Chksrv 1.02

Author: Ian Cherrill



Copyright: Ian Cherrill, 2003, 2004



Email: ian.cherrill@4nf.co.uk



What license is Chksrv released under?

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License: Gnu Public License (see http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html)



How much does it cost?

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Chksrv is free of charge.





What is Chksrv?

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Chksrv is a simple client-side server monitor program for Lotus Domino. It can tell you if your servers are responding or not and how long they take to respond. It can also monitor any numeric statistic that can be retrieved from a "show stat" console command. If a server is down or a statistic target is reached, Chksrv can run a Lotus Notes agent and/or a .cmd script.





What is new in 1.01?

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We added a bug fix to allow Chksrv to monitor R6 servers as well as R5





What is new in 1.02

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We added a new feature that means Chksrv will retry a "not responding" server three times before declaring it "down". Chksrv waits half a second between re-tries.





What is required to implement Chksrv?

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Chksrv is run on a PC with Lotus Notes R5 or R6 installed. It is a "command line" program that uses a Lotus Notes database for its configuration and output. The "target" Lotus Domino servers can be any version and any platform - I have not tried it, but Domino 4.6 on an AS/400 should work OK, for example. You will need administrators rights to the servers you monitor IF you implement statistics monitoring, otherwise normal user access is sufficient.





How do I install it?

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Copy the chksrv.exe, serveralert.cmd, statisticalert.cmd and lcppb21.dll files to your Lotus Notes program directory. Make a new local database using the chksrv.ntf template - you may use any filename you wish, but keep it simple as you must type it on the command line when starting Chksrv. In particular, using spaces in the filename will make things difficult for you. You have now installed Chksrv, but you must configure it properly in order to use it.





How do I configure Chksrv to monitor my servers?

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Step 1 (define servers): Open the Chksrv datbase you created. Switch to the Setup\All Servers view. Click on the Import Servers button. Enter the name of a server in your domain and Chksrv will copy the names of the servers in that domain into the database. You can do this for a number of domains if you wish. Alternatively you can add servers one at a time from the Server Status view using the Add Server button. If you do not want to monitor all these servers, switch to the Server Status view, select some servers and click the "stop checking server" button. The servers will still be in the Setup\All Servers view but not in the Server Status view.



Step 2 (set up alerts): By default both the script (.cmd) alerts and Lotus Notes agent alerts are enabled. In the Server Status view you can choose to disable alerts for a server using the Disable Alerts button and enable them using the Enable Agent Alerts or Enable Script Alerts buttons. By default, the script alert starts a command prompt box with a message in it, and the Lotus Notes agent attempts to sed a mail message to an address called Chksrv Alerts. To allow the Lotus Notes agent to send messages, you can create a mail-in database definition in the public address book for the domain the chksrv machine is in called Chksrv Alerts and direct the mail to a valid Notes database or mail file. Of course, you can rewrite the script or agent alerts to do anything you wish. There is a Notes agent called (Server Alert) and a script called serveralert.cmd for server down alerts, and a Notes agent called (Statistic Alert) and script called statisticalert.cmd for statistics alerts.



Step 3 (setup statistics): open the Setup\Available Statistics view and press the Add Statistic button. This has a very simple form to allow you to define a statistic that can be monitored. Two good ones to start with are mail.dead and mail.waiting. Each statistic needs its own document. To see the statistics your server supports type "show stat" on the console - different versions of Domino support a slightly different set of statistics. Once a statistic has been defined you can select it when you edit a server document and click the Add button in the statistic alerts section. You can define up to 20 statistic alerts per server.





How do I start Chksrv?

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Open a command prompt and change to the Lotus Notes program directory. If you want to use a local database called chksrv.nsf and check servers every two minutes you use the command:



chksrv chksrv.nsf 120



as the 120 is the number of seconds between finishing the last check and starting the next.





How do I stop Chksrv?

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Press any key.





I get prompted for a password when I start Chksrv - what do I do?

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This is your Lotus Notes password, so enter your normal Notes password. You can avoid this password prompt when the Lotus Notes client is running by setting an option to share the password with Lotus Notes programs in the user ID settings.





I see an error that says "statistics could not be checked" - what is that?

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It simply means that the routine that gets stats from the server did not complete correctly. The most likely cause is that the statistic you defined is either incorrect or has not been made available by the server yet if the server has just started.





I see an error that says one of the agents could not run - what happened?

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Either you wrote an agent that does not work correctly or if you are using the default agents you probably forgot to define the email address Chksrv Alerts in your public address book.





The alerts are not running at all - what is wrong?

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The agents have to be enbled in the Chksrv database - check that you have enabled the alerts you want for each server.