Collecting performance data from many sites?

[Mott Given]

We have some homegrown scripts to collect "sar" performance data from many sites. The scripts often fail to retrieve data from some sites because of a problem with the FTP mechanism used, eg. wrong password, too many invalid password attempts, etc? Is there a way that we can retrieve the data using another mechanism like sockets so we bypass having to use a password with each site? For security reasons, we cannot use email to transfer the data. Does HP-UX have any built-in features or programs that we could use to solve our data transfer problems? If not, what are your experiences with free tools like rsync that we might use to solve the problem?
Mott Given, mgiven@dsdc.dla.mil

[John Poff]

Hello,

I do something similar here. I run a Linux box that runs a Perl script and uses the Net::FTP module to handle all the ftp stuff. It works great. Just one way to do it.

JP

[Santosh Nair_1]

Don't know if this will help, but we use Big Brother along with LARRD for this sort of thing...it gives nice web based reports on system information. BB uses its own little daemon to pass information back and forth.

Alternatively, you could write a similar daemon that just passes messages back and forth...

-Santosh

[Bernie Vande Griend]

Yes you could use a socket program or perhaps a tool like rdist. We use OpenSSH's scp to handle tasks like this so everything is encypted and we don't have to pass passwords around. It takes a bit of work to put the public keys in the authorized_keys file of the host you are sending to, but it works well for us.

[Rita C Workman · Accepted solution]

Well here's a thought.
Why don't you put your scripts out on those machines than on your machine set up a script to run those scripts remotely...you could even set those remote scripts to write the data back to your server.
To give you an idea:
script on remote called /my_scripts/sar.sh
sar -w 5 60 > sar.report
rcp sar.report :/dir/sub_dir

script on your_server called run_my_sars
remsh remote_server ./my_scripts/sar.sh

OK...this isn't fancy, but you get the idea. Remember to set up your .rhosts for when you want to run it.

Just a thought,
Rita