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Ask HN: How do you check if your mailserver is still running?

6 points by speedy1034 ↗ HN
I'm running my own mail server with postfix and dovecot on a VPS. From time to time I'm scared that the server might be down, especially, if I do not get an email for some time. At the moment I'm just sending myself an e-mail from gmail to check wether its running. Does someone know a service which texts me or sends a push notification?

4 comments

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riffic
>Does someone know a service which texts me or sends a push notification?

Nagios, Pagerduty :)

You can find more resources here:

https://github.com/kahun/awesome-sysadmin

speedy1034
Maybe I'm wrong, but Pagerduty could be used to ping me, once I do know that the server is not running properly, right? I could use it to ping me if my mail server does not send any logs. This would help in some scenarios.

I thought there might be a service that sends an email to a special account or the answer is forwarded to themselves. If they don't get the forwarded message they send a text message.

simon_acca
You could use uptimerobot[0] to monitor your server's SMTP port and alert you on telegram/sms/whatever.

Sure that's not a guarantee that mail actually gets trough, but I think there's no shortcut for that other than sending an actual mail from an external service and checking its delivery.

[0]: http://uptimerobot.com