I have forked the “Mon” network/server monitoring system. Here is a link to the new project page [1]. There hasn’t been an upstream release since 2010 and I think we need more frequent releases than that. I plan to merge as many useful monitoring scripts as possible and support them well. All Perl scripts will use strict and use other best practices.
The first release of etbe-mon is essentially the same as the last release of the mon package in Debian. This is because I started work on the Debian package (almost all the systems I want to monitor run Debian) and as I had been accepted as a co-maintainer of the Debian package I put all my patches into Debian.
It’s probably not a common practice for someone to fork upstream of a package soon after becoming a comaintainer of the Debian package. But I believe that this is in the best interests of the users. I presume that there are other collections of patches out there and I hope to merge them so that everyone can get the benefits of features and bug fixes that have been separate due to a lack of upstream releases.
Last time I checked mon wasn’t in Fedora. I believe that mon has some unique features for simple monitoring that would be of benefit to Fedora users and would like to work with anyone who wants to maintain the package for Fedora. I am also interested in working with any other distributions of Linux and with non-Linux systems.
While setting up the mailing list for etbemon I wrote an article about DKIM and mailing lists (primarily Mailman) [2]. This explains how to setup Mailman for correct operation with DKIM and also why that seems to be the only viable option.