- Entries from July 2006

Nagios Setups

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 00:55:17 GMT

In my time I've set up nagios several times. If you find yourself setting up nagios you need to read the time saving tricks page(v1,v2). One thing that page doesnt mention and isn't obvious elsewhere in the documentation is that in service definitions you can have hostgroup_name and host_name defined.

Switching.

Tue, 4 Jul 2006 00:56:40 GMT

No, Not that one or indeed that one (thinking about it I stopped using IE at least 7 years ago). I've finally succumbed and installed Ubuntu on my laptop.

After several years of having OpenBSD as my desktop OS of choice I've decided to try something new. My work laptop has beenSolaris 10 for several months now given my previous incarnation as a Solaris Admin. However $work are a debian shop. So ive become more accustomed to linux and its annoyances and even started to like some of the features (iproute,apt). Also it was time for a reinstall anyway.

So I downloaded an iso and did the install dance. It all went smoothly. INstalling windowmaker and making it my session default was also easy. the choice of programs is overwhelming compared to what was in the openbsd ports collections. Then a bad thing happened. It ate my X config. I dont know why but it just did.Thankfully a reinstall fixed. Which was good thing since I had installed lots of crap anyway.

Im seriously tempted to install it on my work laptop to.

Ooo Shiny Lights

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 00:53:26 GMT

I was sitting in a datacentre in the arse end of nowhere the other day waiting for a machine to boot when I noticed that 4 drives were flashing their activity lights at the same time. The fact that these 4 drives were spread across 2 machines was really shiny. It meant that soemthing I had set up was obvioulsy working properly.

Each machine had 2 mirrored disks using software raid which accounts for 2 drives in one machine flashing at the same time. What made all 4 drives flash at the same time was drbd which is bascially network raid 1.

We are using drbd along with heartbeat to provide a HA solution for our database needs.

Anyway it felt good to realise that soemthing I had setup had a physical means to show it is working. Although it has to be said it felt quite good when I could just yank the power out of a machine and have the database failover nicely.