Jason Antman’s Blog

Yeah, I almost forgot to link right to the article from Reuters about the EU fining Microsoft $1.35 BILLION USD (899 million euros).

Microsoft’s monopolistic business practices are costing it billions of dollars.

IDEA:
Actually be open. Open up all of your protocols, specifications, APIs. Even start opening up some of your source code, under GPLv3, and assigning patents to the Patent Commons.

Believe it or not, your sales will go up. Maybe then Bill can donate the next $1B in fines to some starving kids who need laptops.

Seriously though, if I could get Windows Server under GPLv3, and do whatever I want – fork it, whatever, I might buy a copy. I’m sure a lot of people would if they realized that they could change it, wouldn’t get locked in, etc.

Ideas and Rants microsoft, patents

Here’s another Groklaw article on recent Microsoft tribulations. This really is starting to get disgusting. It’s not that I hate Microsoft, I don’t. What I hate is their attitude, and their business practices. Everyone else – I mean everyone – makes software that interoperates with other vendors. Microsoft, even after a *billion* dollar fine, won’t. Everyone else uses open, industry-accepted standards. Microsoft doesn’t. Many other vendors open up their code. Microsoft tried to make some vague gesture to, but makes it incompatible with GPL’d code (okay, okay, I know about ZFS…) and says developers can only use it in non-commercial projects. So they open a few things up to hobbyists, and want a pat on the back. It boils down to how they treat customers and developers. Not very well. I don’t like that. I’m not going to start on the technical aspects of Windows, though it seems to be getting better, a baby step at a time. But the bottom line is that Microsoft actively tries to turn the software industry into a facist dictatorship, where you do it Microsoft’s way, or you’re taken out back and shot (ok, bought up and then shut down).

Anyway, from the blog of Zeheda Bhorat, Open Source Programs Manager at Google,

Google believes OOXML would be an insufficient and unnecessary standard, designed purely around the needs of Microsoft Office.

How can it be that the ISO – the International Organization for Standardization – would actually consider a second, competing standard for document formats. And one that’s as flawed as OOXML? These guys are the ISO. They practically run the world, at least technically. Why don’t they have the balls to look Microsoft in the eye and say, “Hey, moron. We already have a document format standard. It’s called ISO 26300. If you want to have anything to do with the ISO, which sets standards, you can take your 6,000 page specification, put it through a crosscut paper-burning radiation-producing shredder, pay the $320 for a copy of ISO26300, and implement it!”

Ideas and Rants iso, microsoft, ooxml

From A Groklaw article today:

In Atlantic v. Brennan, the courts have finally recognized RIAA’s “making available” argument for the sham it is. Groklaw has a link to the full ruling, which includes:

At least one aspect of Plaintiffs’ distribution claim is problematic, however, namely the allegation of infringement based on “mak[ing] the Copyrighted Recordings available for distribution to others.”… This amounts to a valid ground on which to mount a defense, for “without actual distribution of copies . . . there is no violation [of] the distribution right.” 4 William F. Patry, Patry on Copyright § 13:9 (2007); see also id. n.10 (collecting cases); Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc., 508 F.3d 1146, 1162 (9th Cir. 2007) (affirming the district court’s finding “that distribution requires an ‘actual dissemination’ of a copy”).

Also, finally, the judge rejected the claims as being speculative, as they all rested on the “upon information and belief” statements.

Maybe things will start going in the right direction…

On a side note, if you still haven’t read it, check out the Google Labs paper “Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population” (USENIX FAST ‘07).

Ideas and Rants copyright, IP, riaa

Well, while I haven’t made much progress on anything interesting – mainly my NMS comparison or any of my other projects – due to my busy schedule, I did get an hour or two to clean up my network at the apartment, swapping out my 24-port Linksys switch in my room for the 5-port Netgear previously used for printing. I threw all of the printers and the print server on their own VLAN on the main 3com switch.

I’ve also started thinking more about MythTV – I use it for TV in my room (feeding a grossly insufficient 21″ CRT monitor), and my roommate has a Dell GX270 by the big TV in the living room, though it was running Freevo (and now has a dead tuner and no RAM, or something like that). So, I decided that I might do things right – drop a 5- or 8-port GigE switch in the apartment, put GigE NICs in the two boxes with tuners (putting MythTV on the GX270 also), and setting up a centralized system. The problem is that the ideal solution would be a single dedicated back-end system for storage and control, with the two tuner/video out boxes just providing A/V I/O. Unfortunately, the two boxes with tuners are both high-spec’ed P4’s, and I’m not sure what I can come up with in terms of a server for the backend.

Now, the question for anyone who may be reading – I’d like to setup a good amount (1-2TB) of storage for this. My roommate wants a RAID configuration, but I don’t see the need for videos – if I lose my TV recordings, I set MythTV to record it again the next time it’s on. Anyway, I have an 8-bay external SCAI enclosure and cards in all of the servers, but SCSI disks are expensive. I was thinking of going to SATA 3.0. Most likely, I’d get some sort of 4-8 disk enclosure, start with 1-3 disks in the 400-750GB range.

So, the question – what type of system specs would be needed to stream audio and video, uncompressed, perhaps even HDTV (we have the TV and cable box, would just need an HD tuner) to remote storage over the network? I was thinking of doing either a Linux master MythTV backend with eSATA cards, or letting each TV computer be its’ own backend, and then doing Solaris/ZFS with iSCSI or ATAoE. Any suggestions? I’m pretty much thinking of using a PowerEdge 2550 for this.

Anyway, I’m also filling up my backup disks at home, and don’t want to shorten my expiration cycle. My nightly backup runs put quite a strain on my main Fast Ethernet LAN, so I’ve been planning for a while on moving to GigE. My thought at home is to setup a second, separate GigE switch/lan, with GigE NICs in all of the servers. Not exactly cheap, but I can pickup a Linux-/Solaris-compatible Negear GA311 for around $40, in addition to the Intel Pro/1000 XT and Asante GigaNIC that I already have. The problem here is finding a good GigE switch – I’d really like something with Telnet, SNMP, VLANs, the works.

In other news, I highly recommend reading the Groklaw story on Microsoft’s latest pledge for interoperability. I especially liked the one quote from the ECIS statement:

For years now, Microsoft has either failed to implement or has actively corrupted a range of truly open standards adopted and implemented by the rest of the industry. Unless and until that behaviour stops, today’s words mean nothing.

More fundamentally, today’s announcement is still all about the rest of the world interoperating with Microsoft on Microsoft’s own terms, not the other way around.

There’s even links to *ten* previous Microsoft statements promising interoperability.

The thing is, this is a promise to interoperate with old-fashioned competitors. It doesn’t enable interoperability with the GPL, which is not compatible with patent licenses, and that is Microsoft’s true competition.

From Michael Cunningham, VP and General Counsel of Red Hat:

Eight years ago the U.S. regulatory authorities, and four years ago the European regulators made clear to Microsoft that its refusal to disclose interface information for its monopoly software products violates the law. So, it is hardly surprising to see even Microsoft state today that “interoperability across systems is an important requirement” and announce a “change in [its] approach to interoperability.” Of course, we’ve heard similar announcements before, almost always strategically timed for other effect. Red Hat regards this most recent announcement with a healthy dose of skepticism. Three commitments by Microsoft would show that it really means what it is announcing today:

• Commit to open standards: Rather than pushing forward its proprietary, Windows-based formats for document processing, OOXML, Microsoft should embrace the existing ISO-approved, cross-platform industry standard for document processing, Open Document Format (ODF) at the International Standards Organization’s meeting next week in Geneva. Microsoft, please demonstrate implementation of an existing international open standard now rather than make press announcements about intentions of future standards support.
• Commit to interoperability with open source: Instead of offering a patent license for its protocol information on the basis of licensing arrangements it knows are incompatible with the GPL – the world’s most widely used open source software license – Microsoft should extend its Open Specification Promise to all of the interoperability information that it is announcing today will be made available. The Open Specification Promise already covers many Microsoft products that do not have monopoly market positions. If Microsoft were truly committed to fostering openness and preventing customer lock-in, it would extend this promise to the protocol and interface information it intends to disclose today. There is no explanation for refusing to extend the Open Specification Promise to “high-volume” products, other than a continued intention on Microsoft’s part to lock customers into its monopoly products, and lock out competitors through patent threats.
• Commit to competition on a level playing field: Microsoft’s announcement today appears carefully crafted to foreclose competition from the open source community. How else can you explain a “promise not to sue open source developers” as long as they develop and distribute only*/ “non-commercial” implementations of interoperable products? This is simply disingenuous. The only hope for reintroducing competition to the monopoly markets Microsoft now controls – Windows, Office, etc. – is through commercial distributions of competitive open source software products.

Amen!!!

Projects GigE, microsoft, mythtv, sata, storage

Some links for today:

Microsoft’s new promised on interoperability, open standards. etc. – somewhat ironic given the Office Open XML debacle on “standards”. And Red Hat’s worries about it. (Ars Technica)

Groklaw’s lengthy analysis of the promises.

Pakistan removed from the Internet, causes global YouTube outage.

A Guardian article on the WikiLeaks debacle – perhaps the biggest affront to the First Amendment this year.

An InformationWeek article about some guys from BlackHat D.C. who said that they will be able to crack GSM encryption in under 30 minutes with $1,000 of technology or 30 seconds with $100,000 (FPGAs – Maybe a cluster of PS3’s?)

A Princeton Unviersity blog about cold boots possibly able to crack the Windows BitLocker system.

Yay! Firefox has hit its’ 500 Millionth download!!! And there was much rejoicing…

An ArsTechnica article on Internet Explorer, what should be done to fix it, and how there can still be a non-standards-compliant browser.

Jeremy’s Blog – the mind behind LinuxQuestions.org – provides a recap of the 2007 LQ Members’ Choice awards. Some interesting winners were VirtualBox for virtualization package, Debain for server distro, Knoppix for Live Distro, Eclipse for IDE/Web Development Environment, Python for language of the year, and – much to my chagrin – vi/vim for editor.

A LinuxJournal article on What’s Next for Open Source and Public Meida.

LinuxInsider – EU taking Microsoft’s promises with a grain of salt, noting that MS has made “at least four similar statements” in the past.

Chris Siebenmann – Where the risk is with virtualization (and iSCSI) and Wireless, machine rooms, and the Asus eeePC.

IBM DeveloperWorks – OOXML: What’s the big deal? – outlining the technical objections to OOXML as a standard. Linked from a rootprompt.org article mentioning that “OOXML is essentially a complete replication of every chunk of data that a Microsoft Office application might possibly save in a file”.

Slashdot YRO – a guy who got hist stock photos stolen, entered into a long legal battle, and won.

Microsoft’s Windows Vista Capable lawsuit granted class-action status.

A Washington Post article on Hans Reiser’s Geek Defense strategy.

A Slashdot post linking to news that Apple sent a cease-and-decist order to the Hymn Project, which produces software to remove DRM from iTunes songs. Apple had their ISP remove all download links. (I guess the only solution is for us all to buy bandwidth right from a NSP…)

Yahoo’s shareholders are suing it for not gobbling up the Microsoft deal.

Comcast getting sued AGAIN for P2P filtering.

A leaked RIAA training video for prosecutors, going so far as to say that IP piracy can lead to arrests for drugs, weapons, or terrorism. It also includes instructions on how to get a RIAA investigator certified as a court expert.

A New York Times article on – gasp – women using the Internet. Linked from Tom Limoncelli’s blog.

Interesting Links and Resources apple, bitlocker, cellphone, EU, firefox, gsm, microsoft, ooxml, pakistan, riaa, virtualization, wikileaks, windows, youtube

Well I know I haven’t updated in a while. I have a whole bunch of links that I’d like to comment on, but things have been horribly busy. You can find the links in my “1-toblog” folder on del.icio.us (prefixed with “1-” so it shows up at the beginning of my bookmark menu).

In monitoring land, I’ve paused my Hyperic HQ VM as I wasn’t too pleased with how the features panned out. I was invited to beta test Groundwork Open Source 5.2b, but I’m not crazy about the open-ness of a non-public Beta, and am honestly not that intrigued by the small feature set (though, admittedly, they do need more documentation on the F/OSS version). I’d still like to try them all, especially Zenoss Core, but I’m pretty busy with class, and things are heating up at work and with a few consulting projects.

In my “spare time” (read: staying up until 5 AM and somehow still getting up for work at 9) I’ve been working on something that’s been bugging me for a while – getting Nagios to automatically open and update tickets in Eventum, the ticketing system that I (and MySQL) use. The general idea is to use a “glue” script, written in PHP (Eventum’s native language). It will (hopefully) keep track of which hosts/services it has opened tickets for (and what the ticket ID is), and decide from that whether to open a new ticket or, if one already exists for that host/service, update it. It should also handle changes to assigned user/group, update categories, priorities, etc. This will all be based on a DB table that maps problem severities and hosts/services to the users, groups, categories, and priorities that they should be assigned.

The biggest problem is that I’m not a whiz at object-oriented PHP, and like any good OO program, Eventum is broken down into dozens of objects, classes, and files. With the help of the Xdebug debugging extension for PHP, which prints full debugging output including stack and function call traces, I’ve been able to *finally* – after about four hours of work – write a simple little 15-line script that uses ONLY existing Eventum classes, unmodified (except for a separate init.php with some stuff commented out), which gets a list of users assigned to an issue. From here, it shouldn’t be difficult to get full issue information and then, hopefully, add and update issues.

I have a basic description of the project on my wiki, and the current (development, so could be broken) source code in CVS, which can be seen through ViewVC on my site.

Stay Tuned!

Projects, Tech HowTos eventum, monitoring, mysql, programming, ticketing

Well, today happens to be my 21st birthday. Now, not only can I vote or die for my country, but I can finally buy a drink when a president I didn’t vote for sends me off to war! All kidding aside, almost every year I can remember, it’s either snowed on my birthday, or been a rainy, slushy mess. This year appears to be the latter – an utterly disgusting mix of rain, slushy snow, and little chunks of ice from last night.

I haven’t had much time this week to do anything interesting – it’s been a busy week for class-related stuff, and a bunch of work-related stuff too. So, I guess I’ll just post some interesting links for the past few days…

Sun Microsystems has announced that we’ll be acquiring Innotek, and therefore VirtualBox. This means that Sun’s virtualization products will now reach to the desktop – and that I should give VirtualBox a shot for running OpenSolaris on my laptop. (aside: why is virtualization not in my Firefox spell check yet???)

Researchers at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center have come out with a version of SSH / SCP that uses multi-threading, for use in high-bandwidth applications on multi-core systems.

An ITnews article on why Open Source needs better PR.

What? Microsoft sued again? Ars Technica ran an article on the Vista Capable fiasco, with some comments from MS insiders. How is it that such a big company, with such a ubiquitous product, can constantly be sued, have MAJOR screwups, screw over their customers, and still people come back for more?

BBC News – EU Competition Regulators raid Intel offices in Munich.

A CNet article (linked from John M. Willis’ ESM Blog) on the US Treasury upping its content management budget to $28.2 million – no wonder why ww have so much debt, nobody told them about Drupal. From the article – “tens of millions on a $1 million problem”.

Roger Rustad’s Nagios Wiki, liked in a Groundwork blog entry.

Interesting Links and Resources birthday, innotek, multi-threading, opensource, ssh, sun, virtualbox

Well, I don’t have much time for a real post. I’m quite busy with school work and prepping for an OpenSolaris demo at RUSLUG on this Tuesday. Also, I’ve pretty much finished my initial evaluation of Hyperic HQ and, after reviewing the features of most of the options, I’m looking at Zenoss Core for the next round.

So, instead of anything interesting, a few news stories from the past few days:

• Slashdot – an interesting article on search and seizure of electronic devices at airports

• From asuseeehacks.blogspot.com, also bugtraq – the Asus eeePC apparently has a root-level vulnerability in its’ out-of-the-box Xandros distro, involving Samba. For people like me who put a much better OS on it, it’s not a big problem.
• InformationWeek is reporting that the EU is investigating Microsoft – again. This time, for violating antitrust laws during its’ push for MSOOXML. There’s also a small page at GrokLaw dedicated to this newest development.
• According to Ars Technica, the congressional bill on college funding that would require schools to filter out P2P traffic has PASSED in the House, with the filtering clause intact. Fine. Whatever. A gross invasion of privacy, and of college students’ rights, but that’s nothing new. However, if I’m sitting in my office at Rutgers and have a single hiccup downloading the OpenSuSE Beta 1 via BitTorrent on April 17th, mark my words, my congressmen (and Rutgers administrators) will learn my phone number by heart.
• Some progress in Arista v. Does 1-21, the RIAA’s attack on Boston University students. But, unfortunately, the end of the McCarthy-esque tactics doesn’t seem to be near yet and, even worse for me, neither does the likelihood that the recording industry will wake up and see what the market’s asking for, and give me downloadable DRM-free music and movies.

Interesting Links and Resources antitrust, microsoft, msooxml, opensolaris, p2p, privacy, riaa, rights, ruslug

So, I’ve made some headway on the comparison. I have Hyperic installed and partly configured, albeit without email alerts yet. I’ve found some serious features that I need missing, but I’m going to give it a full run before I move on to another.

The full text, updated a few times a day, is available on my wiki. Here’s a bit of an excerpt:

Part I – Installation

1. setup Xen virtual machine running OpenSuSE 10.3 base packages. (3 hours, some server problems, some Xen problems, and some time learning Xen administration from the CLI)
2. Download hyperic-hq-installer-3.2.0-607-x86-linux.tgz from Hyperic and extract.
3. Browse to http://support.hyperic.com/confluence/display/DOC/Full+Installation+Guide
4. cd into hyperic-hq-installer and run ./setup.sh -full
   1. The installation can’t be run as root (though I assumed it would need root privileges).
   2. I selected to install all 3 components – Server, Shell, and Agent.
   3. Well, whoops! Sorta stupid to not allow installation as root, when the default location to install to is /home/hyperic. How do they expect an arbitrary user to install there? Even worse, it appears that the default OpenSuSE 10.3 installation doesn’t come with sudo (!!!!) so I can’t try that.
   4. As root, create /home/hyperic and chown to my user.
   5. Repear the above steps (well, hopefully not all of them).
   6. Default ports for everything – web GUI on 7080, HTTPS web GUI on 7443, jnp service on 2099, mbean server on 9093,
   7. Change domain names in default URLs to logical ones for my test environment (no real DNS, just IPcop hosts, so devel-hyperic1.localdomian). I hope that I can change these later, or even better that absolute paths aren’t used too much, as this will screw with my idea of using SSH port forwarding for remote access.
   8. Leave the default SMTP server alone and change it later – I odn’t even have mail running here at the apartment.
   9. Use the built-in PostgreSQL database with default port of 9432.
   10. Go with the defaults for everything after this.
   11. Everything runs nicely, and then it tells you to login to another terminal as root and run a script. I’m not sure I like this method, but I guess it works. Login and do it.
   12. How will it start the builtin database? As my user???? Yup. postgres is running as my user. Wonderful. Nothing in the install document mentioned user creation. Was this just assumed? Because in the naive world I live in, most installer scripts (think Nagios) create a user for you, or tell you to.
   13. Setup script complete. A few instructions follow…
5. Run /home/hyperic/server-3.2.0/bin/hq-server.sh start… as my user. Note to self: setup a user for Postgres and Hyperic. Believe it or not, but it booted – but followed with the message, “Login to HQ at: http://127.0.0.1:7080/“
6. Browsed to http://devel-hyperic1:7080 and was greeted by a startup page, saying that the server was 18% finished booting. My, I yearn for little C binaries and a PHP frontend.
7. Page turns blank and stops there. I refresh, and get a login page. I enter my username and password, and get a little message box where the “invalid password” box usually is – says “Server is still booting”. This is over a minute later. I’m happy to see Apache/Coyote1.1, but would like to be able to get into Hyperic in less time than it takes the machine to boot to a graphical login screen (ok, granted, I’m running XFCE). In SuSE’s YaST Xen Monitor, I see that the VM is at 45% of its’ 464MB RAM, and 90% CPU – with 8.5% consumed by dom0.
8. CPU usage for the VM drops to 1% and I login again. BAM! Hyperic HQ. Aside from the fact that it shows NO resources… oh… start the Agent.
9. Start the Agent on the VM running Hyperic. It asks me for the server IP address. What, no DNS? I enter the IP as it is… for now. I keep everything at defaults, including using the hqadmin username and password. Successfully started.
10. BAM! In Dashboard, I see the auto-discovered host with the right hostname, as well as Tomcat, Agent, JBoss, and PostgreSQL. Amazing! Click “Add to Inventory”.
11. Check out the “Resources” -> “Browse” screen. It knows this machine is OpenSuSE 10.3, and I see my four services (listed above). Of course, no metrics yet, but I see the correct IP, gateway, DNS, vendor (SuSE), kernel version, RAM, architecture, and CPU speed.
12. Looking through the “Inventory” screen, I see everything – NICs and MACs, running servers and one service (a CPU resource). What more could a man want in…let’s see.. just over an hour!
13. I really *love* the “Views” screen which, even out-of-the-box, allows “Live Exec” information from cpuinfo, df, ifconfig, netstat, top, who, and more.
14. Well, it’s 03:35, and I have work and class tomorrow. I think it’s time to give Part I a rest. But first…
15. Go to the “Platform” page for my one machine and… YES! Graphs are starting to appear!
16. Following the suggestion here, I enable log and config tracking on the platform for /var/log/warn and /etc/hosts, respecitvely.
17. Before I call it a night (now 03:42), I stop back at the downloads page and grab the Linux x86 Agent for the dom0 machine, hoping to get some physical information as well. While I’m at it, I grab the Linux AMD64 Agent to try on my laptop. I create “hyperic” users on each system. On the base Xen server, I give it a shot and get “Unable to register agent: Error communicating with agent: Unauthorized”. Same thing on the laptop.
18. Did a little reading here. As to keeping all of the defaults, it turns out that both clients had firewalls blocking TCP port 2144. I opened it up on both, and also set the IP address (that the server uses to contact the client) to the correct ones. Viola! Now I have 3 clients connected, and gatheirng data for the next ~16 hours until I have time to check it out agian.

More to come in Part II tomorrow – actually doing something with Hyperic. For
now (04:08), time to sleep.

Part II – Configuration

Unfortunately, I haven’t had much time to play with Hyperic in the two days
since installation. The most I’ve really done is setup Agents on my laptop,
desktop, and the host machine (both dom0 and domU for Hyperic), so that they
start to collect data.

While I found a lot of upsetting stuff in the features list (see below), I
decided to go ahead and add some other devices. On the network at the
apartment, I have two manageable switches (a Linksys and a 3Com) – which pretty
much make up the sum of non-host equipment. I also have an IPcop box, though I
assume the standard Linux Agent will handle that. The one item missing that I
have at home is my set of APC SmartUPS UPSs with SNMP cards, but I guess I’ll
just have to skip them for this review.

First, I went in and added a platform (Resources->Browse, Tools Menu->Add
Platform) for the 3Com switch (a SuperStack II Switch 3300). It showed
successful creation – but nothing else. I went in and entered the SNMP
community string, IP, and version (1). In about a minute or so, I started to
see metrics – Availability, IP Forwards, IP In Receives, an IP In Received per
Second. While it’s quite basic, that’s good for a starting point. While the
[http://support.hyperic.com/confluence/display/DOCSHQ30/Network+Device+platform
Network Device Platform] documentation lists lots of metrics that can be
enabled, I’d also like telnet availability and – my big one since I use a
“cute” (crappy) IPcop installation for local DNS, a dig on DNS to make sure
the entry is there. In the Monitor screen, I was able to enable a bunch of
additional metrics (by clicking on the “Show All Metrics” link), though
there’s also no way (that I can find) to monitor the status of individual
ports.

Next, I browsed through the “Administration” pages, setup a few users, and
started setting *way* more default metrics for various platforms, services,
and servers. While I don’t have mail running yet, that will come this
weekend. While I added a lot of things as “Default On”, I still need to go
back and add more things in the templates as Indicators.

I also added some escalations, though they’re quite simple – you can notify HQ
users or “other users” by email or SMS, write to SysLog, or suppress alerts
for 0 minutes to 24 hours. Hopefully I’ll also find a plugin for Asterisk
integration. One striking omission is user groups. Also, the concept of
“Roles” (maybe their idea of groups?) is only available in the Enterprise
version.

At this point, I also notice one other majoe issue, though perhaps I’ll find a
solution in my experimentation – there doesn’t be a way to setup default
alerts for metrics. If they have all of this platform, server, and service
information defined as default templates, why not just have a way to assign
default users (and groups) to these objects, and have default alerts
generated?

In terms of Apache 2.2 monitoring, out-of-the-box, nothing worked. No metrics
at all. Firstly, Hyperic requires the mod_status module. Persoanlly, I’d
rather handle all of that through a backend, like Nagios. Secondly, it got the
pidfile and apache2ctl paths wrong. Furthermore, it has no “smart” checking for resources – while my Apache 2.2 resource config was clearly wrong (wrong PID file path, no mod_status), Hyperic didn’t detect this and was showing the resource as “Down”.

After that, I setup a bunch of alerts for things that I thought would be off-kilter a lot (like WARN log entries on my laptop, high memory usage on some stressed machines, etc.) as well as log and config file monitoring and alerts for them. While I didn’t have mail working yet, I figured I might as well get that stuff running.

On the Xen dom0 host that runs the Hyperic vm (box called xenmaster1), I wasn’t able to add config file tracking for any of the /etc/xen/ files. At this point I notice some serious shortcomings – not only is it not possible to define a template of alerts for a given platform/server/service, it’s also impossible to define a template for alerts. I also noticed that it’s not possible to define groups of contacts. This wasn’t much of a problem for my test installation – the alerts are only going to my roommate and I – but it would surely be an issue in any larger setting.

At this point in configuration, I come to a make-or-break point. With some of these shortcomings, I really need a way to call a script with alert information when an alert is generated – whether it’s to dial out through Asterisk or just automatically create a ticket for the problem.

Adding alerts is a cumbersome process. You have to browse to a page for a specific metric – which means going to the page for a specific platform, server, or service – and then opening the page for that metric. The actual alert creation takes up two pages – one for the metric, threshold, and time-based criteria, and a second for who to alert. This means that to add alerts for a machine, you need to view the platform page as well as the services and servers pages, and each metric therein.

I’ll be posting some more in the days to come. From a post at the Hyperic Forums, I was able to find out that a Xen plugin is in the works, but for the Open Source version, the only way to trigger a script is to send an email and have it handled by a filter such as Procmail.

Projects, Reviews hyperic, monitoring, open source

So, I’ve been plodding along after troubleshooting some VPN issues with my Solaris workstation that I use for Sun work. After that, I started work on the Xen box. Big surprise – none of the PS/2 inputs are working. I knew that the PS/2 riser card was loose, but now I can’t get any input. I gave a USB mouse and keyboard a shot, but it’s flat-out impossible to use them with a 1U slide-out KVM console. So, back to my room and VNC.

Now, problem 2. I’m trying to use the SuSE/YaST builtin VM manager. Unfortunately, it can’t read half of my known-good SuSE CDs, and for some reason the other half come up with a mysterious error that it can’t find /tmp/{random string}/suse/i586/install-initrd-1.0-72.i586.rpm. This is most troubling because I have 2 VMs setup on the machine, and installed them both without a problem.

By now a new OpenSuSE 10.3-KDE .iso should be done downloading (thank God for a 1.5Mbps download rate at home), so I’ll keep hacking away at it…

Projects