[Info-vax] notification upon reboot

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2013-02-26 21:05:05 +0000, Phillip Helbig---undress to reply said:

> In article <kgj1e3$12d$1 at dont-email.me>, Stephen Hoffman
> <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> writes:
> 
>> and check SYS$COMMON:[SYSERR]CLUE$HISTORY.DAT for data.
> 
> But this will show only internal errors which caused a reboot as opposed
> to a power outage, right?

Nope.  Servers with auxiliary power and exceed that capacity will have 
shutdown data logged.  Servers without auxiliary power will have no 
CLUE data for the outage, which will still be a form of data on the 
outage.

Servers with sufficient auxiliary power might still have local or 
regional network connectivity issues.

If the servers are taking frequent power outages — without auxillary 
power available to the servers — then you might have some other issues 
to look at.

If there's no data, the server can potentially check the periodic 
messages in the error log, or other known activity on the server, such 
as a trivially written "deadman" file.

Feel free to search the archives, as there are tools around for 
measuring uptime.  I'd expect some probably by ping or snmp, some via 
other means.  VMS is very old, and in some installations and some eras, 
folks can be far crazier about measuring who got how much of which 
servers, and what happened when.

Sites will want to determine whether measuring from the host or from 
remote servers — or a combination of these — is appropriate, and 
whether measuring remote connectivity from the host is appropriate.  
Pretty soon, someone that's sufficiently interested in this can invent 
a variety of DCL subroutines for various possibilities.

(Why this mechanism is not already available in an enterprise-class 
operating system is another discussion.)

I'd estimate it'd take an hour to write some DCL for this task — to at 
least gather the CLUE data and send email, maybe maintain a "deadman" 
file — so I'm not sure why this task is even particularly notable.  
That's presuming there's not already an uptime monitor somewhere.


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