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.