Monitor for SFTP

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1

Does anyone have a sample external monitor for monitoring nodes that are running an SFTP (via ssh) server?

A default “tcp” monitor on port 22 seems to kill the FTP server to the point where my FTP monitor on 21 stops functioning.. well, the monitor probably functions, but the server dies for a little while. I’m taking that up with the vendor (serv-u)..

But in the meantime, I’d like to have a real SFTP monitor that logs in and grabs a file. Preferably one that uses password authentication, not private key.

Thanks in advance!

-Kyoo

2

Has anyone successfully installed “lftp” on an LTM BigIP box? passing passwords on the command line to lftp is simple, and it handles SFTP and FTPS.

3

Hey guys,

I followed hoolio’s approach (thanks for you idea) to build a tiny monitor and this seems to be working fine for me.

Here is the string which is executed within external monitor:

sftp -o PubkeyAuthentication=yes -o IdentityFile=/root/.ssh/${PKEY} -b /home/${BFILE} ${USER}@${HOST} | grep ${MATCH} 2>&1 > /dev/null

Arguments here:

`PKEY` - private key file name for SFTP authentication
`BFILE` - batch file specifing which commands to execute after login
`HOST` - ip address of SFTP server
`DEBUG` - 0/1 = on/off
`MATCH` - a string we are looking for to check health
`USER` - account to access SFTP
`

In CLI it looks like:

sftp  -o PubkeyAuthentication=yes -o IdentityFile=/root/.ssh/sftpmonitor_rsa -b /home/sftpmonitor.input f5_monitor@10.128.192.192

Batch file

sftpmonitor.input

is nothing more than:

dir
bye

SFTP administrator created a file named

f5_health

which monitor is looking for. If it gets this string with grep, then we are marking pool member up. Otherwise it is red.

4

Hi FMA,

How do you manage the public key authenticatiion?

“PubkeyAuthentication=yes -o IdentityFile=/root/.ssh/sftpmonitor_rsa”. I assume sftpmonitor_rsa is the private key and is stored in server(/root/.ssh/sftpmonitor_rsa).