There are a lot of people who say, “if it isn’t monitored, then it isn’t a service.” The problem is that I don’t think enough people outside of the systems world believe that or even understand why its said. I think the primary offenders here are developers. It isn’t because they don’t know better, but typically developers just want to get the application up and running and then move on to developing the next thing. I also think there is some fault on the side of the administrators and the managers not insisting that part of the completed version of a project includes monitoring. But I don’t want to harp on this as much as I would like to show just how easy it is to compensate here by taking advantage of Nagios::Plugin.
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Erics Tech Blog Thoughts, musings, and other idealistic (sometimes useful) systems and development hoopla.
Monitoring Services with Nagios::Plugin
7 Apr 2010 — ericCluster SSH with cSSHx
29 Mar 2010 — ericI am in the middle of building out a group of about 25 machines in a data center for my company. I hadn’t really dove into it on a micro level until a few days ago. I was moving around on individual machines that others were working on. When I had gotten to one of the “untouched” machines, I found that vim wasn’t installed. There was about 15 machines that were “untouched” and therefore were missing vim (along with other stuff). And seriously who wants to install a bunch of the same software on every machine after they’ve already been kickstarted?
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Git Branch Name in Your Bash Prompt
11 Dec 2009 — ericI work with a few repositories at any given time. And during that time, I typically have multiple branches created for each repository. I figured that it would make my life easier if I knew which branch and/or repository I was working in. Luckily, very little hackery is required here since the git distribution already comes with such a tool. (Note: If you didn’t build Git from source, then you may not have this file.)
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Creating a Slave DNS Server on Bind9
29 Nov 2009 — ericI couldn’t find a quick and dirty list of commands for setting up a slave DNS server so I figured I would just throw it together.
Starting with a fully working primary name server, we are going to set up a slave name server. We are going to make the following assumptions:
primary – 1.2.3.4
slave – 4.5.6.7
* We want to have the domain example.com have a slave name server
On the primary (or master) name server, add the following lines to the options section.
allow-transfer { 4.5.6.7; };
notify yes;
};
Ensure that you update the serial number in the SOA on the master. Then run:
On the slave name server, add the following entry to the named.conf file (or whichever file houses your zone entries). Ensure that the path leading up to the zone file exists and that bind has write access to that directory.
Then once you made the changes to the slave, you will need to reload the configuration. Do this the same way you did on the master:
If you watch your DNS log, you should see the transfer happen as soon as you restart both named servers.
