An It-slave in the digital saltmine

Andreas Ericsson at op5 is working with major improvements of Nagios. The focus areas are:

• Complexity reduction by moving from multi-threading to single threaded programing
• Reducing latency
• Disk I/O usage reduction
• CPU usage reduction
• Memory usage reduction

Read more at http://blogs.op5.com/development-work-on-nagios-project-to-improve-performance/

Background

On my electricity meter I have a flashing LED. 1000 flashes is 1 watthour.

As a monitor geek I want to know my powerconsumption and find a 1-wire kit containing a counter and a sensor that could detect the flashing from the electricity meter.

I wrote a script that collect the data in an RRD database and graph it. 

Graph

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Background

I have a FON router which allow anyone to connect to Intenet via my network connection. I like the openess and idea behind FON but I do not want to get in trouble if someone do bad things and using my network connection.

One solution is to connect the FON accesspoint to a separate network segment and let all traffic from that network go through TOR, the onion router. 

Another feature is when I want to be anonymous on Internet I plugin my computer to that network segment.

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Background

It really annoyed me that the iowait at the cpu on the Dom 0 system was approximatly 50% when the 4 virtual system was doing more or less nothing.

I showed my earlier blogpost about VM virtualization to our sysadmin at op5. He gave me a couple of more hints that really make a big difference, the best part is that they are real simple to implement.

I also noticed that I forgot some parts in the previous article that was obvius to me.

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Background

As an it slave, I have the same problems as most datacenters:

• Running out of space because of more and more machines get into the datacenter
• Overheating
• Powerconsumption

Added to the "normal" datacenter problems, I also have to deal with:

• Wife acceptance
• Noice, my neighbours has complained about the noice outside my basement.

To address this issues I will run a consolidation project to get fewer machines by using virtualization. As virtualization engine, KVM is choosed.

This article will describe some pitfalls I run into and how I solved them.

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After a couple of weeks fiddeling I can prodly announce that my new internet connection is in full use.

The new access speed is 100 Mbit/s optical fiber, iperf tests show that I can get approx 97 Mbit/s in booth directions.

Changes:

• 100 Mbit/s internet access provided by Ownit
• Updated firewall to OpenBSD 5.0 running on an Astaro appliance
• Updated Webserver to Centos 6.2, virtulized with KVM
• Updated Mailserver to Centos 6.2, virtulized with KVM

Happy new year

 News – Monitor v5.5

Monitor 5.5 –  It’s always extra fun when we do releases. News in short are:

• Support for offline maps – no need to have online gmap connection
• Introducing IP traffic “weathermaps” i.e. a user friendly way to present traffic flows, being WAN or LAN traffic
• Display monitor data on external web i.e visualise and distribute the information to greater crowd
• Multiple of  time saving tasks such as multidelete, free text filter, save searches etc.

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 Nov 1, 2011.

We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 5.0.
This is our 30th release on CD-ROM (and 31th via FTP).  We remain
proud of OpenBSD's record of more than ten years with only two remote
holes in the default install.
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My internet connection is a crappy ADSL line.

I noticed that I did get alot alerts from op5 Monitor complaining about high error rate on the external network. After some investigation I noticed that UDP port 5060 generated approx 1.5 Mbps in traffic and that is more or less maximum my ADSL connection can handle. UDP port 5060 that is SIP.

A nice graph showing the errorrates, generated by op5 Monitor:

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