NAME¶
watch-mimedefang - Keep an eye on mimedefang-multiplexor
SYNOPSIS¶
watch-mimedefang [options]
DESCRIPTION¶
watch-mimedefang is a Tk script which graphically displays the status of
mimedefang-multiplexor(8). Note that Tcl/Tk 8.0 or higher is required
to run
watch-mimedefang.
DISPLAY¶
watch-mimedefang's display is divided into three main areas, from top to
bottom:
- o
- The graph display shows six graphs representing various statistics about
the multiplexor.
- o
- The control area shows the maximum number of slaves, number of busy
slaves, and number of idle slaves. The "Control Command" text
entry lets you monitor remote MIMEDefang servers; see "REMOTE
MONITORING" for details.
The "10s", "1m", "5m" and "10m"
checkboxes allow you to enable or disable the graphing of statistics
averaged over the last 10 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes and 10 minutes.
The "Reread Filters" button forces the multiplexor to reread
filter rules. The "Quit" button terminates
watch-mimedefang.
- o
- The scale at the bottom lets you change the update interval (default
500ms). Be aware that frequent updating may make watch-mimedefang
consume a significant fraction of CPU time.
THE GRAPH AREA¶
The graph area contains six graphs:
- o Busy Slaves
- This graph shows the number of busy slaves each time the statistics are
sampled.
- o Slaves/scan
- This graph shows the average number of busy slaves each time a message was
scanned. The red plot shows the average over the last ten seconds, the
blue plot shows the average over the last minute, and the green and yellow
plots show the average over the last five and ten minutes, respectively.
- o Latency (ms)
- This graph shows the average time taken by each SCAN command over the last
ten seconds, one minute, five minutes and ten minutes.
- o Messages/s
- This graph shows the average number of messages per second that were
scanned.
- o Activations/s
- This graph shows the average number of new slaves activated per second.
- o Reaps/s
- This graph shows the average number of slaves that have terminated per
second.
If the Activations and Reaps increase significantly, it could indicate heavy
load, or an error causing filters to terminate abnormally.
If only Activations increase, then it probably indicates a sudden increase
in e-mail volume.
If only Reaps increase, then it probably indicates a quiet time just after a
period of heavy mail volume.
You can enable or disable the ten second, one minute, five minute or ten minute
plots by clicking on the "10s", "1m", "5m" or
"10m" checkbox.
REMOTE MONITORING¶
Running
watch-mimedefang on your actual mail server poses two problems:
You need Tcl/Tk and the X client libraries installed, and the CPU consumption
of
watch-mimedefang can be considerable.
A better method is to run
watch-mimedefang on a desktop machine, but have
it monitor the mail server with a remote session.
The best way to establish a remote session is via SSH. For example, if you are
running MIMEDefang on "mail.mydomain.net", you can type the
following into the
Control Command entry box and press enter:
ssh root@mail.mydomain.net md-mx-ctrl
You
must have a public/private key for the target machine and you must be
running ssh-agent or equivalent; you cannot use an ssh command that requires
entry of a password or passphrase.
Assuming your SSH setup is correct,
watch-mimedefang will open an SSH
connection to mail.mydomain.net and exchange low-bandwith information over
that session for monitoring purposes.
COMMAND-LINE OPTIONS¶
watch-mimedefang accepts the following command-line options:
- -command cmd
- Use cmd as the control command. You may need to quote cmd
- -interval msec
- Set the update interval to msec milliseconds.
- -10s flag
- Enable the "10s" graph plot if flag is 1, or disable it
if flag is 0.
- -1m flag
- Enable the "1m" graph plot if flag is 1, or disable it if
flag is 0.
- -5m flag
- Enable the "5m" graph plot if flag is 1, or disable it if
flag is 0.
- -10m flag
- Enable the "10m" graph plot if flag is 1, or disable it
if flag is 0.
- -title string
- Add string to the title of the main window.
- -help
- Print usage information.
EXAMPLE¶
As an example, to monitor MIMEDefang on the machine
"mail.mydomain.net" updating once a second, with the 5m and 10m
plots turned off, use:
watch-mimedefang -command 'ssh root@mail.mydomain.net md-mx-ctrl' \
-interval 1000 -5m 0 -10m 0 -title "mail"
AUTHOR¶
watch-mimedefang was written by David F. Skoll
<dfs@roaringpenguin.com>. The
mimedefang home page is
http://www.mimedefang.org/.
PERMISSIONS¶
watch-mimedefang uses
md-mx-ctrl; therefore, it probably needs to
be run as
root or the same user as
mimedefang-multiplexor, or
(if you are monitoring a remote machine), the SSH connection must be done as
root or the MIMEDefang user.
SEE ALSO¶
mimedefang.pl(8),
mimedefang-filter(5),
mimedefang(8),
mimedefang-protocol(7),
md-mx-ctrl(8),
watch-multiple-mimedefangs(8)