Background

I was reading the Swedish computer magazine, Tech World. There was an article about an appliance solution that could give a report about unused switch ports. The box PortIQ from Infoblox costs approximatly 10.000 Euro.

op5 has developed this feature at a customer site and is included with op5 Monitor, op5 has published the code as opensource.

This guide will describe howto get it running in op5 Monitor. op5 Monitor is vanilla Nagios with some addons so it should be no problem to follow this guide in a Nagios environment

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Review Nokia e52

My old cell phone had stopped working so I needed a new.

The demands I have on the new phone is nothing strange.

Must:

• Be able to use as a phone
• Be able to use as a modem in Linux
• Be able to sync with Google Calendar
• Fit into the phone policy my employer have so I do not need to pay anything by myself
• A battery that does not require charging everyday

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I have read the excellent book Asterisk 1.6, Build feature-rich telephony systems with Asterisk by David Merel, Barrie Dempster and David Gomillion.

The book is inteended to anyone interested in bulding a telephony system using Asterisk and are 224 pages. The book claims that no preknowledge about opensource, Linux and Asterisk is required. I think it is a little bit hard to start without any of these knowledge. I would recommend to have basic Linux/Unix knowledge to be able to go through the installation part.

It starts from the begining with introduction to Asterisk, brief telephony system introduction, installing Asterisk,configure Asterisk, creating dialplans. It continues with call logging, different pre-made Asterisk alternatives like trixbox/FreePBX, asterCRM and Case studies and ends with some hints that makes the life of an Asterisk admin easier.

I relly liked the book. When starting with no Asterisk knowledge the number of config files and parameter is overvelming and this book help the reader to penetrate that. The book walk through basic configuration and help to get your a Asterisk installation up and running. I like that it gives an overview of different things to consider when to start an Asterisk implementation and builds up a basic knowledge about the subject.

I appreciate the case studies where three different scenarios are described: Small office/home office, Small business and a hosted PBX.

The drawback of the book is that it just gives an introduction to the different topics. I would like to have a little bit deeper knowledge in some of the topics, for an example dialplans.

I would recommend the book to newbies to Asterisk, the book will help them to get started and boost their knowledge. It is possible to gain all the knowledge in the book by visiting different Asterisk forums, read documentation and so on but that will take much effort compared to read the book.

• To buy the book: Asterisk 1.6, Build feature-rich telephony systems with Asterisk

Background

This article will describe how easy it is to integrate other tools to Nagios or op5 Monitor. I will use an example with a webshop where a business view of how the webshop is doing is implemented by using a GPL’d rule engine, NodeBrain. I have in an earlier article described the ruleset for this implementation but now I will show how the integration can be done.

Scenario

The scenario is a webshop with:

• 5 frontend webservers
• 2 application servers
• 3 databasservers

Management want to monitor how the webshop is doing. They do not want to know if a redundant part is down instead management want to have the overview of the webshop status. Read the rest of this entry »

An interesting article in Washington Post describe how to increase the IT security, the answer is simple:

Do not use windows

This is knowledge that is well known to most people in the IT industry, the interesting part is that this knowledge is now being transfered to common people and an article in Washington Post reflect this.

Another part is that a whole industry is built up around securing windows environment. This is mostly done by adding more and more complex infrastructure components that makes the problem even worse.

A simple comparison could be done:

If you are in pain because of a broken leg. Is the solution to eat painkillers or to go to the doctor and get a plaster bandage?  Painkillers are easy to apply, just swallow them. The plaster is  uncomfortable and makes it hard to do what you want. The short term solution is painkiller, the long term solution is fix the root cause of the problem, fix the broken leg.

Continue using windows for business critical solutions and protect it with "patch tuesday", antivirus, rootkit scanners and so on. That is eating painkillers. Remove the vendor lock-in software, that is the long term solution.

A good example of that it is possible to write secure software is OpenBSD where the approach to software development is focusing on security and as they claim on thier homepage "Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!".

Background

When I worked as a Tivoli Consultant I spend a lot of time investigating the customer processes and workflow and try to make the monitoring solution to support this. It was often long term projects and involved alot of people like, project managers, support staff, maintenance staff, application owners, applicataion engineers, operating systemens managers, DBAs and so on.

Very often the investigation followed the following principles:

1. Investigate the problem management workflow
2. Document the different parts that builds up the system
3. Find spots where a probe could be inserted to monitor a particular part in the system
4. Define the thresholds for the probe
5. Iterate 3 and 4 until all possible problems in the system could be detected
6. Define who should have which alarm and when ifthe probes shows abnormal behavior.
7. Write the ruleset that implements 7
8. Test
9. Document and hand over to the customer

When it comes to a product like Nagios or op5 Monitor, the product has a built in rule engine that fullfills most of the requirements in the steps above. In most cases it is just a matter of configuration and in some cases some extra scripting.

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https://bugs.op5.com/ is now also open for external users to sign up. By signing up you can post bug and feature requests, post bug-notes etc.

Before doing so, please check out the "How to Submit Bug/Feature" documentation available from within the bug tracker.

Note: op5 opensource projects Merlin, Ninja and Nacoma are for now available as categories on Project: op5 Monitor, it's simply to make it easy for us to show a product roadmap/changelog although it might be a bit "unlogical" for people using only Merlin.

In RedHat, CentOs and Suse and probaly other Linux distributions, the way of enabling and disabling a service at reboot is by using chkconfig. In ubuntu, the way of turning on and off a services at boot is by using update-rc.d. It changes the links for the init scripts.

To start a script in the default run levels:

sudo update-rc.d appname defaults

To remove a script from all runlevels:

sudo update-rc.d appname remove

I have read the book "Cacti 0.8 Network Monitoring, Monitor your network with ease!" by Dinangkur Kundu and S.M.Ibrahim Lavlu. The book is 116 pages.

According to the book the target audience for this book is for anyone who wants to manage a network using Cacti. To read the book you do not need to be a Linux Guru. And I agree, even if it probably helps if you have basic knowledge of Linux/UNIX, RRD, MySQL and SNMP.

Many of the OpenSource software projects out there is excellent but usually require a rather skilled person or a very interested person with alot of time to start working. Downloading the software and start reading the manual that comes with the software is often quite hard and a book like this narrow that gap and make a complex software like Cacti easier to use.

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