On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 4:07 AM, Toralf Lund <toralf.lund at pgs.com> wrote: > >>> In general, that might make sense, but please consider the fact that I'm >>> not talking about a "general" server system. It's a machine dedicated to >>> running a "server" component on one specific software package, and will >>> only ever be contacted by a handful of "display" machines running a GUI >>> component of the same piece of software. >> Then you need to look at the features of the specific GUI and its >> transport to the server to see what options it provides for popup >> messages. > I can easily add a check to software itself. But like I said, I want to > avoid re-inventing the wheel. So if there is something built into the > system that will do the job for me... I don't think you provided enough information for anyone to help. What kind of remote gui are you using? If it is a full remote X desktop session (freenx/x2go or native network) you could run anything you could run locally at the console because it is in fact running on the server side. If you are running X locally on the display machine, you can still run anything you want on the server machine with its window open on the display desktop. >> Personally, I'd still recommend something more general >> that would generate email or text message alerts to the right set of >> people. It is fairly rare for 'users' to be interested in fixing >> system problems and even if that happens to be the case now for this >> particular box it may not always be. > Trust me, this is a highly customised setup with very special users, and > this won't change just like that. > > A more general system is not an entirely bad idea, but I think it would > only make sense if implemented at a larger scale based on a system-wide > policy (there is much else going on in the same network.) Which I'm not > sure will happen right now... I think it makes sense because there are already frameworks that are relatively easy to install and set up even if you initially only target one host and test - and you can get things like CPU and network bandwidth tracking for free. Then if you want, you can expand the monitoring to other things you are likely to need, but even if you don't it is probably easier than building your own notification system. It's probably not the easiest thing to start with, but OpenNMS is pretty flexible. For example if you have an xmpp system with clients for instant messaging, it can send alerts to a group conference so the interested people see it without cluttering email. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com