[CentOS] Monitoring a remote server with Conky ?

Tue Oct 20 15:27:24 UTC 2009
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

Andrew Hull wrote:
>
> 
> I do exactly what you suggest. I keep a minimal X install on most of my 
> headless machines -- I still boot run level 3. This lets me "ssh -X" to 
> a machine and execute graphical commands, and up the come on my local 
> Linux workstation.
> 
> Occasionally, this is very useful for me. For instance: I have some of 
> these headless boxen scattered throughout the network. With this, I can 
> launch firefox on a remote machine. This lets me test viewing resources 
> from various points of the network; great for security policy testing.
> 
> What you're talking about works great too. I have gkrellm installed on 
> these machines too, as well as the servers. Cacti is great for looking 
> at trending or historical data. But to see what a server is up to _right 
> now_ I fire up gkrellm this way (along with things like "tail 'cat 
> /var/log/_something_'" and htop) to see what the machine is up to right 
> then and there.
> 
> gkrellm is available from the wonderful rpmforge repo, but I'm sure 
> Conky would work too.

You can take this one step further by picking an always-on host where 
you run freenx.  Then connect with the NX client from www.nomachine.com 
and start a desktop where you can park long running jobs like monitoring 
tools (including remote X connections or a bunch of xterms with ssh 
connections elsewhere).  Then you can disconnect the NX client and 
reconnect later with everything still running.  The connection can be 
from any linux/windows/mac NX client and you get very good remote 
performance even over low bandwidth connections - and unlike normal X 
connections, losing the connection doesn't kill the processes.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com