Re: The day I lost my job due to monit

[address@hidden]

Sure, I admit I sought for a kind of a sensational headline. Monit is a
great tool which surveils the services of this company since many years
and alarmed us for many serious problems.

The more important line is the last sentence: There is room for
improvement. Since I wasn't into C since more than a decade, I am sorry
that I cannot really contribute to Monit, otherwise I would. I remember
that it was roughly 400 lines of PHP code which made a reliable check of
the TLS certificate chain and against the trust store in /etc/ssl/certs.
What I want to give to the developers of Monit is this idea so they may
improve this great tool even more.

Kind regards,

rex kogitans

Am 04.12.20 um 20:03 schrieb Paul Theodoropoulos:
> You did not lose your job due to Monit, and you know that - you
> clearly described what the proximate cause was of your losing your
> job. It makes for a 'sensational' headline, but blaming it on Monit is
> absurd.
>
> On 12/4/2020 7:52 AM, rexkogitans@gmx.at wrote:
> > I configured monit to monitor the TLS certificate validity of all of our
> > highly productive websites. To all websites, the unnecessary full
> > certificate (without root CA) was installed. However, on 30th of May
> > 2020 one of the chain certificates (COMODO) ran out of its validity
> > period. Obviously monit only checks for the server certificate, that's
> > why the check did not notice this, and such a check is completely
> > pointless. It led to a massive damage to my company, and since I was to
> > deal with monitoring as well as TLS certificates, I had to move on to
> > find a new job.
> >
> > During the notice period, I implemented an own check in PHP and let
> > monit execute this PHP program to check TLS certificates. This PHP
> > program did not just check the entire chain, but also the chain against
> > the system's own trust store (in /etc/ssl/certs). I think it would be an
> > interesting feature to deal with TLS certificates like this in monit in
> > order to avoid more people losing the jobs.