Administering availmon

Administering availmon

Three examples are provided to illustrate the administration of availmon. One is for general customers that send reports out automatically; the other two are for secure sites with and without internal report sending.

Using availmon with Automatic Reporting

If availmon is installed on a single system, reboot the system after installation. Then, run amregister without any argument to register and configure the e-mail lists. This will turn on autoemail and send registration reports to all configured addresses when complete. If your system does not have an IP19, IP21, IP22, or IP25 processor, amregister prompts you to input your system's serial number manually.

The shutdownreason and tickerd configuration options can be turned on or off anytime. The default autoemail.list is:

availability(compressed,encrypted):
availability(compressed):
availability(text):
diagnosis(compressed,encrypted): availmon@csd.sgi.com
diagnosis(compressed):
diagnosis(text):

In addition, you may want to add the following entries:

availability(text): <local_sysadmin>
diagnosis(compressed,encrypted): <local_support>

In the above optional entries, replace the strings <local_sysadmin> and <local_support> with the appropriate e-mail addresses for your system administrator and Silicon Graphics support representative, respectively.

If encrypted data in email is prohibited by law at your site, move addresses in "(compressed,encrypted)" entries to "(compressed)" entries.

Using availmon at Secure Sites with Internal Report Mailing

If your site is under security restrictions, you may use the following procedures to set up and use availmon. The setup procedure is similar to that found in "Registering and Configuring availmon", except that the addresses outside your site should be deleted.

After your system administrators receive availmon reports, they can check the latest diagnosis report, /var/adm/crash/diagreport on the system just rebooted, delete any sensitive data and use amsend to mail the filtered report to availmon@csd.sgi.com and any Silicon Graphics support address they require. If the diagnosis report contains any ICRASH, SYSLOG, HINV, VERSIONS, or GFXINFO data, use the command:

amsend -i -z -x availmon@csd.sgi.com ...

to mail the report. If there is no such data in the report, use the command:

amsend -d -z -x availmon@csd.sgi.com ...

If encrypted data in e-mail is prohibited by law at your site, remove -x from the command line.

Using availmon at Secure Sites without Report Mailing

If outisde report mailing is not possible at your site, no special actions need to be taken to use availmon. However, for those platforms not using IP19, IP21, IP22, and IP25 processors, amregister should still be run and then you should turn off autoemail so that reports generated on these systems will not be sent automatically. The shutdownreason and tickerd options can also be turned on or off as you choose.

Since no external report is mailed after the system reboots, system administrators need to check if the system has been down, and then check the report files to determine the reason. If the system crashes more than once before checking, old reports will be overwritten by the new ones (core dumps and icrash reports will be kept until removed explicitly). Therefore, internal report mailing is recommended for secure sites.

Diagnosis reports can be sent to Silicon Graphics using amsend. See the section titled "Using availmon at Secure Sites with Internal Report Mailing". Another method is to run amconfig to configure standard e-mail lists so that when reports need to be sent, amnotify can be used to send reports according to those lists.