Nagios and Databases at LISA '10

Posted Sun, 10/10/2010 - 22:35 by jsellens

I'm going to LISA '10 I'll be teaching two courses at the LISA '10 system administration in November: "Nagios: Advanced Topics" and "Databases: What You Need to Know". You should check out the complete LISA '10 conference program.

System and Network Monitoring at LISA '09

Posted Thu, 09/10/2009 - 18:14 by jsellens

I'm going to LISA '09 Just a note to mention that I'll be teaching two courses related to system and network monitoring at the LISA '09 system administration conference in November: "Performance Tracking with Cacti" and "Nagios: Advanced Topics".

Updated version of snagtools plugins for Nagios

Posted Mon, 11/10/2008 - 16:09 by jsellens

I've just updated the snagtools (SYONEX Nagios tools) distribution to be more friendly, with a configure script and all that. Some of my favorites are check_allstorage, check_snmpexec, and various tools for monitoring NetApps and Asterisk systems. Snagtools is available here.

Modified version of NRPE for Nagios

Posted Fri, 11/07/2008 - 20:38 by jsellens

The Nagios system and network monitoring software is terrific, and I use it in lots of places and lots of ways. The NRPE (Nagios Remote Plugin Executor) addon is handy - it lets you run Nagios plugins on a remote machine.  But I wanted it to allow me a little more flexibility. So, I added a couple of tweaks to it that would let me avoid going through the shell on the remote side and allowed more flexibility in the arguments passed to plugins.

Testing SMTP Server Authentication

Posted Mon, 10/27/2008 - 05:45 by jsellens

I recently set up a new mail server, and I wanted to make sure that SMTP authentication was working as I expected. The msmtp command (from http://msmtp.sourceforge.net/) turned out to be just what I needed.

msmtp is an SMTP client that can use by as an "SMTP plugin" for mutt or other Mail User Agents (MUAs), and it supports authenticated SMTP with various methods (PLAIN, LOGIN and CRAM-MD5) and TLS encrypted connections, and can be configured on the command line or with configuration files.

Welcome to my blog

Posted Wed, 10/22/2008 - 05:55 by jsellens

I plan to blog on various technical topics that I hope will be helpful to others.