An It-slave in the digital saltmine

Background

I sometimes get the question if I have any tips on a op5 Monitor alarm console. I stumbled on the possibility to use irc to present the alerts generated by op5 Monitor or Nagios. A nice feature is that the number of connected clients can be very many, severla systems can send all alerts to the same irc channel and best of all, it's geeky.

Solution

The solution is using four components:

• A working op5 Monitor or Nagios implementation (will not be covered in this article)
• An irc channel where the alerts are presented
• A bot that collects the op5 Monitor status and sends it to the irc channel
• An irc client i.e. weechat

The irc server

I wanted to use my own irc server, mainly because I want it to run in my own controlled environment. There are toons of implementations but i picked new generation irc daemon, ngircd which existed in my distributions repository.

Simple configuration in /etc/ngircd.conf added to the end of configuration.

[Channel]
        Name = #op5_Monitor
        Topic = op5 Monitor Alerts
        MaxUsers = 23

Start the irc server:

# /etc/init.d/ngircd start
Starting ngircd:                                           [  OK  ]

Making sure it starts the next reboot

# chkconfig ngircd on

The bot

I found a boot called nagircbot

Download and compile.

# make && make install

Start the bot:

nagircbot -f /opt/monitor/var/status.log -X -s mail:6667 -c \#op5_Monitor -n Monitor -N op5_Monitor-- -C

Connect the client

Start the irc client

$ weechat-curses

Connect the irc server

/connect <my_irc_server>

Set nick

/nick <my_nick>

Join the correct channel

/join #op5_Monitor

Screenshoot:

Links:

• op5 Monitor, a nagios based eneteprise monitor solution
• Nagircbot, a bot that sends nagios events to irc
• ngIRCd, new generation irc daemon
• WeeChat, nice irc client with rich functionality

One Response to “Using IRC as op5 Monitor or Nagios alarm console”

1. Magnus Says:
   July 24th, 2012 at 5:44 pm

   Thanks for the hint!
   I realized that if you've got a service that outputs longer messages than 410 bytes, the bot will be disconnected from the IRC server (all in accordance to RFC 2812, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2812, Internet Relay Chat: Client Protocol, section 2.3).

   I patched the file "anna.cpp", 
    
   int send_irc(server_t server_conn, char *format, …)
   {
           int rc;
           char buffer[4096];
           va_list ap;
           va_start(ap, format);
           vsnprintf(buffer, sizeof(buffer) – 3, format, ap);
           va_end(ap);
    
   // #— Added change starts here
           if (strlen(buffer) > 410) {
             if (verbose > 1) dolog("Note: buffer > 410 – trimming");
             buffer[410] = 0x00;
           }
   // #— Added change ends here
    
           if (verbose > 1) dolog("OUT: `%s'", buffer);
           strcat(buffer, "\r\n"); /* yes this is safe: check the vsnprintf command */
           rc = IRCWRITE(server_conn, buffer, strlen(buffer));
           if (rc == -1)
           {
                   dolog("error sending: -1");
                   return -1;
           }
           else if (rc == 0)
           {
                   dolog("connection closed");
                   return -1;
           }
           time(&last_irc_io);
           return 0;
   }

    
   This will effectively trim the string. Recompiled it with "make clean; make". With that hack it works; the bot is not thrown out of the IRC chat.
    

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