An It-slave in the digital saltmine

I recently visited a cinema that showed “Baader Meinhof Complex”.

A strange movie where a couple of youngsters was very angry, unclear why, and blow up people and things.

I cannot recommend this movie.

If you are thinking about upgrading your existing Nagios system to Nagios 3, take a look at op5 Monitor. op5 Monitor is a Network Monitor System for enterprise monitoring and its based on Nagios 3. op5 have bundled Nagios with other useful opensource projects such as nagiosgraph, smstools and hypermap and then further developed missing key features such as a web based configuration tool and improved reports for availability and SLA monitoring. The system is built to be easy to use and easy to administrate out of the box! It is the choice for enterprise network professionals that like Nagios but want a supported monitoring system.

What about the existing Nagios installation?
– It is possible to import existing Nagios configuration, as well as any custom built modules. So the work you put into your existing installation does not go to waste!
– You can continue developing you own PlugIns.
– You get access to all of the code.
– The installation of op5 Monitor is easy and fast (usually 1-2 days depending on size). You can choose to do the work by yourself or buy a “op5 Goodstart” service from op5 with remote or on site installation.

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In an article in Svenska Dagbladet the claim that Linux is not only for geeks.

Now with the minicomputers like Asus EeePC Linux is widely used by non computer geeks and for “normal” humans it is as easy to use as Windows.

Read the article in Swedish here.

After got the 1-wire stuff working it is time to use the temperature probes to get some use of measuring your environment. This article describe how you can create an op5 Monitor or Nagios plugin to monitor your temperatures.

Read my previous articles to get the 1-wire bus up and running:

• 1-wire http://www.it-slav.net/blogs/?p=62
• 1-wire getting started http://www.it-slav.net/blogs/?p=67
• Temperature graphs http://www.it-slav.net/blogs/?p=75

I found a 1-wire temperature Nagios plugin on internet, but it had some disadvantages:

• Used Fahrenheit instead of Celsius
• Did not accept thresholds below zero degrees, in Sweden that is quite common temperature during winter.
• Strange License, it just said Copyright and a name and email address that bounced.

The Nagios plugin was written in Perl so it was straight forward to modify and fix the obstacles I found. But the copyright bothered me because I wanted to publish the changes, I tried to email the email address I found in the script but it bounced, so I decided to write my own plugin.

I have published the script at nagiosexchange.

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Now when my blog is growing a need for backup is growing. After a short google search I found exactly what I want, automysqlbackup.

It is a shell script that has very modest requirements list:

• mysqldump, included in mysql client
• gzip or bzip2 if you want it compressed.
• mail if you want the status of the script to be emailed.

Features:

• Backup mutiple MySQL databases with one script. (Now able to backup ALL databases on a server easily. no longer need to specify each database seperately)
• Backup all databases to a single backup file or to a seperate directory and file for each database.
• Automatically compress the backup files to save disk space using either gzip or bzip2 compression.
• Can backup remote MySQL servers to a central server.
• Runs automatically using cron or can be run manually.
• Can e-mail the backup log to any specified e-mail address instead of “root”. (Great for hosted websites and databases).
• Can email the compressed database backup files to the specified email address.
• Can specify maximun size backup to email.
• Can be set to run PRE and POST backup commands.
• Choose which day of the week to run weekly backups.

Download it, modify some parameters and put in /etc/cron.daily and now your database is backuped.

op5 successful business model and the power of OpenSource has been noticed by a Swedish newspaper, Göteborgs posten.

On the picture Johannes Dagemark, op5 CTO can be seen. The article describe how an organisation or enterprise can save money and achive higher security with OpenSource.

One example is the Swedish police that estimates their savings to 25 Million Euro every year.

Link to the article written in swedish

I could not resist buying R2D2 when I passed MC Donalds. I bought 3 and said it was to my kids. My colleagues told me that I have only 2 kids.

Well, now it is standning next to my geek watch.

A new howto has been released, it describes how to Monitor Microsoft SQL-server with op5 Monitor.

Take a look here.

For more information about op5 Monitor, look here.

To make everybody on your office jealous buy a binary watch.

It shows the time in a semi binary format. I think a true geek watch should show the number of seconds since epoch in binary, but a very few could translate that to time used in the normal world.

Thinkgeek is the obvius place to look for a thing like this but it seems like they have stopped selling it, but I found mine at NetOnNet, a swedish online shop. Buy the way, they monitor their systems with op5 Monitor.

Links

• Binary watch at NetOnNet
• Thinkgeek, the geek heaven
• Epoch or Unix time

op5 community is growing and this scripts and definitions comes from Mikael Schmidt, IXX. I will do a step-by-step guide to get it running, if you have any questions do not hesitate to contact me peter@it-slav.net or write a comment to this blog.

This description is op5 Statistics centric, however op5 Statistics is based on Cacti so it will work there as well. The only differences between op5 Statistics and Cacti to this guide is the paths to different files.

Links to the files used is located at the bottom.

1. Create a directory called /opt/statistics/scripts/custom

#mkdir /opt/statistics/scripts/custom

Put the file esxiograph.sh in /opt/statistics/scripts/custom

2. Test the script by manually running the script

./esxiograph.sh io_vm vmware-stockholm demo.op5.com <user> <password>

usage:0.02 read:0.00 write:0.02

It works

3. Import the xml files

console->import templates

Browse to the xml file and choose default rrd settings

Do it with both xml files.

4. Add the graph

console->new graph

Choose your vmware ESX server

Graph template choose "ESX – IO Load per VS" to graph the host vmware ESX server load

or "ESX – IO Load per VM" to graph a particular guest host.

Click Create

Enter guest name (if you pick ESX – IO Load per VM), login and password. Change the title to " -IO load" if it is a guest IO you are graphing otherwise all graphs will have the same name.

Click Create

note: The login and password will be non-encrypted in a op5 Statistcs or Cacti MySQL database, use a read only user!

5. Repeat 4 with all ESX servers and guest host you want to graph.

Hint: to get a list of virtual machines run:

/opt/plugins/check_esx3.pl -H  -u xxxxx -p yyyyyy
 -l runtime -s list

CHECK_ESX3.PL OK - 26/28 VMs up: xxxx.op5.se(UP), yyyyy.op5.se(UP), zzzzz.op5.com(UP)....

6. Create a graph tree

Console->Graph Trees

Click add

Enter a name i.e. vmware ESX

7. Put the graphs in your graph tree with the ESX server at root

console->Graph Management

Enter ESX in search field so you only have yor hraphs containing ESX

click checkbox next to – VS IO Load

Choose action scrolllist "Place on tree (vmware ESX)"

Click Go

Choose [Root]

8. Put the guest machines under your vmware server in the tree

console->Graph Trees

Click add

Enter name "Guest machines"

9. Put the guest graphs under the leaf in the graph tree

console -> Graph Management

Enter ESX in search field

Click the checkbox next to all guests

Choose "Place on tree (vmware ESX)"

Choose "Guest Machines"

10. Now you should have a graph tree that looks similiar to this:

Congratulations, now you can look at some nice vmware I/O graphs.

Links:

• op5 Statistics
• Cacti
• Files used in this guide
• IXX IT-Partner AB
  
• op5 check_esx3.pl

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