Hey Monks,

I am fairly new to Perl, with not very much programming experience. Well, basically here is my situation. We have two firewalls both running Checkpoint Firewall-1. One is the primary in production and the other is on the network, but acting as a hot standby. Right now, if the primary fails, then we have to reconfigure the secondary manually with the primary's ip's and bring it up. I would like to automate this process. Here is what I would like to automate:

1.) Have the secondary firewall periodically ping the primary to see if it is up. Even better have the secondary firewall ssh (since it is a firewall, I don't want to use telnet) to the primary and test to see if the firewall daemon is running.

2.) If the firewall daemon is not running, then have the secondary run a: ifconfig -a down on the primary and run a script on itself that will bring up its interfaces with the ip's of the primaries and install the latest rulebase.

I know there are some products that will do this and much more, but right now there is no money in our budget for it, so I figured I would try to write a script to do this automatically.

Can this be done in Perl? Can somebody with a little Perl experience, but a lot of determination do it Which modules should I use?

Thanks in advance for any help. If I come up with something that works, I will post it here.

-Dru

Edit 2001-05-30 by mirod: changed the title

In reply to Monitoring a firewall using ssh (was: Is this possible in Perl?) by dru145

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