Stsimb's blog
A few headlines
If these sound interesting, you should read The remote manager’s toolkit.
Additionally: Marieke Guy’s blog Ramblings of a Remote Worker.
My favorite performance monitoring tool: Munin by linpro.
Munin monitoring tool surveys all your computers and remembers what it saw. It presents all the information in graphs through a web interface. Its emphasis is on plug and play capabilities. After completing a installation a high number of monitoring plugins will be playing with no more effort.
Using Munin you can easily monitor the performance of your computers, networks, SANs, applications, weather measurements and whatever comes to mind. It makes it easy to determine «what’s different today» when a performance problem crops up. It makes it easy to see how you’re doing capacity-wise on any resources.
Munin uses the excellent RRDTool and the framework is written in Perl, while plugins may be written in any language. Munin has a master/node architecture in which the master connects to all the nodes at regular intervals and asks them for data. It then stores the data in RRD files, and (if needed) updates the graphs. One of the main goals has been ease of creating new plugins (graphs).
Previous articles in my blog about munin:
Another favorite tool.. mtr by Matt Kimball.
mtr combines the functionality of the ‘traceroute’ and ‘ping’ programs in a single network diagnostic tool.As mtr starts, it investigates the network connection between the host mtr runs on and a user-specified destination host. After it determines the address of each network hop between the machines, it sends a sequence ICMP ECHO requests to each one to determine the quality of the link to each machine. As it does this, it prints running statistics about each machine.
Meet Dstat, the Versatile resource statistics tool by Dag Wieers.
Dstat is a versatile replacement for vmstat, iostat, netstat, nfsstat and ifstat. Dstat overcomes some of their limitations and adds some extra features, more counters and flexibility. Dstat is handy for monitoring systems during performance tuning tests, benchmarks or troubleshooting.Dstat allows you to view all of your system resources instantly, you can eg. compare disk usage in combination with interrupts from your IDE controller, or compare the network bandwidth numbers directly with the disk throughput (in the same interval).
Dstat gives you detailed selective information in columns and clearly indicates in what magnitude and unit the output is displayed. Less confusion, less mistakes.Dstat is unique in letting you aggregate block device throughput for a certain diskset or networkset, ie. you can see the throughput for all the block devices that make up a single filesystem or storage system.
Dconf is a tool to collect a system’s hardware and software configuration. It allows to take your system configuration with you or compare systems (like nodes in a cluster) to troubleshoot HW or SW problems.Dconf is also useful in projects where you have to manage changes as a team. Dconf can send out changes to your systems to a list of email addresses so that they can be revised.
As a sysadmin, you won’t become too paranoid if less experienced people have root-access. As a consultant, you won’t feel isolated if you don’t have remote access to your systems. As a support engineer, you won’t become frustrated if a customer has fiddled around with some important config file and you have to find what.
Network Inventory .. What a nightmare to keep up-to-date!
Luckily, if you use Cisco switches, CDPR is here to help you discover where do all your network cables end up.. Simply run it on your linux server, wait a few seconds, and your cisco switch will broadcast the info.
Read about it at http://www.debian-administration.org/article/Where_art_thou_-_CDPR.
The opposite is also useful as well.. A daemon run on linux systems that speaks Cisco Discovery Protocol, thus showing up on your switch’s cdp neighborhood ..
I found cdp-send of cdp-tools that works, but ladvd works better with bonding :)
sw-02>show cdp neighbors Capability Codes: R - Router, T - Trans Bridge, B - Source Route Bridge S - Switch, H - Host, I - IGMP, r - Repeater, P - Phone Device ID Local Intrfce Holdtme Capability Platform Port ID sw-01 Fas 0/23 150 S I WS-C3550-1Gig 0/4 router-01 Fas 0/24 158 R 3640 Fas 0/0 linux.local Fas 0/19 176 H Linux eth0 sw-02>show cdp neighbors detail Device ID: linux.local Entry address(es): IP address: 192.168.1.11 Platform: Linux, Capabilities: Host Interface: FastEthernet0/19, Port ID (outgoing port): eth0 Holdtime : 160 sec Version : Linux 2.6.18-92.1.22.el5 #1 SMP Tue Dec 16 11:57:43 EST 2008 x86_64 advertisement version: 2 Duplex: full Management address(es):
Don't fear the penguin 