Monitoring Message Access

This section consists of the following subsections:

• Monitoring imapd, popd and httpd

• Monitoring stored

Monitoring imapd, popd and httpd

These processes provide access to IMAP, POP and Webmail services. If any of these is not running or not responding, the service will not function appropriately. If the service is running, but is over loaded, monitoring will allow you to detect this and configure it more appropriately.

Symptoms of imapd, popd and httpd Problems

Connections are refused or system is too slow to connect. For example, if IMAP is not running and you try to connect to IMAP directly you will see something like this:

telnet 0 143 Trying 0.0.0.0... telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused

If you try to connect with a client, you will get a message such as:

Client is unable to connect to the server at the location you have specified. The server may be down or busy.

To Monitor imapd, popd and httpd

• Can be monitored with watcher and msprobe. See Automatic Restart of Failed or Unresponsive Services and Monitoring Using msprobe and watcher Functions

• Can be monitored with SNMP.

  If you have the SNMP set up, this is a very good way to monitor these processes. See Appendix A, SNMP Support. The server information is in the Network Services Monitoring MIB.

• Check log files.

  Look in the directory msg_svr_base/log/service where service can be http or IMAP or POP. In that directory you will find a number of log files. One filename is the name of the service (imap, pop, http) and the others are the name of the service plus a sequence number and a date concatenated to the service name. For example:

  imap imap.29.1010221593 imap.31.1010394412 imap.33.1010567224

  The file with just the service name is the latest log. The other ones are ordered by the sequence number (here 29, 31, 33) and the one with the highest sequence number is the next newest one. (See Chapter 21, Managing Logging.”)

  If a server was shut down you might see something like this:

  imap.12.1065431243:[07/Oct/2003:01:15:43 -0700] gotmail-2 imapd[20525]: General Warning: Sun Java System Messaging Server IMAP4 6.1 (built Sep 24 2003) shutting down

• Can be checked with counterutil. See counterutil and counterutil in Sun Java System Messaging Server 6 2005Q4 Administration Reference.

• Run the platform-specific command to verify that the imapd, popd and httpd processes are running. For example, in Solaris you can use the ps command and look for imapd, popd and mshttpd.

• You can set alarms for specified server performance thresholds by setting the server response configuration parameters described in Alarm Messages

• See immonitor-access.

Monitoring stored

stored performs a variety of important tasks such as deadlock and transaction operations of the message database, enforcing aging policies, and expunging and erasing messages stored on disk. If stored stops running, the messaging server will eventually run into problems. If stored doesn’t start when start-msg is run, no other processes will start. For more information about stored see stored in Sun Java System Messaging Server 6 2005Q4 Administration Reference.

Symptoms of stored Problems

There are no outward symptoms.

To Monitor stored

• Check that the stored process is running. stored creates and updates a pid file in msg_svr_base/config called pidfile.store. The pid file shows an init state when recovering and a ready state when ready. For example:

  231: cat pidfile.store 28250 ready

  The number on the first line is the process ID of stored.

  232: ps -eaf | grep stored inetuser 28250 1 0 Jan 05 ? 8:44 /opt/SUNWmsgsr/lib/stored -d

• Check for log file build up in msg_svr_base/store/mboxlist. Note that not every log file build up is caused by direct stored problems. Log files may also build up if imapd dies or there is a database problem.

• Check the timestamp on the following files in msg_svr_base/config:

  stored.ckp - Touched when attempt at checkpointing is made. Should get time stamped every 1 minute stored.lcu - Touched at every db log cleanup. Should get time stamped every 5 minutes stored.per - Touched at every spawn of peruser db writeout. Should get time stamped every 60 minutes

• Check for stored messages in the default log file msg_svr_base/log/default/default

• Can be monitored with watcher and msprobe. See Automatic Restart of Failed or Unresponsive Services and Monitoring Using msprobe and watcher Functions.