Monitor various system informations

[Enrico Zini <zinie@cs.unibo.it>]

Hello!

I am looking for a way to monitor various system informations for the debian
servers we install.

An example of informations to monitor is:
 - Network throughput
 - Uptime
 - Mail queue size
 - If I'm sending mail, what's the sending progress (1)
 - If I'm retrieving mail (fetchmail), what's the progress (1)
 - Is the modem connected? At what speed? What's its current throughput?
 - User specific disk and mail stats (requires user autentication)

...and the like.  The goal is to have various ways to read the stats (web page
on a server's http server, gnome application, win32 application).

The first step is to write ad application who's able to gather all the required
information and to share it in a consistent way.

That said, the questions are:

 1) SNMP seems to be a good way to share these informations, but I have to
    learn it: before starting, is it the right way to go?
 2) LDAP instead? Other services?
 3) Is there a way to interrogate fetchmail about how's going?
 	If not, is someone working on it? Who? I'll give help.
	If nobody's working on it, I will.
 4) Is there a way to interrogate exim and pppd about how's going?
	Luckily diald already has a way to gather informations.


				TIA! Enrico

(1)
Progress is something like:
	"sending message 3/7, 23Kb/85Kb (27%), 104Kb/541Kb (19%) total"
--
GPG public key available on finger -l zinie@cs.unibo.it