[volunteers] Monitoring SVLUG Processes

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Mark Weisler (mark at weisler-saratoga-ca.us):

> Would it be worthwhile to use some automated monitoring tools on our  
> processes? Like Nagios for example?

You mean automated monitoring of those processes from a remote host?
Sure, go ahead.

You'll notice if you read the system cronjobs that it, itself, tries to
do monitoring of its own process list and relaunch essential daemons if
they're for some reason not running.  Of course, if the root cause is
that the system's run itself clean out of RAM/swap, then self-monitoring
is going to tend to be a little fallible.

On the flip side of that, external monitoring of network service
availability may be immune to out-of-memory problems on the monitored
host, but can't accomplish much beyond notification -- which is of
course better sooner than later.

Meanwhile, I've just attempted to better tune system performance by
considerably reducing the number of running Apache httpd processes
(as it needs far fewer, now that Apache's used only for Mailman and not
SVLUG's other Web content), and cutting the number of spamd processes
from 32 to 24.  We'll see.