check_smtp and authentication

[Gareth Fletcher]

Hi Alex!

It seems as though check_smtp doesn't actually send an email, just checks to see if it can connect via SMTP to the server. In the below case, it connected + authenticated fine.

There are some other plugins e.g. check_smtp_send that also sends an email (e.g. http://buhacoff.net/software/check_email_delivery/manual.html - I just found this via google so YMMV). If I were you and only going to setup check_smtp_send, it seems better to just setup a cronjob or something to send a test email every minute or so - then you can check the recipient mailbox via a nagios check (check email arrived in last n minutes + delete old ones) to make sure all your pipes are working properly.

We use check_smtp to check our mail servers, also checks on the active send/receive smtp sessions/mail queues across our servers (these would do weird things if things break), and also use a completely external monitoring service (alertsite) for end-end mailflow monitoring - that escalates via phone.

Hope this helps :)

Cheers
Gareth



-----Original Message-----
From: Help [mailto:help-bounces+gareth.fletcher=onenet.co.nz at monitoring-plugins.org] On Behalf Of Alex Domoradov
Sent: Tuesday, 18 February 2014 9:02 a.m.
To: help at monitoring-plugins.org
Subject: check_smtp and authentication

Hello all,

Is anyone could give a work example of the check_smtp plugin? I just want to send mail via out smtp relay with authentication.

I have tried the following example

# ./check_smtp -H mail.example.net -A LOGIN -U user at example.net -P
1234567 --starttls -v --fqdn=www.example.net -C "mail from:<user at example.net>" -C "rcpt to:<user at gmail.com>" -C "DATA" -C "Hello world" -C "." -C "quit"
HELOCMD: EHLO www.example.net
220 mail.psd2html.com ESMTP
sent EHLO www.example.net
250-mail.example.net
250-PIPELINING
250-SIZE 20971520
250-ETRN
250-AUTH LOGIN CRAM-MD5 PLAIN
250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
250-8BITMIME
250 DSN
sent AUTH LOGIN
received 334 VXNlcm5hbWU6

sent YWtbC5jb20RvbW9yYWRvdkBwc2QyaHR=

received 334 UGFdvcmQ6zc3

sent TUxg5cXVQbTcDg==

received 235 2.7.0 Authentication successful

sent QUIT
received 221 2.0.0 Bye

SMTP OK - 1.693 sec. response time, 221 2.0.0 Bye
|time=1.692533s;;;0.000000

But at the same time in mail lof I get the following lines

Feb 17 19:33:13 mail postfix/smtpd[14943]: connect from www.example.net[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] Feb 17 19:33:14 mail postfix/smtpd[14943]: Anonymous TLS connection established from www.example.net[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]: TLSv1.2 with cipher
ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits) Feb 17 19:33:15 mail postfix/smtpd[14943]: disconnect from www.example.net[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]


How can I send some data?