After waiting for several weeks, my new phone, a HTC Desire has finally arrived. I have been a heavy cellphone user since started working as a Tivoli consultant in -98. I bought my first cellphone -94 and have had several so called smart phones both from Nokia and Ericsson. For the first time I [...]
Background I bought a Fonera 2.0g WLAN router and I wanted to extend the functionality to have the possibility to add packages from OpenWRT. I also wanted the possibility to manage my new router with ssh. The way to achive this is by installing developer firmware.
When using a cool router software like OpenWRT it is a good idea to monitor the network usage. This article describe howto get SNMP on your OpenWRT based router.
Background I got an unused La Fonera router by a collegue. They can be bought from http://www.fon.com for approximately 40 Euro including freight. The purpose of the Fon community is to build a community of hotspots around the world so every owner of a La Fonera could use any other La Fonera router in the [...]
Background It is always a good idea to monitor the server hardware, in many cases the root cause of the probblem is hardware related like: a fan stops and the temperature gets to high, dust in the machine makes it to hot, disks that fails, memory corruption and so on. This article will describe [...]
The release of the next generation Open Source Network Monitoring Software is only weeks away with the release of op5 Monitor 5. Here you can download a Beta version of the sofware intended for testing och evaluation or try it at a live demo. op5 Monitor Beta, virtual image in ovf format Try op5 Monitor [...]
I have an old iPod G3 player that I haven’t used for several years. The main reason is that it is full of Apple vendor lock-in "features". The most annoying issues are: Hard to manage without iTunes iTunes is crap Cannot play ogg and flac I just want to attach it and it should popup like [...]
I have read the book Asterisk now by Nir Simionovich, published in March 2008. The book was a big disappointment, the reason is that the book do not cover the software used in AsteriskNOW today. The book cover the Asterisk GUI but AsteriskNOW is using FreePBX instead which is totally different. One main reason to use AsteriskNow [...]
An email sent to op5-users from op5s CTO, Peter Östlin. –cut– Hi All, The op5 devel team has been kind of quiet on the list lately. The reason for this is that we have been working very hard to complete the next release of Merlin and Ninja. The result of this will be the release [...]
Background I was with my geekfriends at a ski resort and I managed to get an Internet connection using a cellphone. Of course I wanted to share it with my friends. As geeks we brought a switch and a couple of ethernetcables. Solution Using this script on a Ubuntu 9.10 I managed to share my connection: sudo [...]
Background 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.
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I have finished reading the great book "FreePBX 2.5 Powerful Telephony Solutions", by Alex Robar and it is 277 pages.
Background 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 [...]
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 [...]
Background 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Background 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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: op5 -OpenSource based management software company Ninja- Nagios [...]
