I have been looking around at monitoring software, does anyone have any experience running BigBrother on servers running Plesk?

http://bb4.com/

It looks like one of the better ones and it is freeware.

Also, can anyone recommend a hack detect type monitor? Having trouble finding any monitoring software specifically designed to look for hacking red flags.

Rick

BB seems really nice, my local ISP uses it and I can access the page to find out if anything's wrong.

I considered using it on my Plesk server but it seems like it wouldn't be too useful running on the same machine - after all, if something serious like a disk crash happens, BB will die too, and if there's a network problem at RS preventing people from seeing my sites, BB can't tell.

I think I'm going to set it up on my home Linux box one of these days.

In the meantime, I've purchased a monitoring service from www.tracert.com - they check the web server every 15 minutes and send an email to my PCS phone when it's down. Their service is pretty nice but I have had a few false alarms - usually a network problem between tracert.com and rackshack, nothing to do with whether I or most users can access my site. I have set it to only page me after the 3rd consecutive failure, and that prevents 90% of those from bothering me.

That is what I was thinking too, running it from a Red Hat box on our LAN.

I found TripWire and Port Sentry for detecting abnormal access attempts and port scans, they look pretty nice too although I have not installed either yet.

http://www.psionic.com/products/portsentry.html

http://www.tripwiresecurity.com/

Rick