#Cron

If you have a rc.local looking like this:

/bin/run-parts /etc/rc.local.d

and files in /etc/rc.local.d looking like this

hostname.sh sshkeys.sh firstboot.sh

it’s not going to work.

Why, you ask, after cursing and shouting for the past hour?

because run-parts ignores files with dots (".") and/or .sh files.

Yes. True story.

rename all the files to:

hostname sshkeys firstboot

and your problem will be solved (and of course chmod +x them).

Yesterday I’ve start using Prowl, as I heard good comments about it. And one of the things I want it to check, are my server statuses. I made a quick script using bash and crontab to check every 10 min if it replies on ping. Per server, I created “host.domain.tld.sh” (e.g. zero.rootspirit.com.sh), and added this in the file:

#!/bin/bash
KEY=YourApiKey
HOST=zero.rootspirit.com
ping -c 1 $HOST   &>/dev/null
if [ $? -ne 0 ] ; then
curl -k -s "https://prowl.weks.net/publicapi/add?apikey=$KEY&application=Server%20Connectivity%20Failure&event=&description=$HOST&priority=2"
fi

Of course, change KEY to your API key, HOST to the IP or DNS of the server it should ping. Also, make sure, that when pinging on your host where you’ll run the bash script on, a non-existing domain actually returns: