DESCRIPTION

     monitord is a simple to use system service that allows one to easily mon-
     itor other system services for accidental termination. If they terminate
     because of some internal bug or illegitimate action, such as a DoS
     attack, they are restarted with the given username and parameters speci-
     fied in monitord.conf.

     The two command line options are as follows:

     -f file     A custom configuration file may be used instead of the
                 default one: /usr/local/etc/monitord.conf.

     -t interval
                 The time interval in seconds at which to check the system
                 processes, which are configured in monitord.conf. The default
                 interval is 10 seconds.

     The configuration file for monitord, /usr/local/etc/monitord.conf, has a
     simple format. It is divided into two parts. The first part contains gen-
     eral configuration informaion, which for now consists simply of the
     admin's email and your email server. The second part consists of multiple
     configuration lines for each service to be monitored. In this second
     part, the first column contains the user under which the given service on
     that line will be run if it needs to be restarted. The group to which the
     user belongs will be grabbed from the password database.

     The second column consists of the options to be used in monitoring that
     particular service. Currently, three options are supported:

     auto        Indicates that the service should be automatically restarted
                 if it's found down. This is also the default behaviour when
                 neither auto nor noauto are specified.

     noauto      Indicates that the service should not be automatically
                 restarted if it's down.

     alert       Indicates that if this service is found down, the administra-
                 tor is automatically notified via email, as specified in the
                 first part of the configuration file. Also, once a service is
                 restarted, this option will prompt monitord to notify the
                 administrator that it was successfully restarted.

     The third column is the delay that will follow the startup of that par-
     ticular service. Some services take a while to start up, especially if
     they need to perform preperatory tasks in a wrapper script, so to keep
     monitord from attempting to restart a service after it's already begun
     its startup proceedure but before it appears in the process table the
     specified delay keeps monitord from checking that service for the speci-
     fied time in seconds.

     The fourth and fifth columns are the service being monitored and script

     root    auto,alert      30      sendmail        /usr/sbin/sendmail -bd -q60m

EXAMPLES

     Here are a few more example service entries:

     root    auto,alert      30      syslogd         /usr/sbin/inetd        -wW
     root    auto,alert      30      syslogd         /usr/sbin/syslogd
     www     auto,alert      60      httpd           /usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache.sh

IMPLEMENTATION NOTES

     This is version 0.4.1.

     When using a time interval that is smaller than 5 seconds, an increas-
     ingly larger amount of CPU time will be used by the process. It is recom-
     mended that one keep the interval equal to or above 5 seconds. The
     default of 10 seconds may be changed in config.h before compile time.

FILES

     /usr/local/etc/monitord.conf  configuration file

DIAGNOSTICS

     When restarting a service which it is monitoring, monitord will notify
     syslogd(8) of the event.

     monitord should be run as root so that it can restart the services it is
     monitoring with the correct username and group.

AUTHOR

     This manual page was written by W. M. Shandruk <walt@erudition.net>.

BUGS

     There are no known bugs.

FreeBSD 4.3                     August 21, 2003                    FreeBSD 4.3