Playing around more with RRDtool and SNMP stuff I ran across Cacti as a front end for both. Tweaking, tweaking and more tweaking. I also have noticed a difference in the queries … Some report higher volumes than others, and I haven’t looked into the “meat” of this yet. Getting the graphs to work and accumulate data has been the main focus of direction thus far. I was able to make immediate modifications that were important to me. I will dive into the accuracy later. But, whether completely accurate or not, it does show a trend based on whatever data it is collecting. In the case of the routers and switches, I have MRTG graphs to compare it too. I am sure as I play more with these technologies, I will create custom graphs to show what I need. Only other thing I might mention is that Windows again is reluctant to play along in this endeavor. I had SNMP already installed and running on one of the oldest servers I brought up (imagine that), but on another I had to install it. After installing it (and it touching things I didn’t want it to), it surprisingly didn’t ask for a reboot, but I got an alert about it wanting to act as a server. So I said yes and immediately was graced with a BSOD. After a very long time of letting it dump, I gave up and banged the reset key. While it appears to be a functioning server at this point, SNMP data polled from this machine is incomplete. There is hardly any disk information at all, and that’s something I want to monitor. Oh well … The Windows portion of the network is going to be rebuilt at some point, so this is just another reason why.
Month: May 2004
Utilization Graphs
I’m all about the bells and whistles, especially when it shows the traffic going through the network and the impact on the PCs that it has. I installed RRDtool on the “stats” machine for some game server graphing and while I was there I upgraded Perl. The installation and upgrading broke MRTG so I upgraded that to the latest and greatest as well. So, now I have all of the machines (IP addresses) monitored for bandwidth via MRTG and the Mail and Game servers are monitored with RRDtool …
Haven’t heard anything …
Well, here it is early Monday morning and I haven’t heard anything about that computer job … My buddy was supposed to send me out an application, and he said his boss was “coming back” Thursday … So Thursday came and went … The weekend came and went … I even saw some Monster.Com commercials while sitting through the Flyers playoff games … (The relation is that I am looking for a computer job). While I am always the optimistic, I certainly haven’t lost hope, but it’s not like I’m bugging anybody about it either … I certainly don’t want to be any sort of nuisance … So, “buddy”, if you read this … I’m waiting on you …
Standards
I have been turned on to Firefox … a standards compliant browser created by the Mozilla people … Firefox runs on all platforms. So far I have only tried the Windows version, but I will be sure to get the OS X version soon … Using Firefox with a Web Developer plugin, I was able to verify that the WordPress bLog does in fact create valid XHTML and CSS from the PHP/MySQL application … I have also been farting around with Drupal here: http://drupal.davidpierron.com … The old MovableType install is still here: http://mt.davidpierron.com and I have the original bLog up at http://mt.davidpierron.com/blog … Neat!
Missing Entries
Hmm .. I was just changing some of the categories on old posts (notably Health) and I noticed that the first MRI post I made wasn’t there … So I went back to the MovableType bLog and found that entry and cut and pasted it over here being able to put in the original post date and time … I wonder what other entries may be missing? Now I have to check this out … hassle …
ENT Visit
I didn’t get a chance to post yesterday, but I went back for my ENT visit. They shot that stuff up my nose again, and placed the ominous device there for nostril probing for me to stare at while I waited for the doc… well, specialist. After asking me how I was, I described that I didn’t really feel any different. The original reason I went there was discussed, and he explained to me once again that the size of my swollen lymph nodes were just beyond the size to even worry about. He mentioned that even he has some swollen ones that he’s been living with for 10 years. Damn! Another high priced doct… uhm, specialist, that deals with the things that ail him! So, he looked down my throat, checked out my nostrils (but didn’t shove that thing all the way in this time) and said everything looked okay, just a little irritated … He then asked if the stuff they sprayed in my nose helped me to breathe through my nose better … I told him that I really couldn’t tell … I mean, I don’t normally spray things in my nose, and it just feels weird having this junk in my nose that I normally don’t, so I couldn’t answer him honestly. So, he slipped me a sample bottle of Flonase, and told me if it worked for me that he would write a prescription for it for me. I was to use this as an alternative to taking some sort of sinus relief pill … From what a guy told me at the bar last night was that that wasn’t how Flonase worked … You were supposed to use Flonase twice a day or something and it took 2 days to start working. Well, I guess I will try what the do.., specialist said to do, and if that doesn’t work, I will tell him in August … So, he patted my head and sent me on my way … Whole visit took about 10 minutes …
bLogs
In the last week I guess it’s been, I have been following the MovableType press, and I have also happened upon a lot of bLogs … I just read one that said they were changing their URL because “cause well, I get a lot of spam comments and there are some people that read my blog that I would rather not have any information about me. “ and they went on to say “I just want friends and family and random strangers to read it, not assholes.” … hehe … isn’t that funny? I sort of touched on this a couple posts back. I never did get into the comment spamming thing, but I guess that’s a problem that plagues either bLogs in general, or just MovableType … But because of the wonderful world of Internet spidering (WWW), you never know who may have indexed your site, and who might drop by and read about your wonderful life through your comments posted publicly for anyone to see. Yeah, there’s the robot.txt file that you’re supposed to put in your root to stop this, but how many search engines do you think really honor that? Also, who does this stop when it comes to a human web browser? No one … So, bare you thoughts, your life … someone is going to read it. It might be for family and friends, but I think somehow, some way strangers will eventually read it, and I don’t think changing your URL is going to stop that …
All My Sites Are Down!
That’s utimately the worst phone call or email anyone doing what I do can receive. It makes me break out in a sweat immediately before I even know what the problem is … Sometimes, it isn’t my problem, and that makes me angry. Sometimes it is my problem, and that makes me angrier! Most times lately, this is due to the Windows systems rebooting on their own. As I recall, the first time this happened, I researched it and created this page: http://www.icuhost.net/bug_check.html for an acquiantance of mine to look at … After his seeing that page, he sent me the following:
Your Windows issues, it is kind of outside my area of expertise. I can keep my servers running to support my development efforts, but that is mostly with duct tape, spit, and a prayer. Did you go to http://oca.microsoft.com/en/Welcome.asp? In addition, you can turn off auto-reboot and actually see the BSOD that brought your system down. I am going off WinXP/Win2K3, but presumably, it is similar in Win2K. Windows-Break to bring up system properties, on Advanced tab under startup hit settings, and uncheck automatically restart under System failure. You can also change the option to do a complete memory dump, which will give you additional information should it happen again. Do you have anything in your event log? I am also not seeing too many suspects that are running in Kernel mode. Perl should be running exclusively in user mode. Black Ice Defender runs in Kernel mode. Are you running WHQL drivers all around on this box? These are the usual suspects.
So, the decision was made to migrate everything running off of those Windows boxes and create new ones to take their place … This process has been slow going as there are people utilizing the setups on those boxes … The DNS has been moved off, but the mail servers are still active … I have been trying to get everyone to migrate over to the FreeBSD mail server voluntarily, but that isn’t going as well as expected. I thought people would jump at the chance at FREE SPAM and Virus protection? Maybe I need to word it just like that so that it looks sweeter rather than a chore …
Statement Emails
Sent out statement reminders for billing. Wife said that not many payments were coming in as usual. Could be that when I sent them out on the 1st that there were DNS issues. After changing the DNS to FreeBSD servers, I pointed the Windows servers to those new DNS servers … I think this was amistake due to the fact I am running AD here on the Windows machines … Eventually I lost local networking, and I assume this had to do with not pointing the Windows machines to the Windows DNS. So, I have to keep DNS running on the Windows network for the Active Directory … I wanted to avoid this, so I will rebuild the Windows portion of the network into not requiring DNS and doing the networking via a workgroup or something … Utilizing a domain isn’t as necessary as I would have thought when I started all this up … It’s ultimately cool that I have had the ability to experiement and learn with these machines and I have people benefitting daily from my endeavors …
25 Ads
It’s Tuesday morning, and I have 25 ads in my stack to do. That’s less than half of normally what I do each issue. Mike said last night at 10pm he has 4 “with him” and 2 to get … So that’s a substantial loss in advertisers … Regardless, it still doesn’t make sense to do anything on Mondays as there would be phone calls making last minute changes, and we’re sure not to disappoint, right? So being that Monday night is my only night off from the Sound Job, I take it easy with the paper … Ads aren’t ready anyway, so why bust my balls? Bitter? Maybe, but underpaid and overworked doesn’t help when thrown into this equation … If I get the job I mentioned, I might not have time to do the paper anymore … The horror!