Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Ensure emails are accounted for

Ensure emails are accounted for


Sysadmins often set up scripts that send back "OK" or "Error" emails, but there is no mechanism to send alert if *no* email was received for certain time period. Lack of such emails might indicate serious system failure somewhere, that becomes obvious when it is too late to do anything. There are many stories on internet about backups that were set up properly, but for some reason were disconnected.

Thus I wrote the script ensure_accounted_for.py that informs sysadmins about emails that were supposed to arrive on daily basis, but for some reason did not. Its sample configuration can be taken from ensure_af.cfg.

2 comments:

Meir Kriheli said...

Instead of printk, might be better going with the logging module from the standard library

Arie Skliarouk said...

I wrote the script before I learned to use the logging module, sorry :).

Patches are welcome though ;)