Ok ok, I haven’t updated this here for a while. So let’s have a quick simmary of what I’ve been doing the last weeks …
Nagios
Nagios is software to monitor networked “things”. Actually you could probably write plugins for it to monitor just about anything, evenstuff not networked, but that is what it basically aims at. Anyway, basically it’s advantage is that it has a robust basic framework that is highly modular and extendable. So you can do anything as basic as “ping that host and tell my when you get timeouts” or do anything as strange as “alert me if my mailserver gets more than x spam per min”. As you may have guessed, in the default installation, the tool is not only very powerful, but it also has very ugly gui (I wasn’t really surprised). Luckily admins out there have already written some excellent plugins to make the gui very nice. I installed NagVis and am completely pleased with it. My “Nagios ToDo List” still has “gathering performace data” on it so I hope I get around to doing that sometime the next few weeks.
SUN + Debian
I needed a nice piece of hardware that wasn’t prone to go and die on me the next time a power outage happens to put nagios on (ok, I’m writing this in the wrong order, 1st I installed the hardware, then nagios). Since this little project here is at work to monitor some of our systems, but we don’t have any budget, I had to improvise a bit. The official software we should use for monitoring sucks … real, real hard. a system could be offline for hours before we get notified. So I have this nice little SUN Netra T1 laying around. Actually it has been just laying around at least since 2001 when it landed in our department by chance. It’s not much, 2x400Mhz CPU, I can’t remember how much RAM, and I put 2x36GB disk drives in it. Personally, I love the Netra because it is only 1U big, you can fit this thing in just about anywhere, we call it “the pizza box”.
So now is where Debian enters the story. Normally I would just install Solaris 8 or 9 on the Netra. But I decided on Debian for 2 reasons: 1) It should be possible and I have never done it before and 2) sorry SUN, but your package management tools are crap. yeah, that is maybe mean and harsh, but also very true. sunfreeware is probably the only reason so many solaris admins have been able to keep their sanity. Hooking up the console port to my linux pc was no problem (just use a standard cisco console cable), the Debian installer worked pretty cleanly. There was just one bump, a pretty big one too. The installer works great if you don’t want to do any fancy partitioning. Unfortunatly I wanted both drives running in a software raid 1 in case one of my drives decides to die. I’ll omit the long story of me trying to get this to work. I managed to get my raid running, (no thanks to the installer). And after that everything was a breeze. I’m very satisfied with the performance. The rest of the installation was no problem (basic security hardening, installaing apache, mysql and php), everyday stuff. The only thing left on my “Netra ToDo List” is setting up PAM to use OTP for authentication.
phpBB
Version 3 of phpBB (forum software) went gold a bout a week ago. So I started preparing the upgrade and pulled it through today. Weighhing out the pros and cons of trying to convert the phpBB 2 database to phpBB 3 I decided to not try. Well, I did actually look at the database structure of the new version, but the phpbb_user_group table is still as starnge as ever (people with a multiple personality disorder would feel at home here since every user is at least in a group consisting of himself alone). Yeah, so instead of risking a broken database I decided to set the old forum to read only and have the people register again for the new forum.
Ok, this is definatly very un-ryan-like. I must be getting older 😉