Tuesday 12 August 2008

Backing up MySQL with daily snapshots and Bacula

I have decided that from time to time I will be putting here some scrips I find useful. As most sysadmins I am lazy and proud of it - that is exactly what makes me write more and more useful scripts. Following some slightly twisted logic if you are lazy sysadmin as well, you might find those useful (as well). Some code may and will be trivial, but still useful - that is the goal!

Today nothing fancy - just (another) database snapshot script that uses mysqldump to do the job and Bacula to get the daily backups automated.

Monday 7 July 2008

Tuning Nagios for running off CF Card

As a follow up to my previous post I've run my Nagios installation on Soekris net4801 implementing the advice I've given you in my last post (focusing on slow I/O when writing to CF Card), describing the platform and what can be done with it. The changes in system behavior are huge - in a positive way of course.

First of all the system is not so overloaded now and I guess I could double the amount of tests run on this platform without getting into trouble like before. At the moment this system is monitoring 36 machines with 86 services in total. Some time ago I had to stop adding and literally remove some less important tests, because most of the time I was getting false positives - usually warnings, with comment that the plugin has timed out. So how big is the difference?

Monday 30 June 2008

Soekris net4801 as Nagios powered network monitor

Some time ago (rather long long time ago) we have decided to purchase some small device to turn it into very portable server, that we could send to one of our friends to host. The whole purpose was to get Nagios on it and to monitor our sites from outside of our networks. To some people it may sound crazy, but it makes kind of sense - how many times you have heard from someone "it works on my computer"? Too many times?

The goal is to know when my (and possibly why) visitors/customers can't reach my servers and to be able to diagnose if that is local to some location or network part or it affects wider audience. Up to some point remote sensor answers that question - at least from a perspective of his particular location.

After looking around the net we've decided to get one of those famous Soekris kits.


Was it a good choice as a hardware platform? How will it scale when the amount of monitored systems will reach certain level? Let's see where it got us so far as the system is live for about a year now.

Tuesday 18 March 2008

Migration finished

For quite a long time I was investigating different blogging platforms and finally I've made my choice - move away from WordPress to Movable Type. My requirements were rather simple - host entries, be able to publish code snippets, maybe some photos from time to time... I prefer static HTML instead of tons of PHP scripts running to display any single page. I don't expect being 'slashdotted' :-) I just want to keep it simple (K.I.S.S.).