An article or five
February 18th, 2009Haven’t had a chance to get blogolicious in a while (understatement), so here are my last 5 login articles (like you care):
June 2008: Admin, Root Thyself — An attempt to use SystemTap (like dtrace in Linux) to capture security-relevant changes to the file system. The file system integrity problem is one that has plagued me for years. There just isn’t a simple bullet-proof way to find out who changed what files and when in modern operating systems and that is a fact I find really annoying. I’ve recently become aware of Dazuko, which promises to be a safer and more elegant solution. Fodder for a future article possibly.
August 2008: Hold the Pixles — One too many instances of watching otherwise brilliant admin re-invent RRDTool because they thought it was a graphing tool prompted this article on the finer points of using Round Robin Databases… AS DATABASES.
October 2008: YOU Should write an NEB Module! — My wordpress database lacks the space to hold the adverbs I would need to describe how tired I am of OPP (other peoples perl) in the context of Nagios add-ons. A new metric prefix may need to be created to describe the heaping mounds of poorly-written, obfuscated, drivel that is to be found on NagiosExchange. Not perhaps since the crusades have so many worked so diligently to screw up the lives of others from an earnest desire to help. This article was written in the sincere hope that some small percentage of NagiosExchange posters would notice that those wily German hackers who gave us Nagios also gave us a means to extend it, and that means is the Nagios Event Broker. Those who accidentally read further may even learn the basics of its use.
December 2008: YOU should write an NEB module revisited — A follow up to the article above where I update my nagfs module to support Nagios 3.0 and fill in some blanks.
February 2009: Message in a Bottle — The current issue as I write this features an entertaining rant about the current state of email follwed by very specific information about replacing the email notifications of your Nagios box with SMS-based ones in the hope that you may actually recieve them. I even add asterisk voice alerts as a backup, it’s actually a pretty cool article you should read it (who knew?). I feel pretty strongly that the email admins of the world have shot themselves in the foot with their war against spam, and as you may have noticed, I rarely miss an opportunity to wag my finger at them (us) for it. I don’t do this because I’m angry inside, nor do I do it because I think they can be convinced to abandon their decade-long suicidal lost cause; I do it just in case there are a few admins in the next generation with a clue who might be convinced that the robustness principle isn’t a silly old 1950’s engineering fallacy.
Anyway there you go.