Category Archives: Tech

ServerDensity.com – Hosted Server Monitoring

By zeb | Published May 18, 2009

Ever find something online and you have no idea how you found out about it? Well, this is sorta the case. I think I found out about ServerDensity.com via some well placed marketing on twitter. Regardless of how I found it, I did.

There have been and probably still are a million hosted remote server monitoring services; years ago I tried most of them. All I needed at the time was a remote service to monitor my Nagios monitoring server. Lets face it–when the network connection to the server that monitors all your other servers fails, it can’t exactly send you an email. But an hour later you’ll see an email telling it is back up, implying you know it WAS down :) . I tested a couple services that were basically ping monitoring… Didn’t like any of them. Either they were too expensive, overly complex or unstable. One I liked didn’t notify me a server hiccup and when I went to the site I found they were no longer in business. I finally stuck a simple Nagios configuration on a server I run for my Dad’s Office. It’s one of the servers I monitor from my network and since I give him all that free computer work, I let Nagios have a couple CPU cycles every 5 minutes to make sure it can talk back to my monitoring server.

Load Monitoring my sever via ServerDensity.com

Load Monitoring my sever via ServerDensity.com

So today I find ServerDensity.com. I make a quick trip through the site and like what I see, so I decided to try it. I should mention at this point, the service is beta, but it looks like they are set to launch later this month. Any linux geek worth their salt should be able to set this up in less than five minutes. Anyone who can follow instructions can set it up in 15.

I pulled up an ssh connection to a test server I have here that doesn’t do much. AMD 64bit, couple gigs of ram, nothing fancy… it runs Xen with one virtual server running on it 24/7 (my wife’s file server) and occasionally a virtual server that is used as a second test platform for server images.  If that server goes down, my wife will tell me pretty quick, so I don’t monitor it via Nagios. Literally 3 minutes after entering my ssh password I had the script downloaded, configured, running and was seeing the updates on the website.

The agent is nothing fancy, a small python script that runs as a daemon and doesn’t even need root permissions to work (which I very much appreciate). It pushes load stats to the server every minute or so, no holes to punch in a firewall, no further configuration needed. I did script it to automagically start at boot for simplicity.

The website is very simple and polished and as you see in the screen capture above, the stats are nicely graphed for you with noted min/avg/max. There are plenty of alert options you can configure to let you know when your server is acting up, down or being slashdotted. I’m still playing with the alerts a bit, but they seem straightforward.

I will point out that I haven’t had a chance to test the Apache monitoring yet. I don’t have Apache running on that box so I’ll put it off for another day.

All in all I’m pretty impressed–looking forward to the public launch of the service and updates to the agent. It won’t replace Nagios or (wait, is there anything other than Nagios? what’s that other one called? hmm… nevermind), but for those that don’t need as many options and need a hosted solution or just a solution to monitor their Nagios box, you might give ServerDensity.com a look. I’ll keep an eye on them for a while, but I do believe I’d recommend this option to clients when it fits their needs.

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Zune Fail – programming bug on 30GB units

By zeb | Published January 2, 2009

Many of you probably heard about the Zune leap year bug. I saw a couple of Zunes with the problem before Microsoft released the official “fix.” On December 31st anyone with a 30GB Zune was annoyed to find it would freeze during start up and become totally unresponsive.  Late in the day Microsoft released a “fix” I hesitate to use that word. They suggested leaving the Zune on the frozen screen (you didn’t have much choice) and letting the battery run dead. Once it ran dead, wait till January 1st to turn it back on and sync it with your computer.

The source for the offending code showed up on several websites last night and I pulled out the function that has the problem. Unless your a programmer (I’m not) or can at least read most code (like me) then it won’t mean anything to you (just smile and nod). But basically on December 31st in a leap year there are 366 days, this code gets stuck in a loop when days equal 366 and there isn’t a graceful error exit. It just keeps telling itself that days equal 366 and it doesn’t know what to do.

This code is for a chip made by a third party, not Microsoft. I keep wondering if other devices have had the same problem.

//----------------------------------------------------------
//
// Function: ConvertDays
//
// Local helper function that split total days since Jan 1, ORIGINYEAR into
// year, month and day
//
// Parameters:
//
// Returns:
//      Returns TRUE if successful, otherwise returns FALSE.
//
//----------------------------------------------------------
BOOL ConvertDays(UINT32 days, SYSTEMTIME* lpTime)
{
    int dayofweek, month, year;
    UINT8 *month_tab;

    //Calculate current day of the week
    dayofweek = GetDayOfWeek(days);

    year = ORIGINYEAR;

    while (days > 365)
    {
        if (IsLeapYear(year))
        {
            if (days > 366)
            {
                days -= 366;
                year += 1;
            }
        }
        else
        {
            days -= 365;
            year += 1;
        }
    }
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Straight No Chaser: Youtube giveth, Warner taketh away.

By zeb | Published December 23, 2008

Many of you will remember last years Christmas music sensation brought to you via Youtube. The group “Straight No Chaser” was an male acapela group originally founded in 1996 at Indiana University, ten years later Indiana Univeristy invited the original members got back together for a reunion concert. One of the group’s founders compiled old concert video into a DVD and posted some of the footage on youtube for friends.

Here’s the beauty of the internet… They didn’t promote it. Word just spread around and in December 2007 the Youtube video of Straight No Chaser Singing 12 Days of Christmas went…  hmm, where does a youtube single go? I guess you could classify it as multi-platinum. I recall showing the video to family members while visiting before christmas, when the youtube video had a mere three million views. I know it made almost eight million views by christmas. Continue reading »

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Gmail Doesn’t know who Google is…

By zeb | Published December 20, 2008
Irony

"This email may not be from who it claims to be!"

I absolutely love this. Really I do. So… I get google alerts for lots of things. News, blog entires on certain subjects, etc. A few minutes ago I pull up my email and saw this email. Click the image to see the full size and take a gander.

The email is from google, just like every other one I get. Yet, I see this large, ominous red bar pop up saying (roughly): This email may not be from who it claims to be! don’t trust it!

You’d think that Gmail would know if an email claiming to be from google really was from google. Seems like a basic verification in a phising check algo. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t just my stange sense of sys/net admin humor that thought this was funny so I showed it to my wife without telling her what why I wanted her to read it. She laughted too…

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Tis the Season: Linux Update Season

By zeb | Published October 24, 2008

Seems like we’re in that time of year when all major Linux distos are on the new release bandwagon.

Ubuntu
Yesterday Ubuntu uploaded it’s final Release Candidate for 8.10 which means we’re a week away from 8.10 final. – I don’t usually run Ubuntu but I usually spend a few days burning discs for friends and will do a little testing with it. I just started the RC download for 8.10 so I’ll be testing it a couple hours.

Fedora
“Did someone say beta?” We’re also nearing the release of Fedora 10, a much anticipated release by those of us who are of the Red Hat persuasion. So Fedora 10 beta is out. Development for F10 is about to freeze so we’ll be getting a preview spin sometime in the first week of November. With the final due out during my vacation for my anniversary. I’m very much looking forward to this release and as such, you’ll probably be hearing more from me once the preview spin comes out.

OpenSUSE
11.1 Beta 3 is out for OpenSUSE. I’ve installed it but not done any testing yet. OpenSUSE’s roadmap takes the scenic route to the public release which is slated for the third week of December.

That’s the big three. Other distros are nearing release or have just recently released new versions. Many of these are based off of one of the major distros so their releases will inherently sync with the upstream distro.

  1. FreeBSD this week released a second beta for 7.1 in their “current” branch
  2. DreamLinux 3.5 RC 4
  3. SemplyMEPIS released the third beta for version 8.0 earlier this week
  4. LinuxMINT released the “fluxbox” spin for version 5
  5. PCLinuxOS just released 2009 beta 1
  6. Mandriva launched version 2009 earlier this month
  7. Debian (stable) released revision 5 of “etch” yesterday
  8. gOS released 3.0 a few weeks back.

CentOS, Slackware and Gentoo are about the only distros that didn’t pop up on the radar for release work. CentOS being RHEL is obvously tied to it’s schedule. Gentoo, one of my favorite off brand distros went through some growing pains with the last release (2008) and has changed the way they do releases.

See… this is why my download/iso server is so busy this time of year.

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