Suspending Alarms

[posted 2000/06/19]

From time to time, I find myself temporarily suspending alarms for one reason or another.  Usually, I've been going into alerts.cfg and commenting out the alarm listing (using '//').  That's fine, except that I then forget to reactivate the alarm, and weeks will pass before I notice the inactivity.

I think I have a better way.  From now on, whenever I want to suspend an alarm's operation, I'll set its status field in alarms.cfg to "inactive".  In addition, I've applied the following patch to my pikt binaries:

vienna# diff -C 1 /pikt/bak/src/piktd.000621/pikt.c $P/src/piktd/pikt.c
*** /pikt/bak/src/piktd.000621/pikt.c   Sat Jun  3 19:52:20 2000
--- /export/home/berto/ucgsb/pikt/src/piktd/pikt.c      Wed Jun 21 06:56:00 2000
***************
*** 375,378 ****
        foreach (alarmcurr, alarms) {
!               if (STATUS == INACTIVE)
                        continue;
                if (beginscript() == ERROR)
--- 375,380 ----
        foreach (alarmcurr, alarms) {
!               if (STATUS == INACTIVE) {
!                       logreturn(PIKTLOG, LOG_WARNING, __FILE__, __LINE__, FALSE,
                                  "%s alarm inactive", ALMNAM);
                        continue;
+               }
                if (beginscript() == ERROR)

From now on, whenever pikt sees an alarm's status set to "inactive", it will as usual skip that alarm but now, in addition, it will log a WARNING message to the alarm's .log file.  I can then monitor this in, for example, PiktWarningLogChk with the rule:

        rule    // report inactive alarms
                if $inline =~ "WARNING:.+alarm inactive"
                        =outputmail $inline
                        next
                endif

I might use =stifle() or some other means if repeated alerts for this get to be too much of a nuisance.

Another way one might handle this is to keep the status "active" but add this at the beginning of the script:

        begin
                if #weekday() == 2      // monday
                        output mail "FOOBAR SCRIPT SUSPENDED"
                endif
                quit

or

        begin
                =remind(..., "FOOBAR SCRIPT SUSPENDED")
                quit

For more examples, see Developer's Notes.