Linux System Admins Blog

We recently came across a problem with Cacti and the MySQL counters. For those of you who don’t know how to integrate MySQL statistics into Cacti have a look at this: http://code.google.com/p/mysql-cacti-templates/. These templates are a great way to gain some insight into how your MySQL database servers perform. The templates are actually PHP pages [...]

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This guide will help you setup Nagios user to have limited access to host and service checks. It is helpful when you want to allow your customers or clients to view and receive alerts on their servers and services, like for dedicated servers.
Procedure:
Contacts: Create new contact definitions for your client.
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In the day and age of high definition many are upgrading their video recording gear to the latest harddrive or flash based hi def video cameras. Unlike auto dealerships consumer electronics retailers don’t offer trade in options for your old stuff.  In the green / renewable mindset we can put these no longer used video [...]

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There is a module released for monitoring Drupal sites with Nagios.  Monitoring includes the check if your site is up and running, check for new updates on Drupal core, security, and modules, database updates, write permission on “files” directory,  check if cron is running on the specified period, and other sections of your Drupal site.  [...]

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Aside from missing coconut trees and hula girls distinguishing our data center from Hawaii was pretty tough this afternoon. It was HOT, so hot in fact that I was sweating while sitting in just a cotton tee-shirt. I kept drifting away into a daydream where that failed 20 ton Liebert A/C unit was running. Soon [...]

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Many mainstream oem server iron manufacturers (dell, supermicro, sun, ibm) offer remote management options. HP’s variant is called iLO or Integrated Lights Out and is standard on 3oo/500/Blade line of servers. Newer generation (G5 and up) servers come with iLO 2 which offers hardware video acceleration and network encryption.  Normally iLO is setup before booting [...]

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increasing drupal performance notes from drupal con dc 2009

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We have a monitoring server running Nagios and we needed to add checks for Nginx process on a new server.  Basically, you only need to install NRPE to monitor services, processes, disk space, load, etc on your remote machine.  Check the NRPE docummention for complete reference and here’s a quick NRPE installation guide for Debian.
For [...]

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So a couple of weeks ago I touted the AdBard folks and their FLOSS oriented ad network system.  Today we received the following email from them.  What is worse, is that the ads have already stopped appearing on the site.  .
It looks like they will be teaming up with  Free Software Foundation.
Hello,
This email details your [...]

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This is a slight departure from our regular programming. Instead of just concentrating on the sys admin side of things I want to show how to add a Nagios check to an existing application. In this case we have a Java application for which we want to monitor whether it is running or not. Later [...]

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