JCifsMonitor

This monitor tests a file-sharing service based on the CIFS/SMB protocol.

The use of the JCifsMonitor requires the installation of the meridian-plugin-protocol-cifs package before polling will start.

To install the meridian-plugin-protocol-cifspackage:

  • For RPM-based distributions:

    • yum install meridian-plugin-protocol-cifs

  • For Debian-based distributions:

    • apt-get install meridian-plugin-protocol-cifs

With the JCifsMonitor, you can run tests for the following use cases:

  • share is available in the network

  • a given file exists in the share

  • a given folder exists in the share

  • a given folder should contain at least one (1) file

  • a given folder folder should contain no (0) files

By testing on files and folders, you can use a regular expression to ignore specific file and folder names from the test.

A network resource in SMB is a file or folder addressed as a UNC Path.

\\server\share\folder\file.txt

The Java implementation jCIFS, which implements the CIFS/SMB network protocol, uses SMB URLs to access the network resource. The same resource as in our example would look like this as an SMB URL:

smb://workgroup;user:password@server/share/folder/file.txt

The JCifsMonitor cannot test the following:

  • if a file contains specific content

  • a specific number of files in a folder; for example, folder should contain exactly/more or less than x files

  • age or modification time stamps of files or folders

  • permissions or other attributes of files or folders

Monitor facts

Class Name

org.opennms.netmgt.poller.monitors.JCifsMonitor

Configuration and use

Table 1. Monitor-specific parameters for the JCifsMonitor
Parameter Description Default

Required

path

Path to the resource you want to test.

empty string

Optional

retry

Number of retries before the service is marked as down.

0

domain {}

Windows domain where the user is located. You don’t have to use the domain parameter if you use local user accounts.

empty string

username {}

Username to access the resource over a network.

empty string

password {}

Password for the user

empty string

mode

The test mode which has the following options:
path_exist: Service is up if the resource is accessible
path_not_exist: Service is up if the resource is not accessible
folder_empty: Service is up if the folder is empty (0 files)
qwafolder_not_empty: Service is up if the folder has at least one file

path_exist

smbHost

Override the IP address of the SMB URL to check shares on different file servers.

empty string

folderIgnoreFiles

Ignore specific files in folder with regular expression. This parameter be applied only on folder_empty and folder_not_empty; otherwise, it is ignored.

n/a

{} indicates the parameter supports placeholder substitution.

Due to limitations in the JCifs library, only global timeouts can be used reliably.

This monitor implements the Common Configuration Parameters.

It makes little sense to have retries higher than 1, as it is a waste of resources during monitoring.
If you access shares with Mac OSX, you may have some side effects with the hidden file .DS_Store. If it gives you false positives in monitoring, use the folderIgnoreFiles parameter.

Example test: existence of a file

This example shows how to configure the JCifsMonitor to test if a file share is available over a network. For this example, we have access to a share for error logs and we want to get an outage if we have any error log files in our folder. The share is named log. The service should go back to normal if the error log file is deleted and the folder is empty.

JCifsMonitor configuration to test that a shared folder is empty

Note that you must include the monitor section for each service in your definition.

<service name="CIFS-ErrorLog" interval="30000" user-defined="true" status="on">
    <parameter key="retry" value="1" />
    <parameter key="timeout" value="3000" />
    <parameter key="domain" value="contoso" />(1)
    <parameter key="username" value="MonitoringUser" />(2)
    <parameter key="password" value="MonitoringPassword" />(3)
    <parameter key="path" value="/fileshare/log/" />(4)
    <parameter key="mode" value="folder_empty" />(5)
</service>

<monitor service="CIFS-ErrorLog" class-name="org.opennms.netmgt.poller.monitors.JCifsMonitor" />
1 Name of the SMB or Microsoft Windows Domain.
2 Username to access the share.
3 Password to access the share.
4 Path to the folder inside of the share as part of the SMB URL.
5 Mode is set to folder_empty.