Advogato blog for apgarcia

16 Oct 2007

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 03:42:16 GMT

i always loved my little libretto ct70. it has a 120 mhz pentium, 32 mb of ram, and a 640x480 24bpp display. don't laugh!

it's a great toy, but i must have suffered three or four hard drive crashes. i think i found a solution. this company makes some cool stuff, among which are compactflash and sd adapters for ide drives, both 2.5" and 3.5". they're fairly cheap. i got a 2.5" one for like $20.

tonight i installed debian 2.2r7 on it. so far so good! this thing is like a swiss army knife with its pcmcia cards: 802.11b, 10mbps ethernet, even a scsi adapter. plus the standard serial and parallel ports (i've actually used plip on this thing in the past). it makes great quickie ssh client or serial console, and it's just an all around fun toy! and i don't take for granted the pentium's mmu, running real, albeit old, linux.

it doesn't take much to make me happy. :-)

5 Oct 2007

Fri, 5 Oct 2007 22:36:14 GMT

This is really cool: Robert Nordier has made an x86 port of unix v7. (yes, the original runs in simh, but this is still super awesome.)

2 Oct 2007

Tue, 2 Oct 2007 00:12:41 GMT

i've been looking at some floss network monitoring systems lately. here are some quick notes.

Criteria (not necessarily in this order)

LDAP authentication
Web interface / User friendliness / Operator retraining
Distributed monitoring
Redundancy
Documentation
Community support, mailing lists
Flexibility -- how easy is it to create custom monitors?
LDAP integration? (computer groups, contacts)

Software

OpenNMS
Zabbix
Zenoss
Nagios/GroundWork

1. OpenNMS

OpenNMS aims to be 100% Java, uses Tomcat, GWT, AJAX, XML, PostgreSQL, intends to implement SOA

cons:

complex, error-prone installation -- could not get to work on RHEL5; downgraded to RHEL4.
not configurable through web interface
xml config files are really more complex than they need to be
possibly unstable? coworker was able to generate an exception after playing w/ it for 5 minutes
custom plugins are relatively difficult to write, and they discourage using any language besides java.
documentation is rather poor: not well written, and had to gather info from different parts of web site and wiki

pros:

good use of SNMP
can use nagios plugins with nrpe monitor

2. Zenoss

Zenoss is written in python, using the zope framework and MySQL

cons:

can distribute collection agents, but does not support distributed servers in the same way Zabbix does
I am not really familiar with python or zope

pros:

very easy to install using rpm. also can check for its own updates online.
everything configurable through web interface
excellent use of SNMP and WMI; no need to install separate agent on linux or windows
can make use of nagios plugins, and custom plugins are easy to write in any language
clean, object oriented design
ui is pretty!

3. Zabbix

Zabbix has a PHP front end, can use MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or SQLite

cons:

not hard to install, but have to compile it yourself
has its own agent that must be compiled for each type of host to be monitored (RHEL4-5, Solaris 8-10, Windows) -- maintenance nightmare

pros:

does distributed monitoring
most things configurable through web interface
nice looking ui

4. GroundWork -- haven't tried yet, but based on nagios, which I have used...

cons:

seems somewhat naive, like snmp was an afterthought rather than a central part of the design from the start?
vanilla nagios ui is kind of ugly. maybe GroundWork is better.

pros:

decent oo design (again referring to system abstractions rather than code)

1 Jan 2002

Tue, 1 Jan 2002 04:25:05 GMT

20 Nov 2001

Tue, 20 Nov 2001 14:13:58 GMT

6 Nov 2001

Tue, 6 Nov 2001 15:34:46 GMT

25 Oct 2001

Thu, 25 Oct 2001 14:42:21 GMT

14 Sep 2001

Fri, 14 Sep 2001 01:59:35 GMT

11 Sep 2001

Tue, 11 Sep 2001 17:37:26 GMT

10 Sep 2001

Mon, 10 Sep 2001 03:16:43 GMT

As the UNIX system has spread, the fraction of its users who are skilled in its application has decreased. Time and again, we have seen experienced users, ourselves included, find only clumsy solutions to aproblem, or write programs to do jobs that existing tools handle easily.
-Kernighan/Pike, 1984

There are many people who use UNIX or Linux who IMHO do not understand UNIX. UNIX is not just an operating system, it is a way of doing things, and the shell plays a key role by providing the glue that makes it work. The UNIX methodology relies heavily on reuse of a set of tools rather than on building monolithic applications. Even perl programmers often miss the point, writing the heart and soul of the application as perl script without making use of the UNIX toolkit.
-David Korn, 2001