CARETAKER

Name

caretaker -- a network services monitor

Synopsis

caretaker

DESCRIPTION

This manual page documents the caretaker command.

caretaker is a program to monitor network services. caretaker uses nmap and ndiff to make network scans and to compare the results against a reference scan, e.g. from the day before.

This is intended as a negative monitoring system which informs about services and hosts going active which should probably not do so.

OPTIONS

None

CONFIGURATION

/etc/caretaker/caretaker.conf contains the variables for running caretaker. It understands the following settings:

SPOOLDIR

The directory where the scan results are kept. Defaults to /var/lib/caretaker .

NMAP

The path to the nmap executable. Defaults to /usr/bin/nmap .

NMAP

The path to the ndiff executable. Defaults to /usr/bin/ndiff .

/etc/caretaker/caretaker.hosts contains the hosts and/or networks for caretaker to monitor. Values may be given as IP addresses in CIDR notation or what else nmap would accept as a valid scan target. The installation routine sets this to the network attached to the system.

FILES

/etc/caretaker/caretaker.conf

/etc/caretaker/caretaker.hosts

/var/lib/caretaker

SEE ALSO

nmap (1), ndiff (1).

BUGS

This is a shell script. So it is not very robust on syntax errors inside the config files.

AUTHOR

This manual page was written by Christian Recktenwald for the caretaker software and may be used by others. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts and no Back-Cover Texts.

DISTRIBUTION

The newest version of caretaker can be obtained from http://www.fischglas.de/software/caretaker

caretaker is (C) 2003-2004 by Christian Recktenwald.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; Version 2. This guarantees your right to use, modify, and redistribute caretaker under certain conditions. If this license is unacceptable to you, citecs GmbH may be willing to sell alternative licenses. (contact )

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details (it is in the COPYING file of the caretaker distribution).