Simple Ping Test from a node/server

Thanks for the all the responses and especially Henrik!    As usual, he
connected all the pieces that were in my head and made a simple solution.

Have a great week!

On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 5:08 AM, Henrik Størner <user-ce4a2c883f75@xymon.invalid> wrote:

Hi,

If the PI can connect back to your Xymon server, then the easiest solution
would be to install the "xymonnet" utility on the PI, configure it to run a
limited set of network tests, and send the status messages back to the
Xymon server.

If you use pre-packaged installations of Xymon, then you would install the
"server" package on the PI, but disable everything in tasks.cfg except the
client and xymonnet tasks (note that by default the xymonnet task has a
dependency on xymond - you need to remove this when disabling xymond).

The key configuration items are:

   1. Configure xymonserver.cfg on the PI with the IP of the normal Xymon
   server in XYMSRV setting, so all status messages go to the normal Xymon
   server
   2. Use the "NET" tag in hosts.cfg (on the normal Xymon server) to
   distinguish network tests which run on the PI from those running on your
   normal Xymon server. You can either add a "NET:primary" and "NET:backup" to
   all of the network tests, or use the "--test-untagged" option with xymonnet
   on the normal server and only add a "NET:backup" for the tests which should
   run on the PI.
   3. Configure XYMONNETWORK=backup in xymonserver.cfg on the PI so it
   will run the network tests tagged with "NET:backup" (if you put a
   "NET:primary" on the normal tests, then of course also add a
   XYMONNETWORK=primary setting on the primary server).
   4. Run Xymon on the PI.

That should work. In the "old days", you would have to somehow get the
hosts.cfg file across from the normal Xymon server to the PI (or have
separate hosts.cfg files on each), but these days xymonnet will fetch
hosts.cfg from the normal server instead of reading a local copy, so it
should work and you only have to maintain the normal hosts.cfg file.

You can run a test on the PI to see what network tests it will perform -
"xymoncmd xymonnet --no-update" will run the tests without sending any data
to the server, so you can verify that the PI only runs the tests you intend
it to.

The xymon.com installation has this setup, since xymon.com is hosted on a
public server in Germany (at Hetzner), and my home network is behind a
firewall but uses xymon.com to collect data from the home network. So you
can look at the configuration files on xymon.com and see how I have a
"NET:hetzner" and "NET:home" setting.

Regards,
Henrik

On 09-02-2017 20:21, Patrick Nixon wrote:

Hey all,
  I want to monitor my backup internet connection (simple ping test
outbound is fine).   I'm going to throw a raspberry pi with dual interfaces
on the network, one on the main network and one on the backup internet
connection.

 What's the best way to implement a ping test from the PI and have it be
part of the main server display?
 Solutions I've considered so far:
 - set up the PI as a xymon server and figure out how to get the test
results to go back to the main server.
 - setup the PI as a xymon client and write some sort of ping test that
does the work
 - something else I missed?

Thanks!