Ever since I sow the oscon presentation of reconnoiter I wanted to check it out and play with it. Yesterday, I finally had some time to do this and thought it would be a good idea to document it as a short howto. Most of the infos I used are from the readme (BUILDING), the wiki and the excellent writeup of Thomas Dudziak on how to install reconnoiter on ubuntu.

The daemons noitd and stratcond are written in C, and the database used is postgressql, while the web interface is written in php. We will need to install a few dependencies to be able to compile noitd/stratcond: Read the rest of this entry »

This is rather silly, but I lost some time with it, so I thought to put it in a blog post as it might be useful to others. Ok, a few days ago I took over an existing cacti installation; I was working to improve it and bring in some other stuff I always do in a cacti installation (note to self, I should really put some blog posts about cacti templates I use, as that will definitely save me some time in the future). One problem I noticed was that there was a traffic interface graph that was wrong when it was going over 114Mbps. I knew what the problem was and it should have been a quick fix.

All I had to do was to change from regular 32-bit counters to 64-bit counters and increase the maximum value to 1M. I have done that, but to my surprise the graph stopped working completely for the respective interface. So I had to dig into it, and debug the problem. I was able to see that the cacti poller snmp query was failing and returning:
Error in packet
Reason: (noSuchName) There is no such variable name in this MIB.
Failed object: IF-MIB::ifHCInOctets.10124

Read the rest of this entry »

Cacti uses for its web interface persistent mysql connections to the mysql server. Normally this is fine and you would not care about it, but if you want to disable this and make cacti use regular mysql connections (and properly close each of its open mysql calls) here is what you need to do:

edit: lib/database.php and replace PConnect with Connect

if ($cnn_id->PConnect($hostport,$user,$pass,$db_name)) {

Again, this is just for the web interface and if you don’t have any problems or particular reasons to change this, it is better to leave it as it is. For example I had to do this on a server where mysql had problems with persistent connections as those were affecting the proper functionality of the site.

Here is a list of 10 nagios 2.x web frontends that you might find useful if you are looking for a web interface to administer your nagios configuration.

1. Centreon / Oreon – http://www.centreon.com/
Centreon is a network, system, applicative supervision and monitoring tool, it is based upon the most effective Open Source monitoring engine : Nagios. Centreon provides a new frontend and new functionalities to Nagios. Read the rest of this entry »