Category: Virtual Data Center


Nagios, SMS and Cell Phones

Filed Under: Home Network, Technology, Virtual Data Center by breandan — Comments Off
6/25/2011

Consumer-grade cell phones suck. Especially the free ones that come with your plan, effectively subsidized by the obnoxious rates carriers charge for voice, data and SMS traffic. We’ve been having problems with our Nokia 6350s (at work) that we use for automated Nagios alerts over SMS – the phone locks up or powers off, and the only fix is to drive to the data center and manually reset the phone. Fun.

Recently, another group at work let us borrow a pair of seriously cool MultiModem® GPRS Wireless Modems – in essence, serious grade “cell phones” that talk to the computer over a serial port. They don’t have the ability to do sound, which limits usefulness as a phone, but they are full on AT command set serial modems that can send SMSs. They act as a drop in replacement for gnokii and gnokii-smsd, which we use for automated Nagios alerts, and they can be reset from the command line. We may even be able to use them to replace the analog phone lines we use for our alphanumeric pagers, which would save us a couple grand a year in phone line costs.

I’ll keep posting here with comments and updates.

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Mea Culpa

Filed Under: Development, Technology, Virtual Data Center by breandan — Comments Off
4/7/2011

This will teach me to type config files from memory: don’t set the device in the qpage.cf file to /dev/ttyS3. Instead, create a symlink to /dev/ttyS2 called /dev/modem. Like so:


#### Modems ####
modem=modem_name
 device=/dev/modem
 initcmd=AT&D0&W
 dialcmd=ATM0DT

I’ve already fixed the initial post, but qpage insists on the name being /dev/modem – likely due to the fact that it’s really old code. I’ve not got the time or the interest to hunt about in the source and try to fix it.

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OpenSolaris 2010.03

Filed Under: Home Network, Technology, Virtual Data Center by breandan — Comments Off
3/30/2010

I’m looking forward to the release of OpenSolaris 2010.03. Among other reasons – a stable dedup engine, a simpler automated installer process, and most importantly for me, built in drivers for the dual gigabit NICs on my fileserver’s motherboard. This means I can either leave the Intel NIC in place, and have three dladm aware NICs, or move one over to my development box, Thor, which is currently running on 10/100.

I really hope Oracle doesn’t decide to kill off the OpenSolaris project. It’s doing me wonders. But with recent moves they have been making, I’m not so sure.

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skipfish

Filed Under: Home Network, Technology, Virtual Data Center by breandan — Comments Off
3/28/2010

Here’s another tool to add in, along side nikto and nmap – skipfish, an internal Google tool, hosted on Google Code. It’s written entirely in C++, and compiles cleanly on Snow Leopard (after libdin-1.18, which also installs cleanly).

Running the full tests against my Nagios VM took about an hour – and pushed about 4GB of data over the network to the VM. The report is comprehensive, and found two places where I’d forgot to validate my inputs for SQL inserts – which would allow for SQL injection attacks. This is very handy, and I’m going to keep it in my arsenal of security tools.

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The Nagios Project

Filed Under: Development, Home Network, Technology, Virtual Data Center by breandan — Comments Off
3/4/2010

I’ve been working on a massive home project recently – writing an Ajax frontend to Nagios and NDOUtils. This similar to groundworks, zenoss and op5, but I have specific needs to address, and a lot of what I learn in doing this can be used for my work projects. The important part of this is getting a handle on AJAX – it’s been all the rage for the last few years, but I avoided it because javascript implementations differs between browsers, and it wasn’t worth the hassle for what I needed to get done.

However, I’ve stumbled across jQuery – a mature, lightweight AJAX javascript library designed for cross-browser compatibility. I’m also working to achieve graceful degradation – so if a user doesn’t have javascript enabled, or their browser only understands a subset of the javascript calls, they still get full access the tools I write.

So, all of this lives in a subversion tree, and I’m madly hacking away on it. Once I get a stable, clean demo that validates user input, I may well post a link to it.

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