Mike’s House

A while back I wrote about using Nagios as a monitoring system.

Since then, I’ve had need to have it deployed via a packaging system called RPM, and since no “stable” community editions are out there, I have the need to “roll my own” for distribution on our platforms.

I’ve never used RPM from the “packager” side before - and it’s both very cool and infuriating. It has all sort of features and powerful macros, but debugging it isn’t a piece of cake at all.

If anyone has a great RPM tool out there that they want to recommend, let me know.

A while back, we began investigating centralized monitoring tools for multiple systems, cross-platform, alerting, etc.

One contender was a package from MS, and a few others were tossed in the ring.

We did a proper match-up (or shootout, as I prefer) and tested a couple of candidates. While the all-inclusive MS offering is probably the best-functioning one, the cost is too prohibitive for a monitoring tool - about $1500/host monitored.

The extensivity and ease of use is uncomparable, but cost being a factor, we looked at another popular solution - Nagios.

Open source, modifiable - or should I say - Build Your Own - as it comes wth some basic egine concepts,a nd then you pretty much have to build every single monitor you want to look at.

The result is a more targeted monitoring solution, inasmuch it does exactly what you set it out to do - but absolutely no more.

The comparison showed this past week when I got an alert from my test MS instance about a SQL job running too long, something that I would have had to create some code, adapt it to monitor that specific job, and hope it could deal with exceptions I hadn’t thought of.

That’s a difference between a specialist in a particular field (i.e. DBA, mail admin, etc) and the overall concept of a systems administrator - sometimes a jack-of-all trades.

The MS offering is combined of “Management Packs” that are written by the developers of the systems that are being monitored - i.e. Exchange developers write the monitors for exchange and so on, whereas in Nagios monitoring world, you are expected to be able to figure out all of your own monitors/thresholds, etc.

I guess it makes it a little more interesting in the long run, as building something from scratch allows you the familiarity of knowing the ins-and-outs of the systems, but it’s time consuming and the returns are not as immediately apparent.

But it’s affordable. And we’ve got the techie know how to do it. So we do it.

If any readers have used Nagios, are interested in it, have advice, want advice, want to see what the color blue tastes like, let me know.

Some of you may know that I don’t hold much love for Apple’s operating system.

It feels so clunky compared to my Windows-fu knowledge, and the change from one to the other is not at all simple.  I’d rather use Ubuntu, to be honest.

But here’s my current beef with Mac OSX - my machine is bound to Active Directory (in a corporate environment, they ALL  should!) and as any good computer, looks for a Domain Controller after a reboot, to check your login credentials, apply any scripts, etc

If it’s a mobile machine, typically you’ve set it up as a “mobile user account”, meaning that the machine is to cache your credentials, and in the absence of a DC, check the local cache and allow you to log in.

However, whenever MINE reboots, it takes about half an hour delay to log in, and there’s no progress, cancel, notification, etc as to WTF is it doing. Eventually, it might let me in. But in the meantime, time is a-wasting.

I finally got fed up enough to really research this, and it seems that there’s a way to fix it manually (in what all OSX users will deny vehemently is NOT a Registry!)  by modifying the values to a few keys, to reduce the timeout wait. But you can only do that once you’ve logged on.

So I’m stuck using another machine until mine logs me in and lets me change it. What a waste of time.

Windows will time out within a minute and let you know why.

Grumble. grumble, grumble.

This is crazy, but it needs to be put out there.

I currently have:

1 HP Laptop, running Windows XP
1 MacBookPro, Dual booting Vista and OSX Leopard, and have Paralleles to run XP and Ubuntu under OSX
1 EeePC, currently running Xandros (Eee mode), and soon to dual boot with XP and Ubuntu

Is this too many operating systems? I think it just might.

What’s your preference, and why?

So here it is.
The revelation.
You thought it would never happen.
It’s almost unbelievable.
I’m still unsure of it myself.
But this memorable event will go down in history, I’m sure.

(more…)

So a while ago, my friend David sent me a funny article (funny for us, not for the article’s subjects).

It showed what some brilliant SysAdmin had done at his company’s location, and how it backfired miserably.

Read it here: A “Priceless” Server Room: Priceless - Worse Than Failure

I hope you enjoy reading the article. I think I may have (more…)

So this morning, on my way to work, I get an urgent phone call that something is wrong with the network - people can’t get to the file server, or get out to the Net, nada.

So naturally, I do what any average person would do. Whip out my BlueTooth ear piece and connect it so I can have my hands free. Then I grab my laptop - someone else was driving - and connect to the Net via BlueTooth connection to the phone I’m talking on.

Once the net is up, I connect to my office VPN and check the status of the servers.

Servers seem ok, communicating nicely with each other and the world.

My guy on the other end of the phone is not a sysadmin, but is savvy enough to check some of the more advanced diagnosis problems, and it seems that the internal network computers are just not talking to the servers.

So I decide I’ll restart the server that hands out network access numbers (for the techies: DHCP server) and see if that does anything good for the universe.

No dice.

By now, I’ve pretty much arrived at the office and begin the point-to-point diagnosis of where it seems the failure is. I see that the servers, on their own switch, seem to be happily chattering away, but anything connected to that switch is not happy.

Power cycle the switch.

Nope. Not yet. So I power cycle the other switches that are connected to that switch, effectively disconnecting anyone connected to anything anywhere.

Still no effect.

Finally, I decide tht I’m going to swap a cable - a simple, 12″ cable - that connects one switch to the other.

Voila!

So everything works, power cycle the switches again, and all is well. What a great start to an even greater day.

This leads me to the following revelation: I am a hero.

Not a super-hero, just a hero. Batman was a hero thanks to his gadgets and capability to use them. I have some of that under my (non-utility) belt.

So there.

Or is it “into the light!”
Depending on your perspective, of course.

Yesterday I decided I was going to go down the path of the “righteous”.
I was reading about Windows Vista and it’s release delays and the new features and the latest “to protect your rights” DRM crap.
I read about pricing models - how they are now increasingly difficult to understand.
i read about Office 2007 and how that is becoming the basis for life everywhere and you can’t live without it.

And then I said to myself - I’m going to try an alternative.

For sooooo many years the home computer market has been awash with a single operating system (I’m not counting MAC’s as they are proprietary hardware and REALLY expensive) that could be installed on an i386 chip architecture (for the uninitiated - “Pentium”).

But now, the dawning of a new age has arrived, bringing with it a wide variety of full-featured operating systems, and all absolutely 100% at no cost.
Spend as much as you want getting custom hardware to tweak your system out - just make sure it’s Linux compatible.

So yes, I have installed Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft on my main desktop machine here at home.
It took a while, and is still incomplete.

For your average desktop user, who uses Internet (Web & Email), office-style apps and a few kinds of games, this OS is perfect. It runs well on really low-end hardware and I’m running it on a much more than low-end.

I think that this is slowly becoming one of the more user-friendly operating systems, and I must say that although I absolutely love sticking it to “Big M$”, it’s nice to not have to.

Let me know if you’re interested in more details.

Aches and pains, it seems that’s all I get these past few weeks.

It’s a bright Sunday afternoon, and my eyes are almost sealed shut, even with the blinds down most of the way.

Have you ever run out of Hard Disk space?
I do, frequently.

Only problem is, I have over 250GB, that has a fast turnover, i.e. the minute I burn a few gigs off, it fills up like water scooped from a pond.

I think I’m a download addict.

Another day, another dollar, and the world spins on.
Last night a friend from work came over with his computer, to get some assistance installing a new motherboard. Doing that and installing a new OS took a while, but saving his data was a real bitch. He eventually left, leaving me to work on it until 6am. I’m still not done with it, but I’ll probably finish it soon.

Later.

PS- This is my first post using PocketLJ on my PalmVx, in a coffee shop called “Aroma” in Jerusalem.