Comment 2 for bug 770428

(I made Nat and Robert.)

Zagy suggested: "A very easy thing to check is a file age. So if a file like "tracer- last-receveid" was touched when the tracer is received the nagios check would be very simple."

That's a clever suggestion if the goal is to just measure repoze.postoffice and whether it is functioning. Though we wouldn't know what threshold to set it at. What constitutes "too long ago" for KARL?

If we're planning on doing an end-to-end test, meaning writing blog content into a KARL community, we're back to some of the issues in the LP ticket. Robert, did you have in mind something that required no KARL development?

I'll admit, writing a new blog entry every N minutes has some negative consequences.

Is this something that we need to have a roadmap discussion about and move this to the top of the list, and get exclusive immediate use of Rossi's available budget until it is done?

--Paul

On May 10, 2011, at 10:23 AM, Christian Zagrodnick wrote:

> A very easy thing to check is a file age. So if a file like "tracer-
> last-receveid" was touched when the tracer is received the nagios check
> would be very simple.
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/770428
>
> Title:
> Develop email-in tracer tool
>
> Status in KARL3:
> New
>
> Bug description:
> We don't have a reliable way to know when email-in is wedged. Rather
> than trying to monitor each part of the end-to-end facility, we should
> instead monitor the failure of a tracer email to be received.
>
> The idea is that something, somewhere (hopefully inside the OSF NYC
> LAN) sends a tracer email to KARL every N minutes. This won't be a
> blog entry, as we don't want some dummy blog filling up and the
> content feeds getting blasted.
>
> Instead, we'll develop a new tool, either as part of a community or
> something hanging off the top. This tool will record receipt of the
> email. We'll also make sure that if the tracer wasn't received in the
> last N minutes, monitoring gets triggered.
>
> Some notes:
>
> - Exercise as much of the machinery as possible. We don't really need
> to test the ability to create a blog entry or blog comment. If it
> goes out of the NYC network, through the Internets tubes, into the
> outer Postfix, through its spam filters, to the inner, through
> repoze.postoffice, and is picked up by the daemon, that will handle
> 99% of the problems.
>
> - Make sure admins like Robert/Nat/Paul can go and see something about
> the tracer. Most likely the admin screen.
>
> - Document, in that tool, the email address that is used for the To:
> on the tracer. That lets people send the email manually if they want
> to.
>
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