Route 19

I’ve been using the monitoring tool Monit for quite some time now, and it works great. One issue I’ve always had is that I don’t run a mail server, so Monit had no way to send me alerts. Recent versions of Monit allow SMTP to be used for email alerts, but my Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) distro is only up to Monit 4.08, which doesn’t have this capability.

I could have installed from source, but I didn’t really want to download a bunch of tools just to install one application — I use APT for everything. Rather than wait for a backport of 4.10 I decided to download the .deb package and install it:

curl -O http://insert-mirror-here/monit_4.10.1-3_i386.deb sudo dpkg -i monit_4.10.1-3_i386.deb monit -V

In the monitrc file I use a specific gmail account for sending alerts:

set mailserver smtp.gmail.com port 587 username "email@domain.tld" password "password" using tlsv1 with timeout 30 seconds

Works great so far… I’ll update here if it messes anything up.