monshow(1)

🎀 monshow — the manual page, but make it cute 🎀

okay bestie, welcome to monshow(1), the section-1 manual page. this is your lil backstage pass to the monshow command. let's get into it 💅

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✨ NAME ✨

monshow — show operational status of mon server. that's it, that's the whole vibe check 🦋

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

monshow [--help] [--showall] [--full] [--disabled] [--detail
group,service] [--view name] [--auth] [--login user] [--old] [--server
hostname] [--port portnum] [--prot protocol] [--rcfile file]

like, look at all those flags. she's got range. 👑

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so monshow shows the operational status of the mon server. and here's the tea: both command-line and CGI interfaces are available. choose your fighter. 🥊

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

every single one, no skips, no cap:

• --help — show help. our fave. the "i'm lost but make it graceful" button 🫶
• --showall — do not read the configuration file, and show operational status of all groups and services. everything, everywhere, all at once 💀
• --full — instead of showing only failed services, show all services no matter the state. she doesn't gatekeep 🌈
• --detail group,service — display detailed information for group and service. this includes description, detailed output of the monitor, dependency information, and more. when invoked via CGI, append "detail=group,service" to get detail for a service.
• --view name — display a pre-configured view. when invoked via CGI, supply the arguments "view=name" in the URL, or by using this technique: "http://monhost/monshow.cgi/name". for security reasons, leading forward slashes and imbedded ".."s are removed from the view name. (protect the vibe ✋)
• --auth — authenticate client to the mon server. show your ID at the door 🎫
• --disabled — show disabled groups, services, and hosts. the default is to not show anything which is disabled, but this may be overridden by the config file. (so like, the config file has main character energy and can override 👀)
• --server hostname — connect to the mon server on host hostname. hostname can be either the name of a host or an IP address. if this name is not supplied by this argument, then the environment variable MONHOST is used, if it exists. otherwise, monshow will fail. dramatic but true 😭
• --login username — when authenticating, use username.
• --port portnum — connect to the server on portnum.
• --prot protocol — sets the protocol to protocol. the protocol must match the format "1.2.3". if unset, the default supplied by the Mon::Client module is used. > do not use this parameter unless you really know what you are doing. fr fr, this is not a beginner-friendly flag 💀
• --old — use the old 0.37 protocol and port number (32777). vintage, retro, archival-core 🕰️
• --rcfile file — use configuration file file instead of ~/.monshowrc.

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✨ CGI INVOCATION ✨

if monshow is invoked with the "REQUEST_METHOD" environment variable set, then CGI invocation is assumed. in that case, monshow gathers variables and commands submitted via the POST method and QUERY_STRING. > command-line options are ignored for security reasons. don't try it bestie.

all reports which are produced via the web interface have a text mode equivalent. slay, accessibility 💖

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✨ VIEWS ✨

a view is a pre-defined configuration supplied to monshow. views can be used to generate different reports of the status of certain services for different audiences. they are especially useful if you are monitoring hundreds of things with mon, and you need to see only a subset of the overall operational status. for example, the web server admins can see a report which has only the web server statuses, and the file server admins can have their own report which shows only the servers. users can customize their own views by editing their own configurations. everyone gets their own lil corner of the internet 🌸

views are stored as files in a system-wide directory, typically /etc/mon/monshow, where each file specifies one view. if this path is not suitable for any reason, it can be changed by modifying the $VIEWPATH variable in the monshow script. (yes, you can move her house 🏠)

when invoking monshow from the command line, the view to display is specified by the --view=name argument.

in the case of CGI invocation, views can be specified by appending either ?view=name or /name to the URL. for example, the following are equivalent:

http://monhost/monshow.cgi?view=test
http://monhost/monshow.cgi/test

if a view is not specified, then a default configuration will be loaded from $HOME/.monshowrc (command-line invocation) or cgi-path/.monshowrc (CGI invocation). no view? no problem, she'll pick for you 💅

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✨ VIEW CONFIGURATION FILE ✨

the view file contains a list of which services to display, how to display them, and a number of other parameters. blank lines and lines beginning with a # (pound) are ignored. (comments are self-care 🧚)

• watch group — include the status of all the services for "group".
• service group service — include the status of the service specified by group and service.

if no watch or service configuration lines are present, then the status of all groups and services are displayed. (she's generous like that 💜)

• set show-disabled — this has the same effect as using the --disabled option.
• set host hostname — query the mon server hostname.
• set port number — the TCP port which the mon server is listening on.
• set prot protocol — set the protocol. this probably should not be used unless you really know what you're doing. (again with the mystery protocol 👀)
• set full — show everything disabled, all failures, all successes, and all untested services. the full buffet 🍓
• set bg color — background color for the CGI report. the value of this parameter should resemble "d5d5d5" (without the quotes).
• set bg-ok color — background color for services which are in an "ok" state. green flag behavior 💚
• set bg-fail color — background color for services which are failing.
• set bg-untested color — background color for services which have yet to be tested. the "we don't know her yet" aesthetic 🙈
• set refresh seconds — for CGI output, set the frequency that the report reloads. the default is to not reload.
• summary-len len — for CGI output, set the maximum length of the summary output to display. summary text which exceeds len will be truncated and replaced with ellipses. (she's cutting you off mid-sentence, sorry 😭)
• link group service URL — for the CGI report, make a link to URL at the bottom of the detail report for group/service for more information.
• link-text group service — insert all HTML up until a line beginning with "END" after the link specified with the link setting.
• set html-header — lines after this statement, continuing up until a line beginning with the word "END" will be displayed after the "</head>" tag in the CGI output. use this to display custom headers, including images and other fancy things. ✨ fancy things ✨

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✨ ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES ✨

• MONHOST — the hostname of the server which runs the mon process. the little address book of the operation 📓

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✨ SEE ALSO ✨

• mon(8)

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✨ BUGS ✨

report bugs to the email address below. (yes, the actual below. go look 👇)

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✨ AUTHOR ✨

Jim Trocki <trockij@arctic.org> — legend behavior, honestly 👑

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okay that's the whole page bestie, you ate that 💅✨

this was the Linux version of monshow(1), dated $Date: 2005/04/17 07:42:27 $ — yes she's a vintage icon and she still serves. bye bye, go monitor something 🦋💖