http://archangel.thenibble.org Random grumblings from the Archangle Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:04:57 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en In an earlier post , I mentioned Nagios as a system monitoring tool. It's simple, it's flexible, and out of the box, you can monitor network services without any software installed on the monitored systems. Now if you want to monitor other aspects of a system, like it's disk usage, ... http://archangel.thenibble.org/2010/02/nagios-agents-nrpe/ The nice thing about programs like Firefox and Thunderbird is that you can get a lot of community-created plugins to make the program look and do what you want. The downside of programs like Firefox and Thunderbird, is there is (at least for me) a few plugins that have ... http://archangel.thenibble.org/2010/01/essential-application-plugins/ Battery backup at home went off today BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP! Everything shuts itself down and I go to reboot the UPS when *sniff* *sniff* ah yes, the distinctive smell of burned electronics. So that's it finally. Adios APC BackUPS 350. You will torture us no more ... http://archangel.thenibble.org/2009/12/fire-bad/ Nagios is a network monitoring application which itself provides no actual monitoring but rather specializes in scheduling checks and notifications. As a module framework, it works very well and there are a lot of monitoring plugins and all told, there aren't many (or any) systems that really compare, F/OSS, ... http://archangel.thenibble.org/2009/11/nagios-rules-all/ LiveUSB Creator, it's a wonderful thing. Connect a USB key, get the LiveUSB Creator on your PC (Windows or "Linux"), point it either to a local .iso file for a Fedora live CD or let it download the version you want for you, click go, and shazzam! (yes, ... http://archangel.thenibble.org/2009/10/fedora-bootable-usb/ For anyone who's had to cleanup some mail problems with Postfix configuration (or more often with other things, like anti-spam, tied in but not part of postfix), it may be common enough that a large spool of mail gets queued up and needs to be pushed out. The easy ... http://archangel.thenibble.org/2009/09/processing-deferred-messages-in-postfix/ Back in the olden days, like a year or two ago, Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) was a fancy feature that allows users to mount file systems. Using FUSE means that you can create a file system driven by an application rather than a driver (e.g. a kernel module). ... http://archangel.thenibble.org/2009/09/lets-fuse-him-with-this-juice/ I've had some problems in the somewhat recent past where my UPS goes into panic mode and because the battery was old / crappy, this made things "very bad". I've had no issues since replacing the battery, but now I'm getting a picture of why it was so awful ... http://archangel.thenibble.org/2009/09/crappy-power/ I often need short random numbers at work. For example, if I'm scheduling a whole bunch of servers to do the same automated tasks and I want them to not run at exactly the same time, I'll use a random number between 1 and 60 to have them run ... http://archangel.thenibble.org/2009/08/rolling-dice-in-bash/ I've been running Fedora 11 (x64) on my workstation at work and running Windows XP (32b) in a VMware virtual machine. It was a VM I'd created with server so all I needed to run it was the free VMware Player. First, installing VMware Player was a bit ... http://archangel.thenibble.org/2009/07/vmware-and-unity/