Registering and Configuring availmon

Registering and Configuring availmon

You must issue the amregister command to set up availmon configuration, turn on autoemail, and register your system with the Silicon Graphics Availmon Database.

To register your system, log in as root and issue the command:

/usr/etc/amregister -r

Depending on your system type, you may need to enter the serial number of your system by hand. See the amregister(1M) reference page for further information.

The availmon software is enabled through the chkconfig(1M) command, described in "Checking Options With chkconfig". The flags are:

availmon: Controls the activation of the entire availmon software package. By default, this option is on.

The other configuration flags are set using the amconfig(1M) utility, which is similar to chkconfig, but uses a different record file. There are four flags:

autoemail: Enables automatic distribution of reports. By default, this option is off, but is turned on by amregister.
hinvupdate: Enables a daemon that checks for changes reported by hinv and gfxinfo. By default, this option is on for large systems and off for all others.
shutdownreason: Directs the system to query the Superuser for a reason for each system shutdown. By default, this option is on for large systems and off for all others.
tickerd: Enables the daemon that monitors system uptime. By default, this option is on for large systems and off for all others.

There is also an e-mail list configuration file, /var/adm/avail/config/autoemail.list, used to control the report type, e-mail format, and e-mail addresses for availmon reports. The e-mail list is edited and maintained through the amconfig(1M) command. By default, this file is configured to send diagnosis reports to Silicon Graphics.

For sites with multiple systems participating, the amconfig command can be executed on one system to set up a common email configuration file (/var/adm/avail/autoemail.list), and then this file can be copied onto all participating systems. Then run amregister -r on each system.

Configuring an availmon Site Log File

If a site log file for one or more systems is desired, a pseudo e-mail alias can be created. This alias pipes availability reports to amreceive whose output is then appended to the site log file. This procedure should be done before registering all the systems, because initial availability reports will be sent out when registering.

After setting up availmon, amreport can be executed on each system to view the availability statistics and reports for that system, or it can be run with the site log file as input to view overall availability statistics for all systems, and availability reports for any system.

If a site log file is desired, perform the following steps in order:

Create an e-mail alias on one system and pipe all availability reports to amreceive. For example, if the site logfile is to be /disk/amrlog, add this line to the mail server system's /etc/aliases file:
amrlog: "| /var/adm/avail/amreceive >> /disk/amrlog"
and then run the newaliases command to set up this e-mail alias.
Then, run the amconfig command on the mail server system to configure the standard e-mail lists. For our example log file, add the entry:
availability(text): amrlog
Then, copy the resulting /var/adm/avail/config/autoemail.list on this system to the rest of the systems at your site.
Run amregister to register all your systems as described above in "Registering and Configuring availmon".
Now the command:
amreport -s /disk/amrlog
shows the overall statistics, system statistics, and individual availability reports for all participating systems.

Running availmon On Other Systems

The availmon software is part of your standard IRIX distribution in this release. For previous releases of IRIX, software patches are available from your customer support provider. The software on your distribution will not work with previous releases of IRIX.