We’ve blogged in the past about Nagios, the open source monitoring software. Another great open source alternative is Cacti. Both Nagios and Cacti do a great job of graphing system resources.
Like Nagios, Cacti is capable of monitoring your servers, as well as processor, memory, network, and disk utilization on your networking devices. After initial installation, adding hosts to be monitored can be completed using nothing but the web interface.
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Network World is reporting that 2010 will be the year of Open Source. According to the article, half of the organizations surveyed are using Open Source Software in some capacity already, and the vast majority (71% in the US) said they are planning to greatly increase their use of OSS in the coming year.
More interestingly, perhaps, many of the participants in the survey reported that they are switching to OSS for non-financial reasons such as:
I know you’ve all been waiting with bated breath for this day: UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook, 4th edition, is finally out! More than two years in the making, this edition covers six major operating systems in 1300 pages of fresh deliciousness. Plenty of new topics, including virtualization, green IT, scripting, and modern storage and security. Copies available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or from Pearson Education.
Writing a book of this magnitude is an intense process that I learned all about. The steps to produce the book, from inception to dead trees, include:
One of the biggest challenges in producing this edition was the distributed collaboration effort. We Skyped regularly to stay in sync. Evi was around for much of the development, but we also corresponded with her while she was sailing in the Caribbean and the Pacific. We used a subversion repository for the Adobe FrameMaker source files to avoid stomping on each other’s work. I’d say this was met with mixed success; Frame’s binary files are hard to merge, despite Garth’s valiant efforts at a scripted solution.
Special thanks to our named and unnamed contributors whose efforts are highly appreciated and certainly worthy of recognition. This is the best edition yet!
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The latest version of The Barking Seal is here , and it is filled with a variety of applicable and accessible treats. Want some? Keep reading for a taste…
Goodie #1: Learn why version control is important for all businesses across the board.
Goodie #2: Get some assistance in deciding “Git or Subversion? Git or Subversion? Git…?”
Goodie #3 (otherwise known as the cherry on top): Meet Jim Turpin, one of our fabulous network engineers, who embodies the concept of multi-discipline to a T both inside and outside of the office.
Click here to read Q3 2010, and, as always, enjoy the treat!
We’d love to hear from you, so please post your comments and questions here.
The fine folks at Twitter Engineering recently posted about the performance issues they have had over the holiday weekend. Since Saturday, the site has been slow for users and API calls. While AppliedTrust hasn’t (yet) made the leap to Twitter, we recognize how important it is for delivering World Cup news. I give Twitter Engineering tons of credit for being so transparent about the details of the problem – they say:
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In brief, we made three mistakes:
* We put two critical, fast-growing, high-bandwith components on the same segment of our internal network.
* Our internal network wasn’t appropriately being monitored.
* Our internal network was temporarily misconfigured.
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Twitter is well known for great application-layer monitoring and instrumentation, so this gap in monitoring is a surprise. It exposes a common misconception among social software companies – that their server and network infrastructure is “covered” by their hosting provider. As web applications scale to even 1/1000 the size of Twitter, software becomes critically interdependent on the underlying network. Infrastructure should be instrumented and monitored at least as closely as the software that depends on it.
For more The Barking Seal articles on monitoring and troubleshooting, see:
Saturday morning I was up and out the door early for a long run before the heat set in too much. As I was running I was thinking to myself, “Gosh, having a good exercise routine is kind of like having a good information security program.” I had lots of time to ponder this particular issue, as my iPod was unfortunately not charged and I had no one to talk to. Here are a few things I thought of that make exercise and security so alike.
1) Set goals: Both in exercise and in information security, it is good to set goals. For example, before I can write up a training plan for myself, I need to know what race I’m training for, and what my target pace is. Similarly, before I can write up my information security plan, I need to know what information I need to protect and how much protection I need (is this credit card data, or is it records of what color paint my store sold last year?)
Sadly disasters happen, and when they do there are often valuable lessons to be learned. Unfortunately, poor IT infrastructure will limit the lessons the oil industry can learn from this incident.
The Deepwater Horizon rig was equipped with a vessel management system (VMS), which records dozens of different metrics about the conditions on the rig and in the well. These VMS logs would contain valuable details about the blowout, much like an airplane “black box” is essential in understanding a plane crash.
Removable media: We all have them, maybe a few of them in different sizes. They’re invaluable for various administration tasks. Trying to get network drivers onto that new machine you’re re-installing? How about bringing one with you when you have to patch a few machines that aren’t on the domain? Or loading Knoppix LiveCD onto one for resetting administrator passwords? We love flash drives, but we also know they can be perfect vectors for malicious users. As with many types of technology, as their popularity increases the more lucrative it becomes to write virus code that targets them.
This infographic from Focus claims that IT-related positions compose three of the top 10 “Best Jobs in America.” Systems engineers, IT project managers, and security consultants are ranked at number one, number five, and number eight, respectively. The graphic also indicates that 7 of the top 35 jobs are in the IT sector. Interestingly, there are only 13,000 security consultants, far fewer than the 200,000 IT business analysts, or the nearly 800,000 software developers.
Health care jobs also have a strong representation in the list. It’s a good time to be a security consultant working extensively in the health care sector. I’m excited that I regularly play the role of system engineer, project manager, and security consultant, often all in a single day.
The data was gathered from cnnmoney.com, payscal.com, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor.
We’re just a few weeks away from sending the latest edition of the Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook to press, and as of today you can get a preview online at the Safari site.
This 20th anniversary edition brings the best of Unix System Administration Handbook and Linux System Administration Handbook together, and adds coverage of IBM AIX to updated coverage of Oracle America Solaris (formerly Sun Solaris), HP HP-UX, Ubuntu Linux, SUSE Linux, and RedHat Linux. In addition, it includes significant all-new coverage of system administration scripting languages such as Python and Perl, as well as virtualization, green IT, and modern standards and compliance management challenges. This is the ultimate system administration bible.
We’re very proud to have 4 Applied Trust staff members on the author team for this book (me, ned, ben, terry). Look for the printed version in your favorite bookstore this June (or, pre-order at Amazon now), but enjoy the Safari online preview in the meantime!