Please add a Remote SSH Server status monitor check to Webmin. This would be very useful as a generic "alive" check for remote servers that have ICMP (ping) blocked by a firewall. The existing Remote Ping monitor is useless in these situations.
In the past, I have used the Remote TCP Service monitor with port 22 to check remote SSH servers. This was functional for a while, however it always logged the following error in /var/log/secure on the remote system:
Feb 1 1:00:00 Host1 sshd[5284]: Did not receive identification string from ::ffff:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Due to the huge number of SSH password-guessing attacks on the Internet these days, I am using the excellent DenyHosts script to thwart these attacks. I highly recommend it for everyone that has runs an SSH server:
The problem is that the error above from Webmin connecting to port 22 without passing an identification string appears to DenyHosts as a hacking attempt. It specifically looks for this string. As a result, this Webmin status monitor (TCP port 22) caused my server to be blocked out from accessing these remote servers via SSH, which was a serious problem. I have worked around the problem by removing the status monitors and by adding my server's IP address to the "allowed-hosts" file in DenyHosts.
The ideal solution would be for Webmin to implement a Remote SSH Service monitor that properly sends the identification string. For reference, see the Nagios plugin check_ssh:
http://www.netsaint.org/docs/0_0_6/oldplugins.html#check_ssh
http://sourceforge.net/projects/nagiosplug/
As an added benefit, the monitor could retrieve the SSH version of the remote server during the connection check and display this in the monitor's "current status" line.