Do you work in an environment where you bounce through a bunch of firewalls? Do you hang out on idle ssh connections that often times get dropped after a certain amount of idle time? I do and it has always annoyed me. To the point that once I connect to a box that I will be coming back to, I will run top and move on. Well, not anymore. You can set your SSH client to automatically send a bit of data over your connection every X seconds.
Recently I had a chance to do a little monit foo with a co-worker for a rather interesting project that we will hopefully be sending off into the intertubes.
For one part of this project, I got the chance to get my hands dirty with my old friend monit. Monit, for those that don’t know, is a UNIX system administrators dream.
Here’s a brief run down of what monit can do from the web site:
Every once in a while one of the LUG lists that I am on decides to have a big dick contest and everyone shows off who has the better uptime. Its actually a way of generating traffic on mailing lists that have greatly suffered any sort of reasonable traffic in a while. Its the same as starting a vi vs emacs flame war. No one really wins, but it always gets people contributing to the list.