I have been working on setting up a better alerting system for our equallogic machines the past couple of days. Currently the iscsi network is very isolated, we designed it this way deliberately. There is no DNS available on this network, no gateway on this network, and no real route to the outside. While this is true each Linux host that uses the iSCSI net for storage also has a dedicated management link to that net as well. The other hosts that has a path into this network is sw4 one of our backup servers.
Sw4 is the main management console for the equallogic devices and many scripts are run from this workstation as-well. Naturally this is where I began my pursuit of finding a better notification solution for the iSCSI storage devices.
Here is what I did:
Set up sendmail to listen on the iSCSI network side. Made a change in /etc/mail/sendmail.cf added this line
O DaemonPortOptions=Port=smtp,Addr=172.26.128.172, Name=MTA
This allowed the incoming messages from the equallogic machines. I also had to add the member01 IP addresses to /etc
/mail/relay-domains so that sendmail would accept these messages as relay-able. Now things look like this and mail is
properly moved through sw4 to our "real" relay server then on to sysadmin type people.
sendmail 22362 root 4u IPv4 723302 TCP 127.0.0.1:25 (LISTEN)
sendmail 22362 root 5u IPv4 723303 TCP 172.26.128.172:25 (LISTEN)
I am still running the eql_inf.pl scripts daily to collect and send config / status information to sysadmin types but the email notifications will be a plus in the event of disk failure and or issues as we had before.
Posted by Kevin Foote in work on August 01, 2007
