Doug Harris's questions

I'm in the early stages of testing Varnish 3.0.4 as a new front end for a web service. I have varnish configured to listen on port 88. For its backend it's using an existing apache server running on the same host on port 80.

The trouble I'm having is that when varnish makes a request to apache, it's including ":88" in the Host http header (even though it's definitely connecting to apache on port 80.

For example:

1. I request http://www.myservice.com:88/images/foo.gif. It makes a request to the backend.
2. The apache backend logs the HOST header to the Apache access log - using %{Host} in the log file format
3. The access log shows this host header as www.myservice.com:88, not www.myservice.com.

If I connect to this apache server with telnet and make identical HEAD requests but altering the value of the Host header, I see the same behavior that I witness through varnish - i.e. if I include the :88 in the host header, the request returns 404.

I've tried:

• altering req.http.header.port and beresp.http.header.port to 80
• altering req.http.header.host and beresp.http.header.host to www.myservice.com.

Seems like I'm missing something obvious.

How do I get varnish to send a proper Host header to apache?

Possible Duplicate:
What tool do you use to monitor your servers?
Can anyone recommend a website monitoring service?

My company builds and maintains sites for our clients. On any given date, we have 400-600 sites active. We build 5-10 per week and take down a similar number. We have basic "is the site live" monitoring enabled for each site, but I'd like to expand that.

Before we build our own, I'm looking for suggestions.

Monitoring would be centered around each site, not servers (all sites run on a load balanced pool of physical servers). For each site, we want to monitor different categories of information, such as:

• registration items: domain name expiration, SSL cert expiration. These data are derived from live checks.
• implementation checklist: Data checked by database queries and/or making an HTTP request and comparing resulting HTML against regular expressions
• performance metrics: Visits, conversion, etc. Data checked by database queries.

Because of how regularly we add/remove sites, we need this to be be able to add and remove through an API or other automated manner.

I've looked a bit at Nagios, Icinga, and Zenoss. Although these have plugins and APIs for expanding, each of these centers on a physical host. We really need to be able to have an at-a-glance view which highlights sites having trouble and then drill down to see what the problem is.

Are there tools that I've not found which address my needs? Has anybody used one of these others in a non-server-centric way?

In /etc/services on a few machines I've checked, port 9898 is associated with a service called MonkeyCom:

monkeycom   9898/udp     # MonkeyCom
monkeycom   9898/tcp     # MonkeyCom

The first reference I found in a google search for MonkeyCom says it's part of the Sasser virus. That seems like a misinterpretation to me -- it's more likely that Sasser is using 9898 but that there's some older service called MonkeyCom which originally got the assignment.

Who can tell me what MonkeyCom is?

I have a cron job which produces a list of resource, expiration date and the days until expiration. The report produces a CSV file. I attach this to the a message using mutt -a report.csv.

I also want to include information in the body of the email. I use gawk to format this into clean lines and add this to the body. It looks something like this:

Resource                                 Expiration Date           Days  
======================================== ========================= ========

resource one                             Oct 11 2009 07:59 PM      3    
resource two                             Nov  3 2009 07:59 PM      22     
resource three has a longer name         Nov  6 2009 07:59 PM      28     
rscrc 4                                  Dec  8 2009 07:59 PM      58     
you get the point                        Dec 17 2009 07:59 PM      66     
www.blockbuster1.smartsubs.net           Dec 23 2009 07:59 PM      70     

(yes, I fudged the dates and expiration, they don't add up in this example)

The problem is that most of the recipients do not have their email clients configured to show plain text email using a fixed width font. So, for them, it looks like this:

Resource Expiration Date Days
======================================== ========================= ========

resource one Oct 11 2009 07:59 PM 3
resource two Nov 3 2009 07:59 PM 22
resource three has a longer name Nov 6 2009 07:59 PM 28
rscrc 4 Dec 8 2009 07:59 PM 58
you get the point Dec 17 2009 07:59 PM 66
www.blockbuster1.smartsubs.net Dec 23 2009 07:59 PM 70

Are there suggestions for how to easily format this text in email so that is forced into a fixed width font? I have flexibility to install new command line tools on this server