monitoring status of your computers...

[eccerr0r]

I had been using netkit's rwho/rwhod years ago but it apparently was removed from portage after suffering a lot of bugs - around the time it was removed it was not working very well for me either, sometimes did not update.

However it would be interesting to monitor my computers' uptimes and know when I may have left a computer on so I could shut it down if it's not needed after a distcc or other job after a wake-on-lan perhaps. What do you use to do this?

Worst case I could monitor my dhcp server or broadcast pings but it seems an "I'm Here" type program would be better as I don't know the identity of each machine by IP address (though I probably could use mac address), could be a rogue machine too. At least the ones I know about, the "I'm Here and alive" messages with its assigned hostname would be sufficient. Maybe once every few minutes - which dhcp doesn't do.

These machines are on its own subnet/lan and should not be broadcast out of the LAN.

Any thoughts? Was there a replacement for rwhod as it seems like it was exactly what I'm describing here? Maybe there's some better way to do this?
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

[pingtoo]

The only mechanism that similar to what your describe of rwhod is use ntp to do the broadcast and have something like tcpdump or snort to listen for broadcast and do some scripting to check database for known nodes in entire environment and do something for unexpected node(s).

On the other hand if you accept a probe model than possible use app-metric/prometheus to setup periodic network scan and setup alarm for new nodes on network.

Personally I like use net-analyzer/zabbix for its simple(relatively speaking) setup and comprehensive monitoring.

[eccerr0r]

I suppose voluntary would be ideal, also divulging its status would be nice along with its assigned name. Probe would only indicate presence but not status, which nmap could do too, but with dhcp I don't necessarily know the identity of the machine especially if I swapped network cards. I suppose what I want is know the contents of the hard drive (well, just the hostname... and possibly uptime... is what I need, nothing else) of the machine that's on the network!

Technically speaking if I set up avahi on all machines this should also pass this information along... hmm...
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

[pingtoo]

I think there is a reason why netkit drop out in favour. there are desire wanting more of something and it just couldn't keep up.

simple network present is thing of past, since having few or 10s of nodes in the past to today's easily thousand nodes in entire network. Finding a node and knowing how will the node function is something you must do all the time because of the number. so you likely want to have a tool that will perform this all the time and only let you know something unusual happen instead actively pursue what is going on. especially you mostly like to want to compare what happened since my last check. So having a good network monitoring system is very important

[eccerr0r]

True that, though I only have a small system though they are NOT identical which is more like for enterprise systems. I suspect most of the time I will still end up walking up to the machine and pressing buttons... probably only 10 machines at most.

So zabbix is capable of 100s of nodes?

I just want something really lightweight if possible... Avahi at least has the advantage of being integrated in distcc so I could automatically find helpers and thus "already" installed but there are machines that I don't want drafted for distcc (namely anything slower than 1GHz, etc.).
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

[pingtoo]

[eccerr0r]

technically they are within walking, but could be on different floors but may not have status LEDs and could be within proximity to another... I guess I know the machine by name and visual check but can't necessarily tell which one is on or off by sound. Once I know which one was left on, I could shutdown remotely.

Still doesn't help that some machines have TVs as monitors, and if I left that on, that won't shut off on its own unfortunately....ugh.

Been thinking it's best to just dump them all into one room, but it's not necessarily a server farm, they do have their unique purpose for the most part. Some are just to hold disks however, and those probably should all be dumped into one room.
_________________
Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?