SysAdmin

Using an SMS Server to Provide a Robust Alerting Service for Nagios

I’m a big fan of the Nagios network monitoring system and rely on it to tell me if something goes wrong with the systems for which I am responsible. I have made a large investment in time configuring Nagios to monitor exactly what I am interested in, and this effort would be wasted if Nagios detected a problem, but failed to communicate that problem to me.

Recovering from a Hard Drive Failure

Have you ever woke up in the morning and said to yourself, “today is the day that I'm finally going to backup my workstation!” only to find out that you're a day late and about 320Gb short? Well, that's about what happened to me recently, but don't worry, the story has a happy ending. I'm getting ahead of myself though.

Know when your drives are failing, with smartd

“Ka-chunk... ka-chunk... ka-chunk... tick... tick... tick... Ka-chunk... ka-chunk...” That's just not a sound you ever want to hear coming from a hard drive. It's the sound of a hard drive trying to move it's read/write heads into a position that they don't seem to want to go to or its trying to read a sector that just isn't there anymore.

The Green Penguin: Your Ideas on Heat Recycling

Recently I asked you for ideas on creative recycling of waste server heat. The inspiration came from a University of Notre Dame project that warms a botanical garden with waste heat. This edition of The Green Penguin covers your own creative ideas. This idea came from Lorenz in Germany:

Custom checks and notifications for Nagios

A while back, I wrote an article for Linux Journal's web edition entitled “Howto be a good (and lazy) System Administrator.” A couple astute readers, after reading the article, asked if I was familiar with the Nagios monitoring system, and I am. I've been using Nagios for a few years now.

Creating chroot sftp Jails with Jailkit

One of the things I both love and hate about my job is getting assigned new projects. They can be about anything and everything. A few months back I was given an assignment to create some chroot jails for a group of customers so that they could securely upload files with sftp. The requirement was that the customers needed to be able to upload file, but in a secure and private way.

How to be a good (and lazy) System Administrator

If you're anything like the average System Administrator, you are understaffed, underfunded, and overworked. By now, you've also gotten used to the idea that no one knows you exist until the mail server goes down, then you're suddenly on America's Most Wanted. In this article, I'm also assuming that you have many servers that you are responsible for. I'm also assuming

Wireshark 1.0

Its not breaking news, since it happened in March, but Wireshark 1.0 has been released. The news, for me at least, was that Wireshark even existed, never heard of it before. Somebody mentioned it recently when we were trying to diagnose a networking problem.

Make Your Scripts User Friendly with Zenity

The first time I played with Zenity, I recognized several potential uses for it. While I'm pretty comfortable with interacting with computers with a command line interface, I know many people are not. Zenity creates GUI widgets from a simple command line and can be used from any shell script.