NDPFAlarmsSystem

NDPF Alarms System

The list of email alarms currently pending can be found at http://www.nikhef.nl/grid/ndpf/alarms/.

Clearing an alarm

Each alarm message that is visible on the web page at https://www.nikhef.nl/grid/ndpf/alarms/ can be cleared from the web as well. For this, please click on the message and copy-paste the discard-URl into your browser. You now need to authenticate with your (grid) certificate and then the status of the message will change and it will disappear from the web page.

Actually, the ID of the message (the file name) is added to the "discard" file /global/ices/grid/alarms/www/discard, with one line per file name. The web URL just adds the file name to this file.

If you do not have your certificate handy, it can be made to work with a pre-set token as well (over https). Please see the script for the latest token.

Alarms email handling scripts

The alarms system is triggered by email to <ndpf-alarms@nikhef.nl> or <nlt1-alarms@biggrid.nl>. The email is passed through procmail, which subsequently invoked the processing script at

 /global/ices/grid/alarms/bin/alarms-email.pl

This script uses a couple of configuration files in /global/ices/grid/alarms/etc/ to classify and route mail, and to determine which user DN are allowed to end up in the high-priority list. Only qualified users sending signed email are routed to the queue and end up on the web page and trigger SMS notifications. All other non-spam mail is routed to the grid.support mailing list.

For those needing to debug the thing: logs are kept for all incoming mail and for the procmail output. The mailing list itself is of course kept at

 /public/mailinglists/ndpf-alarms*

Routing based on site name

The script can distinguish between sites if appropriate GOCDB site names are present in the email, but for the moment all mail sent to the address ends up as a NDPF alarm.