Re: Strategy for multi-distro .monitrc management?

[Martin Pala]

Hi,

although the proposed solution may simplify the support of portable 
configuration, i think it will be better to use for example the 
mentioned m4 for the creating monit configuration from common source for 
various distributions.

From my point of view, the distribution of portable/conditional 
configuration won't be advantage for the end user since he/she will see 
lot of unnecessary informations, which will make the configuration hard 
to read. The preprocessed configuration for monit distribution for 
particular platform may be simpler to read/manage on target platform.

It may be also needed to distribute different binaries for various 
platforms - due to the different prerequisite libraries for example 
(such as openssl when enabled). The preprocessing of the configuration 
may be automated using custom script when building monit.

Summary:

i think the implementation of preprocessor in monit configuration parser 
is not needed and is out of project scope - simple existing tools may 
serve for portable package creation.


Thanks :)

Martin


Stephen Dowdy wrote:
> I have to deploy monit on Debian, RHEL4, SuSE SLES9.  Unfortunately, each is
> different enough that a single .monitrc won't work.  Specifically, as an
> example, 'sshd' and 'ntpd' init.d scripts have different names across all
> three distros.  (/etc/init.d/{x,}ntp{,d} /etc/init.d/ssh{,d} ...)
>
> It would be nice if monitrc had some simplistic preprocessor handling, like:
>
> #ifdef RHEL4
> include RHEL4/sshd
> #else ifdef DEBIAN
> include Debian/sshd
> #endif
>
> or if it supported variable expansion:
>
> include ${DISTRO}/sshd
>
> Additionally, for a logfile scanner, i look for "Out of Memory: Kill
> process" messages, but the default syslog writes these in different places
> on different distros, so my 'logscan' monitrc include snippet would benefit
> from variable expansion or preprocessor conditionals, etc.
>
> -------------------
> #ifdef RHEL4
> syslogfile=/var/log/messages
> #else ifdef DEBIAN
> syslogfile=/var/log/syslog
> #endif
>
> check file SYSLOGFILE with path ${syslogfile}
> -------------------
>
> I could create a bunch of start/stop front-end scripts that did all the
> conditional determination/processing themselves in /etc/opt/monit/init.d or
> something, but that's also non-optimal.
>
> Running the .monitrc through an m4 or cpp first-run might be workable, but
> again, isn't as desireable as having built-in support in Monit to do this.
>
> I would prefer to have to manage a SINGLE .monitrc and tree full of includes
> than to have to track modifications across distro-specific .monitrcs.
>
> Does anyone have any good ideas on this issue or anecdotes on how they
> manage this problem?
>
> thanks,
> --stephen