I have a project that I'm trying to iron out some details for. First, a brief description:

I'm building a centralized database for logging from a series of distributed firewalls. The logging will take place via a perl script I've written that opens a pipe on the logging interface (OpenBSD's pflog0), parses the output, and inserts the data into a MySQL table.

For security's sake, and to be able to maintain a "pull" mode from the database server, I've been using a remote SSH tunnel (forwards remote port to local port), then using SSH to run the remote script. The script connects to the firewall's local port, forwarding the connection through the tunnel to the database server securely. Unfortunately, this brings up a couple of issues: 1) How to monitor that the tunnel stays up, and 2) How to monitor that the script is still running/connected?

I'd consider moving the SSH connection task into the Perl code, but I haven't found any tunnelling methods in the Net::SSH or Net::SSH::Perl modules. As far as the process monitoring goes, I don't have any experience with process communication or error trapping, so any "high-level" suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Example use of script: 
$ ssh -C -x -R 3307:192.168.0.10:3306 root@192.168.0.1 'perl pfdb2.pl'

[download]
TIA,
-fp

In reply to SSH Tunnels and IPC(?) by fuzzyping

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.