I have recently installed DFM with the intention of using it to handle
the sending of pages. During this process a few limitations have
become evident;
1) No direct option for out-of-band paging. DFM only supports paging
via e-mail messages to SMS gateways (e.g. xxx@skymail.com). If the
Ciscoworks box has lost connection to the mail server or the mail
server has lost connection to the internet the page does not occur.
2) No differentiation of which messages should go to which recipients.
3) No editing of messages for necessary content. Could be important
where SMS systems charge by character count or receiving devices
have limited display space.
I reaction to these limitations was to try implementing a PERL script
to do paging. My Ciscoworks system runs on Win2k and so comes with a
port of PERL installed.
I started by enabling the File Notifier Adapter. Next I installed a
copy of the "tail" utility ported to Win32. By opening up a file
handle to "tail -n 1 -f" on the DFM-Alarms.log file, I had a
mechanism to review incoming alerts as they enter the log file and
evaluate them;
open(DFM, "tail -n 1 -f
c:/PROGRA~1/CSCOpx/objects/smarts/logs/DFM-AL~1.LOG | ");
The process is maintained by using a while loop on the file handle;
while(<DFM>) {
I then obtained a simple SMS server application (SMS Centre) and
installed a modem on the Ciscoworks server. Through the use of
regular expression tests on the log file entries and parsing the
contents of each entry, I should be able to provide the functions not
currently supported by DFM. The script is run as a service by
creating an Autontex.bat file calling PERL and the script, then
configuring the Autoexnt service to start automatically.
I am left with the exercise of selecting the regular expressions.
Below is the complete script;
***********************************************************************
open(DFM, "tail -n 1 -f
c:/PROGRA~1/CSCOpx/objects/smarts/logs/DFM-AL~1.LOG | ");
while(<DFM>) {
if( $_ =~ /NOTIFY/ &&
$_ =~ /[Router]|[Switch]/ && $_ =~ /Unresponsive 100%/ ) {
system(qq(c:/progra~1/SMSCEN~1/SMSCEN~1.EXE jon DFM $_));
sleep 60;
system(qq(c:/progra~1/SMSCEN~1/SMSCEN~1.EXE steve DFM $_"));
sleep 60;
} elsif( $_ =~ /NOTIFY/ && $_ =~ /MSFC/ && $_ =~ /Unresponsive/ ) {
system(qq(c:/progra~1/SMSCEN~1/SMSCEN~1.EXE jon DFM $_));
sleep 60;
system(qq(c:/progra~1/SMSCEN~1/SMSCEN~1.EXE steve DFM $_"));
sleep 60;
}
}
***********************************************************************
In this rudimentary implementation, I send the complete contents of the
alert to the SMS server with the string "DFM" pre-appended if;
1) the string contains "Notify" and ("Router" or "Switch") and
"Unresponsive 100%"
or
2) the string contains "Notify" and "Router" or "MSFC") and
"Unresponsive"
My network is made up of;
2 Cat 6509s with MSFCs
11 Cat 4006s (4 w/ 4232 L3 cards)
4 3620s (access routers)
My intention is to send pages only if a system (switch, router, MSFC or layer 3 card) is completely unavailable to the Ciscoworks polling process.
Any comments? Does this solution look correct? Usable?
