Introduction

Nagios is an open source monitoring application that is simple to configure and handles many different simultaneous checks quite well. Nagios configuration is all file-based which makes version control of the config files very easy. That being said I will be talking about extending Nagios in this post.

Extending Nagios

There are a great deal of plugins availabe online at Nagios Exchange. Plugins that are available range from great to terrible so make sure you check out what you are installing on your Nagios machine.

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Welcome Back… Again!

Sorry about the state of this blog and what has happened to it. Both Ben and I have been quite busy with school/thesis/work. We hoped to keep this blog updated as much as possible but the last couple of months have been damn busy. I have a couple posts that I will be writing from documentation that I have made at work.

Thanks for coming back and enjoy.

We did have some technical issues regarding mephisto, ruby, rails, and our schedules. Basically a migration was failing because ruby-inline, once that was resolved the blog came back online and everything is good to go.

Sorry about that!

-Ron

These guys are at it again!

I wanted to make it known to all the Mac SysAdmins out there that MacHeist is such a wonderful package. I have purchased the last two MacHeist bundles and have been more than happy with every single app that I have received.

So get there and sign up!

MacHeist

Regards,

Ron

Tip of the Day – Setting Hostname on Mac OS X 10.5

So if you are a road warrior and travel around a lot. You may be annoyed by your terminal displaying your DHCP hostname rather than the real hostname of your machine. That being said here is a simple way to permanently fix your problem.

sudo scutil --set HostName

Enjoy!

Just if you missed it, FreeBSD 6.4 (if you’re still on the 6 series of releases) was released two days ago. Checkout the release notes here.

I attended USENIX’s Large Installation System Administration conference in San Diego, CA from November 12th to 14th, 2008. I was lucky enough to receive a student grant from USENIX and the NSSA department at RIT to attend the conference. I took part in four of the Solaris system administration training sessions, and spent my third day attending two invited talks. As part of my student grant I volunteered my time to summarize the two invited talks. The summaries are to be included in the February issue of ;Login:, the USENIX magazine. I’ve included below those two summaries. I will post more later on the vendors I thought were neat, as well as my overall feelings of the conference (which are all positive).

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Tip of the Day

This is a great plugin that I feel everyone should implement.