Being in Africa, not all the packet paths are that great. Some people steal copper, others sabotage fibre, somali pirates hijack repair ships, things like that. Slowly but surely the state of things is improving, but for now, loss is inevitable.

Combine this with using smokeping slave instances in far countries, and things can get extremely noisy. And I mean “I had 1200 mails from smokeping since 6am and it’s now 11h39″ noisy. Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to fix, unlike what is said in this post.

Edit Smokeping.pm, jump to the check_alerts subroutine. Change this:

                         sendmail $cfg->{Alerts}{from},$to, <<ALERT;
To: $to
From: $cfg->{Alerts}{from}
Date: $rfc2822stamp
$mail
ALERT
                       }

To this:

                       if ($slave !~ /slaveNameToMatch/) {
                         sendmail $cfg->{Alerts}{from},$to, <<ALERT;
To: $to
From: $cfg->{Alerts}{from}
Date: $rfc2822stamp
$mail
ALERT
                       }
                }

And happiness is. If I feel like looking at more perl later, I’ll try make it a bit more formal (build it into the slave configs, allow it to be a generic check), but for now this’ll do.