System: Advanced: Notifications

brainloss · Apr 8, 2013, 10:57 AM

I've setup SMTP E-mail notifications and received a test message

"This is a test message from pfSense. It is safe to ignore this message."

My question is; What is classed as a notification? ie gateway failure? service stopped? Interface down? SMART HDD failure detected?
NUT reporting UPS on battery?

I searched about but could not a list of possible "notifications"

Many thanks for pfsense!

jimp · Apr 8, 2013, 5:47 PM

Mostly, anything in the GUI that makes the notification bar flash. Usually it's pretty dire things such as firewall rules failing to load, failed CARP syncs, etc.

It does also send a notification on gateway failures, and when a CARP VIP changes state (master/backup).

That's one thing I intend to work on for 2.2.

kelsen · Apr 8, 2013, 5:53 PM

There is a package called mailreport that you can get many logs based in /var/log directory and command line, and you can set filter too.

jimp · Apr 8, 2013, 5:55 PM

@kelsen:

There is a package called mailreport that you can get many logs based in /var/log directory and command line, and you can set filter too.

Yes, those are good for periodic reports, but they aren't reactive (e.g. immediate notification when event X happens).

brainloss · Apr 9, 2013, 8:02 AM

Thanks for the responses.

Overnight I had one notification:

MONITOR: FTTC001 is down, removing from routing group

but have not received a message to say the connection has come back online (manually checking shows it has)

I currently have FTTC & ADSL with 3 routing groups 1. PreferFTTC 2. PreferADSL 3. LoadBalance. After configuration rules to use the gateways I successfully have failover between the two wan connection working, which works really well, very pleased. Failover is wonderful, but I'd need to know if either of the connection has a potential fault so the underlying cause can be investigated.

I've played with Zabbix in the past - Maybe worth dusting that box off and finding out if the events can be detected/reported from Zabbix

Currently running 2.0.2-RELEASE(amd64).
Procurve & ZyXEL Layer2 switches, Lots of VLAN, siproxd, NUT, three Intel 1000 PCI cards in a Intel Dual Core E6300, Intel Desktop Board
Northamptonshire, UK

Many thanks for pfsense

brainloss · Apr 9, 2013, 10:08 AM

If I wanted to discover all the possible notifications that pfsense can deliver via email, are they neatly all in one file or are they scattered across the source code? If in one file, could you point me in the right direction?

kelsen · Apr 9, 2013, 11:33 AM

I've played with Zabbix in the past - Maybe worth dusting that box off and finding out if the events can be detected/reported from Zabbix

I have done a template that you can use if you want,
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,58279.0.html
You can use the interfaces status item to make a trigger.

jimp · Apr 9, 2013, 12:05 PM

The notifications are scattered all over, you'd have to grep around the source for file_notice() and similar calls to the function that notifies by e-mail.

We only notify when a gateway goes down, we don't notify when a gateway comes back up. It's a quirk of how the gateway monitoring works, we don't get the 'up' event the same way we get the 'down' event, often we have to assume it's up after the monitoring daemon restarts rather than seeing an 'up' event.

brainloss · Apr 11, 2013, 9:17 AM

Thanks for replies,

I have received

MONITOR: FTTC001 is down, removing from routing group

and then sometime later

Gateways status could not be determined, considering all as up/active.

I think I'll head down the zabbix route and see how that works out

Thanks!