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Dan Albrich
Microcomputer Network Specialist
dalbrich@oregon.uoregon.edu
If you've ever experienced difficulty connecting to Gladstone, Darkwing, or Oregon and wondered whether the problem was system-wide or yours alone, there is way to find out.
Network Services provides several online tools to help you troubleshoot network connectivity issues. These tools enable you to answer, among other questions, "Is the host or service I need up or down?" For example, you may wish to see the status information for Darkwing, Gladstone, or Oregon. Obviously, if the host is down, then all dependent services are not available.
This article introduces you to some of the basic tools that can enable you to determine host and service status. The specific methods mentioned here are not a complete list, so you will be able to glean more information through experimentation. Also note that the tools themselves are first and foremost for network services internal use with regard to network management. For this reason, they may initially appear complicated to the average user, and some features on the list are actually not enabled for your use.
For security reasons, these tools are domain restricted. What this means is that you need to have a computer connected to the university network, UOnet, to view this information. Campus users and UO dialup users will have no problem viewing this information. If you are off-campus and using a third party (not the UO) to connect to the Internet, then get and install our VPN software to access this information remotely. For more information about VPN see http://micro.uoregon.edu/getconnected/vpn_overview.html
Let's start with the question of how to determine the status of Gladstone, Darkwing, and Oregon, including up/down and also specific services like web and email. First, go to the network services page (http://ns.uoregon.edu), then click on "Network Monitoring."
Determining host and service status. From this page, several network monitoring systems are available. For host status information, go to "Network Monitoring System." When you click on this link you will be prompted for a username and password.
Enter "uonet" for the username, followed by "uonet" for the password. At this point you should see a web page called "Nagios" with links down the left side of the page. The fastest way to determine host and service status is to simply click on the link "Tactical Overview." From this screen you can view network outages, host outages, and service outages.
Host status. For host status, click on the link under the heading "Hosts" and then "Down." If the host in question is not listed, then that host is up.
Service status. For service status, click on the link or links under the "Services" heading, and "Critical" subheading. For a web-specific outage, you should see the "HTTP" service listed on the host in question. If, for example, "Darkwing and HTTP" are not listed, then they are not down.
Don't trust the system and need to see for yourself? Click on "service detail" under monitoring. Scroll down to find the host in question, select "Darkwing" and check to be sure all services you are interested in are running.
Some of the listed services may not be obvious. For example, most modern email programs use either POP or IMAP to get your email, so if these services are down, this may impact your ability to read email. SMTP is used to send email, so if that's down, this will impact your ability to send email. PING indicates the host is reachable or "up."
Confirming an outage. Another thing you might want to do is confirm an outage. For example, suppose you suspect that Darkwing's HTTP service was down yesterday at 5 p.m., and you simply wish to confirm it was a real problem with the host, as opposed to a problem with your computer's setup.
To do this, click on "Availability" under "Reporting." Click on "Services" and then "Continue to Step 2." Select "darkwing;HTTP" from the drop- down menu. (Shortcut: click once on the drop-down, then type the letter "d" to get down the list faster.)
Click "Continue to Step 3." The default report period is the last seven days, which will include the information you are interested in, or you can adjust these settings as you see fit.
Click "Create availability Report!" This will take you to a screen with statistics (percentage of availability) and specific log entries for specific outages. If none are listed and availability is 100%, you'll know the outage did not occur.
Modem status. One final example of information that is commonly requested is modem status. For example, if you've been able to dial in and everything has been working fine, and suddenly you cannot connect during a time when you think you should be able to, then you might want to make sure there is not an outage.
To view this information, go back to the main http://ns.uoregon.edu page and click on Network Monitoring again, but this time select "Modem Pool Status Report." The information is listed in graph form showing modem usage over time.
In addition, inside the graph window you'll see the current usage statistics, including how many modems are currently in use and how many are available total.
If, for example, you see 576 out of 576 modems in use, you'll know all the modems are in use and this would explain a busy signal during that time.
On the other hand, if you notice an unusual, extreme drop-off in modem use, this may indicate a systemwide problem of some sort, which can be reported tonethelp@ns.uoregon.edu