Monitoring....

[Greg Lindahl]

> You can easily write a script that monitors the exit status of
>    mii-diag --status eth0
> or the output of
>    mii-diag --watch eth0
> 
> http://www.scyld.com/diag/index.html

On this page, in the Network section, is an example of such a script:

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~hick0088/laptop/i4100.html

In this case it's a clever laptop hack that starts your dhcp client
whenever the link comes up. For non-laptops, most ethernet drivers
print something in /var/log/messages and/or dmesg when the link
comes up, so you can just look at your cluster logs and see if
your switch or cables are being flakey over the long run.

-- greg