Owl Monitoring System Sensor Installation Manual

6. Owl Sensor Commands

The Owl sensor has a number of Owl-specific commands required for its operation. This section provides a brief overview of the available commands. These are all Perl scripts and have self-contained man pages, which contain greater details about their use. These scripts are intended to run as an unprivileged user.

This section briefly describes the software used on the Owl sensor hosts.

• owl-archold
  This script archives previously archived Owl sensor data into monthly archives. A compressed tar file is created that contains the archived data files from a particular month. It should only be run on a particular month's archive after the month has been completed. This script is exactly the same as the owl-archold on the Owl manager host.
  This script is assumed to live in the Owl user's home or bin directory.

• owl-dataarch
  This script moves data from the Owl sensor's active data directory to a year/month-specific archive directory. This script archives Owl sensor data by moving old data from the Owl data directory to an archive directory.
  This script is assumed to live in the Owl user's home or bin directory.

• owl-dnstimer
  This script is the primary part of the Owl sensor. It sends periodic DNS requests to the root nameservers and records the time each request takes. These query records are provided to the Owl manager for aggregation and display.
  This script is assumed to live in the Owl user's home or bin directory.

• owl-heartbeat
  This script periodically contacts the Owl manager to let it know the sensor is still alive. owl-heartbeat is an optional service for the benefit of the Owl manager's administrators; the Owl sensor will run just fine if a sensor's administrator elects not to run it. This is intended to be a cron job that runs once a minute, but other time periods may be chosen.
  This script is assumed to live in the Owl user's home or bin directory.

• owl-sensord
  This script executes the owl-dnstimer and owl-transfer daemons and monitors their execution. If either of the daemons exits unexpectedly, then owl-sensord will restart it. In order to keep configuration or other problems from causing rapid re-executions, owl-sensord will temporarily suspend execution of one of the daemons if a certain number of execution attempts fail within a short period of time.
  This script is assumed to live in the Owl user's home or bin directory.

• owl-status
  This script gives the user a simple view of the status of the three primary Owl sensor components. It reports whether or not owl-dnstimer, owl-sensord, and owl-transfer are running. An additional option shows the query parameters used by owl-dnstimer and the time that each root nameserver was last queried.
  This script is assumed to live in the Owl user's home or bin directory.

• owl-transfer
  This script periodically transfers Owl sensor data from the sensor host to the manager host.
  This script is assumed to live in the Owl user's home or bin directory.