At op5 we often run into BizTalk at customer sites as a business critical application. We have done an investigation and come up with a plugin to monitor BizTalk.
To fully understand this document BizTalk knowledge is necessary.
My laptop and cellular phone has both Bluetooth and it has annoyed me for a while that I have not managed to get a working Internet connection using Bluetooth. I have only managed to get it working with a USB cable between my phone and laptop.
After some Google search and reading of man pages I finally get it working.
After fiddeling with my Bluetooth GPS reciever I wanted my friends and my wife to keep track of me. I wanted to use OpenStreetMap because I really like the idea of free and open maps instead of the unintelligible Google Maps licenses. The result can be seen here where I show the op5 office location outside Stockholm, Sweden.
In my setup I have the GPS reciever attached to my laptop which I travel around with. On my webserver I have gpsd-client and a script that generates the webpage. I use a VPN connection to allow my webserver to communicate with the laptop gpsdaemon. On the roads I use 3G attached cellphone and when I have an internet connection via cable or wifi I use that.
Every computer geek ends up with a bunch of disks with unknown status in the drawer. It can be rather cumbersome to put them in a machine and check the status especially if some are SATA and others are PATA, it gets even more complicated if they are mixed 3.5" and 2.5".
In situations like this I recommend a USB SATA/PATA interface i.e. Plexgear at Kjell&Company, the adapter looks like it is OEM:ed so there probably several with different brands.
Features:
The only thing I miss is that it does not contain a SCSI interface aswell 
I have used it to backup files on a LVM disk, transfer files from old disk to a new when upgrading, reinitialize a disk that refused to install Windows 7, attach a DVD-Rom to a blade server and so on.
In my opinion every geek and sysadmin should have one.
I have owned a PSP for several years. It is a fabulous machine with real impressive hardware and possibilities. The big problem is that Sony tries to look in the owners so the potential of the hardware is not there. There has been way around that by installing cracked firmware. The main obstacle has been the boundaries around video. It has not been possible to look at full resolution videos without running third part software which requires a cracked firmware, i.e. using http://jonny.leffe.dnsalias.com/
Now I have upgraded my PSP to firmware 5.50 GEN-D and finally I can drop movies into the /VIDEO folder and look at them in full resolution. So finally I can look at mythtv recordings on my way to the work or my kids can look at movies in the back of the car when we are travelling. Now it time to buy a second PSP.
Converting movies into a PSP accepted format is rather painful. I have not find any good solution running on linux. I have fiddled several hours with handbrake, avidemux, commandline driven ffmepg and PSPVC. The only program that makes the converting somewhat painless, just time consuming, is PSPVC on windows. The main problem on linux seems to be that ffmpeg is broken and need to be recompiled.
My recommendation to Sony is to open up their excellent solutions. Right of my mind I know four failures Sony have made because of their vendor look in strategy:
So Sony if you want to get richer, open up!
After the problems I have had with Bredband2, I want to test Phonzo.se as a new VoIP provider.
I registered on their homepage and after a couple of days I got a snail mail with my credentials.
I configured my FreePBX and calling in worked directly, but not outgoing. After 2 hours of troubleshooting I started to google "phonzo asterisk" and found several people that has the same experience. The reason is that Phonzo does not accepted "Asterisk PBX" as useragent and that is default in Asterisk.
After changing sip.conf
[general] ... useragent=it-slav PBX ....
It worked!
I have used Digisip as SIP VoIP provider for several years. It has been working very well until Skycom bought Bredband2 and Digisip. After that it has been very problematic:
Without any information my Asterisk could not register anymore. After discussion with Bredband2 support they activated my account again after a week. According to Bredband2 this was not a disturbance in their service, it was regular maintenance. It is a policy to only compensate service problems.
The webpage http://www.digisip.se, redirect to this page in swedish. It claims that service is much better when Bredband2 and Digisip has joined and refer to the support if you want to know account balance and so on, during the period until everything is working again. This page has been there for several months.
I have asked several times to get my money back and end my account. But Bredband2 refuse and claims that the lack of availability is regular maintenance.
I have finished reading the great book "FreePBX 2.5 Powerful Telephony Solutions", by Alex Robar and it is 277 pages.
I was reading the Swedish computer magazine, Tech World. There was an article about an appliance solution that could give a report about unused switch ports. The box PortIQ from Infoblox costs approximatly 10.000 Euro.
op5 has developed this feature at a customer site and is included with op5 Monitor, op5 has published the code as opensource.
This guide will describe howto get it running in op5 Monitor. op5 Monitor is vanilla Nagios with some addons so it should be no problem to follow this guide in a Nagios environment
My old cell phone had stopped working so I needed a new.
The demands I have on the new phone is nothing strange.
Must:
I have read the excellent book Asterisk 1.6, Build feature-rich telephony systems with Asterisk by David Merel, Barrie Dempster and David Gomillion.
The book is inteended to anyone interested in bulding a telephony system using Asterisk and are 224 pages. The book claims that no preknowledge about opensource, Linux and Asterisk is required. I think it is a little bit hard to start without any of these knowledge. I would recommend to have basic Linux/Unix knowledge to be able to go through the installation part.
It starts from the begining with introduction to Asterisk, brief telephony system introduction, installing Asterisk,configure Asterisk, creating dialplans. It continues with call logging, different pre-made Asterisk alternatives like trixbox/FreePBX, asterCRM and Case studies and ends with some hints that makes the life of an Asterisk admin easier.
I relly liked the book. When starting with no Asterisk knowledge the number of config files and parameter is overvelming and this book help the reader to penetrate that. The book walk through basic configuration and help to get your a Asterisk installation up and running. I like that it gives an overview of different things to consider when to start an Asterisk implementation and builds up a basic knowledge about the subject.
I appreciate the case studies where three different scenarios are described: Small office/home office, Small business and a hosted PBX.
The drawback of the book is that it just gives an introduction to the different topics. I would like to have a little bit deeper knowledge in some of the topics, for an example dialplans.
I would recommend the book to newbies to Asterisk, the book will help them to get started and boost their knowledge. It is possible to gain all the knowledge in the book by visiting different Asterisk forums, read documentation and so on but that will take much effort compared to read the book.
This article will describe how easy it is to integrate other tools to Nagios or op5 Monitor. I will use an example with a webshop where a business view of how the webshop is doing is implemented by using a GPL’d rule engine, NodeBrain. I have in an earlier article described the ruleset for this implementation but now I will show how the integration can be done.
The scenario is a webshop with:
Management want to monitor how the webshop is doing. They do not want to know if a redundant part is down instead management want to have the overview of the webshop status. Read the rest of this entry »
Many people have received their 4.6 CDs in the mail by now, and we
really don't want them to be without the full package repository.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
- OpenBSD 4.6 RELEASED -------------------------------------------------
Oct 18, 2009.
We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 4.6.
This is our 26th release on CD-ROM (and 27th via FTP). We remain
proud of OpenBSD's record of more than ten years with only two remote
holes in the default install.
As in our previous releases, 4.6 provides significant improvements,
including new features, in nearly all areas of the system:
- New/extended platforms:
o mvme88k
o MVME141 and MVME165 boards are now supported.
o sgi
o SGI Octane, SGI Origin 200 and SGI Fuel systems are now supported.
o Several bugs in interrupt handling have been fixed, resulting
in significantly improved system response.
o sparc
o The bootblock load address has been moved so that larger kernels
can be loaded.
o sparc64
o Acceleration support has been added for many of the PCI frame buffer
drivers, such as the Sun PGX, PGX64 and XVR-100, and Tech Source
Raptor GFX graphics cards.
Read the rest of this entry »
An interesting article in Washington Post describe how to increase the IT security, the answer is simple:
Do not use windows
This is knowledge that is well known to most people in the IT industry, the interesting part is that this knowledge is now being transfered to common people and an article in Washington Post reflect this.
Another part is that a whole industry is built up around securing windows environment. This is mostly done by adding more and more complex infrastructure components that makes the problem even worse.
A simple comparison could be done:
If you are in pain because of a broken leg. Is the solution to eat painkillers or to go to the doctor and get a plaster bandage? Painkillers are easy to apply, just swallow them. The plaster is uncomfortable and makes it hard to do what you want. The short term solution is painkiller, the long term solution is fix the root cause of the problem, fix the broken leg.
Continue using windows for business critical solutions and protect it with "patch tuesday", antivirus, rootkit scanners and so on. That is eating painkillers. Remove the vendor lock-in software, that is the long term solution.
A good example of that it is possible to write secure software is OpenBSD where the approach to software development is focusing on security and as they claim on thier homepage "Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!".
When I worked as a Tivoli Consultant I spend a lot of time investigating the customer processes and workflow and try to make the monitoring solution to support this. It was often long term projects and involved alot of people like, project managers, support staff, maintenance staff, application owners, applicataion engineers, operating systemens managers, DBAs and so on.
Very often the investigation followed the following principles:
When it comes to a product like Nagios or op5 Monitor, the product has a built in rule engine that fullfills most of the requirements in the steps above. In most cases it is just a matter of configuration and in some cases some extra scripting.
https://bugs.op5.com/ is now also open for external users to sign up. By signing up you can post bug and feature requests, post bug-notes etc. Before doing so, please check out the "How to Submit Bug/Feature" documentation available from within the bug tracker. Note: op5 opensource projects Merlin, Ninja and Nacoma are for now available as categories on Project: op5 Monitor, it's simply to make it easy for us to show a product roadmap/changelog although it might be a bit "unlogical" for people using only Merlin.
In RedHat, CentOs and Suse and probaly other Linux distributions, the way of enabling and disabling a service at reboot is by using chkconfig. In ubuntu, the way of turning on and off a services at boot is by using update-rc.d. It changes the links for the init scripts.
To start a script in the default run levels:
sudo update-rc.d appname defaults
To remove a script from all runlevels:
sudo update-rc.d appname remove
I have read the book "Cacti 0.8 Network Monitoring, Monitor your network with ease!" by Dinangkur Kundu and S.M.Ibrahim Lavlu. The book is 116 pages.
According to the book the target audience for this book is for anyone who wants to manage a network using Cacti. To read the book you do not need to be a Linux Guru. And I agree, even if it probably helps if you have basic knowledge of Linux/UNIX, RRD, MySQL and SNMP.
Many of the OpenSource software projects out there is excellent but usually require a rather skilled person or a very interested person with alot of time to start working. Downloading the software and start reading the manual that comes with the software is often quite hard and a book like this narrow that gap and make a complex software like Cacti easier to use.
op5 AB is a world leading OSM – Open Source Management – company that delivers software based on open source for control of IT systems and networks. The award winning op5 Monitor is now released with important enhancements that will enable customers and other vendors to further improve usability and integration for optimized IT monitoring.
op5 Monitor is based on Nagios*, the industry standard for enterprise-class IT infrastructure monitoring. Until now, op5 Monitor has had to rely on the basics of standard Nagios Graphical User Interface (GUI) for presentation and overall user experience. With the release of op5 Monitor 4.2 we include a fully functional preview of a brand new GUI, now based on the Ninja Open Source project. The new GUI is based on a modern PHP architecture and is now shipped for real operation testing. Read the rest of this entry »
op5 Announces Global Partner TruePath Technologies, Inc. For U.S. Markets FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -August 5, 2009-Swedish OS Management IT monitoring software developer, op5, announced today their partnership alliance with American company TruePath Technologies, Inc. - one of the premier monitoring service companies in the United States. Read the rest of this entry »
Next week, op5 will release the new Nagios GUI called Ninja. The license is GPL and several people has reported the GUI work perfectly well on vanilla Nagios. Ninja uses a database backend. Merlin, another op5 developed software feeds the Nagios information into the database.
Links:
Some screenshoots below:
Geomap, based on google maps
In a contest Nagios won as the best system monitoring tool:
http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/09/top-5-best-network-monitoring-tools/
At 4.30 CET I lost my internet connection and 9.30 CET it was back. After that it was flapping up and down for a couple of hours. My ISP is Bredbandsbolaget and I continusly looked at their so called maintenance site. Not a word about the disturbance. It really annoys me that there was no information what so ever, I tried to call them and gave up after 20 minutes of "thanks for your patience" in my ear. I tried to send an email and got an automated answer saying that they will come back to me in a couple of days. Yes days!!
I know for sure that the problems was not on my side, because a friends friend that lives in the same area had the same problem.
This graph shows the packet lost when pinging the closest router:
I noticed that my blog become slower and slower by using op5 Monitor and webinject, see previous article. From installation 2.5 seconds to over 7.5 seconds to run my testcases. The most annoying was that the it was a very linear increase see graphs below. My first try was to tune MySQL
By installing wp-cache the testcase went down to 0.4 seconds.
The drawback is that my counter widget is getting updated every hour instead of every reload of the webpage.
Take a peak at some nice graphs showing that I stopped the increasing loading time and got a speedup from 7.5 seconds to 0.4 seconds:
Op5 has written an excellent article howto monitor Esx3.x, ESXi, vSphere 4 and vCenter Server with op5 Monitor. This article is op5 Monitor centric but op5 Monitor is based on Nagios so this article can be used to implement Nagios vmware monitoring.
The plugin used to gather the information is GPLd and developed by op5.
