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May 2009

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05.30.09

Process Check Plugin for Nagios Binary Talks | (10)
This is a sh-compliant check plugin for Nagios which enables you to monitor a specific process whether it's running or not and to see how much cpu/memory it's wasting. This can be accomplished with the check_procs plugin which is included in the official Nagios-Plugins package as well, but it doesn't generate any performance output. At least that's what I've experienced lately (I'd have written the plugin anyway for training purposes). The script No special needs, just the basic stuff. The script parses the output of ps aux in different ways. You need to provide a specific process via -p/--process, if warning/critical thresholds ...

Tagged: gplv2, linux, nagios, network monitoring, open source, plugin, shell scripting, sysadmin
05.25.09

Towel Day 2009 World wide web | (1)
Fellows in our company asked me why I'm wearing this nice and shiny new accessoire around my neck the whole day and the answer is rather simple: It's Towel Day! So long Douglas, and thanks for all the fish!

Tagged: 2009, douglas adams, nerds, towel day
05.24.09

Last.fm profile gone for good reason World wide web | (0)
I just hit the panic button and deleted my Last.fm profile after I've read a german blog post at Koehntopp's blog and afterwards several articles at Techcrunch. 116.186 plays down the drain, but for good reason. It seems that CBS, Last.fm's parent company, requested user data related to the leak of an U2 album to actually forward this data to the RIAA. Although I haven't been some kind of a target, this is unacceptable for me since I'm interested in where my data is being used and for what purpose it gets stored. Koehntopp already mentioned this two years ago, now it ...

Tagged: cbs, last.fm, libre.fm, riaa, techcrunch, web-service
05.24.09

nginx Check Plugin for Nagios Binary Talks | (1)
Update: Please also consider reading the article regarding Update 1.1 for check_nginx.sh. Ok, this was obvious. Here's a Nagios plugin I've just finished to check whether nginx is running and to get some performance data like requests and connections per second as well as requests per connection. Please note that the StubStatus module for nginx must be compiled into it, this isn't done by default! And please make sure that you've added a location directive to your nginx configuration like the following as well. The script must be able to access it! location /nginx_status { stub_status on; ...

Tagged: nagios, network monitoring, nginx, open source, performance, plugin, shell scripting, sysadmin, webserver
05.21.09

howto: Let nginx serve the Nagios web-interface Binary Talks | (6)
For serving the Nagios web-interface it's not necessary to run an Apache webserver. It also works quite well with others like lighttpd or nginx. Here's how to configure nginx with basic auth so that Nagios knows who you are. Prerequisites Almost any package management system like apt pulls the Apache webserver as a dependency. I therefore strongly suggest you to compile and install Nagios manually since then you've got way more options to play with. Stick to the official documentation if you consider to do so. The following config files are all based on Nagios' default configure options. Get CGI going nginx isn't capable ...

Tagged: apache webserver, fcgiwrap, icinga, lighttpd, linux, nagios, network monitoring, nginx, open source, spawn_fcgi, sysadmin
05.20.09

Update 1.3: Bind check plugin for Nagios Binary Talks | (2)
Thanks to Gareth's feedback and advice I fixed a small, but nerving bug which raised an error when the plugin was called on a Debian based distribution. The main problem here was, that the awk snippet failed because of an unescaped metacharacter when using mawk (Debian default awk alternative), but worked like a charm with gawk (Gentoo default). Apparently gawk is just more loose than mawk, it should've failed on both. Anyway, this shouldn't be a problem anymore. As always, the updated script is available at MonitoringExchange, or via svn. Please consider that the svn checkout is only possible via svnserve at ...

Tagged: awk, BIND, bugfix, dns, gplv2, linux, nagios, network monitoring, open source, plugin, shell scripting, sysadmin
05.19.09

howto: nginx with php and Passenger (mod_rails) at once Binary Talks | (5)
nginx is one hell of a webserver. It's fast, efficient, small and reliable. According to Netcraft's webserver survey about 3 percent of world's webserver are using nginx to deliver content and the amount of nginx-powered servers is growing strong. Since I was bothered by administrating another Apache (I do this all day long) and because I was tired of letting the Apache balance on several Mongrels which is not just slow, but also quite inefficient for this low-traffic blog, I just migrated my whole environment to be served by nginx. And that wasn't much of a problem. Here's how I proceeded on ...

Tagged: Add new tag, debian, howto, nginx, open source, passenger (mod_rails), ruby on rails, spawn_fcgi, sysadmin, ubuntu
05.15.09

Blog/SVN maintenance Matejunkie | (0)
Just a short note: I'm currently migrating my web-applications to nginx since it seems to be a quite fast and stable software. I simply have to get rid of Apache's webserver since it's way too much for my intentions. I'm working with Apaches all day long so looking over the rim of a tea cup isn't the worst idea... Therefore it'll be a bit of a pain around here for the next few hours. Public SVN access is currently disabled, HTTPS and my redmine is not ready yet as well. If you're interested in my Nagios Plugins take a look over ...

Tagged: apache webserver, blog, migration, nginx, redmine, svn, webserver
05.13.09

CPU check plugin for Nagios Binary Talks | (5)
I've just finished version 1.0 of a CPU check plugin which is sh-compliant (as always) and calculates utilization through Jiffies rather than using another third party tool like iostat or top. This means it should work on all Linux machines right out of the box without the need to install additional software. Frankly speaking the performance of the script is slightly worse than the performance of most of the other CPU check plugins due to the sacrifice of parsing iostat or top output, but I nevertheless wanted to do this since calculating CPU utilization through Jiffies instead of parsing another tool's ...

Tagged: cpu, gplv2, jiffies, linux, nagios, network monitoring, open source, performance, plugin, pnp template, shell scripting, sysadmin
05.11.09

Update 1.1: UDP Packet Loss Check Plugin for Nagios Binary Talks | (0)
I've changed the small UDP packet loss script yesterday so that it's now showing the total requests, requests sent to an unknown port and receive errors per check interval. That means, if you'd choose a check interval of 5 minutes, the script shows the amount of the previous mentioned for this time frame. It now creates two temporary files in a directory which you may define via -t/--path-tmp. The file is automatically deleted when it's size got over 32Kb. Feel free to grab it from MonitoringExchange (they've changed their name due to legal problems with Nagios Enterprises and because of Nagios' ...

Tagged: gplv2, icinga, linux, nagios, netstat, network monitoring, open source, plugin, shell scripting, sysadmin, udp

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