build a webserver yesterday on CentOS and running ISP Config 3 – this took quite a long time to do, found a great tutorial that makes it a breeze, tutorial can be found here
Was a good experience, nice to have something up and running by the end of the day. This was the first time I have built anything that uses nginx and not apache.
Finally cracked it! Got my email notifications to work. Granted I probably should have got this to work towards the beginning but I was struggling enough getting my head around nagios/icinga and linux.
To get my notifications to work, I had to install mailutils (this makes the mail command work) and postfix (which needed careful configuration). I set up my notifications to be relayed through a gmail account on the grounds I didnt want to configure a full SMTP server on the box as well.I will stick a guide up about this in the next few days – its taken me a few days of head scratching and as ever a lot of learning to get this cracked.
Why it wasnt working? In the commands.cfg for icinga (found at /usr/local/icinga/etc/objects/commands.cfg) where it define’s the commands for “notify-service-by-email” and “notify-host-by-email” it had the “mail” command listed as being installed in /bin/mail – however on my ubuntu 11.1 install this has been installed to /usr/bin/mail – I changed this and the notifications started working straight away. Before I was convinced it was a problem with postfix, so I reconfigured that a thousand times – I dont know why I continued on that train of thought for so long when from very near the beginning of this stage I have been able to send e-mails from out of the terminal, thus eliminating a postfix problem. Well, im still learning, I guess to learn you have to get it wrong sometimes…
I have finally got my Nagios project a step further today, in that I have got it running and monitoring remote sources. Head over to my Nagios core – Icenga page for a guide and links to usefull resources – with the scripts made by a couple of guys far cleverer than me, it was alot easier than my initial escapades in Nagios Core a month and a half ago, that ended with me installing many dif distro’s of linux convinced they were the cause of my ignorance. However, this made me realise that ubuntu for the most part is the one for me.
In other news, a piece of work in the pipelines to do an IT inventory and upgrade 600 machines to use trend worry free business – fingers crossed the work comes in, fingers crossed I don’t go bonkers doing all those machines.
Overall – pretty chuffed that my icinga is at least working. Next step – get this icinga server to talk to another remotely, and set up a proper distributed monitoring system.
I have been doing alot of com port work recently, it became obvious that windows 7 does no longer include hyperterminal! Hyperterminal I managed to find on the web here, download extract and run it, runs fine under windows 7 32 bit or 64 bit.
Also – I have had a whole myriad of problems with the windows installer service on client machines at various sites recently. These always seem to centre around registry permissions and SYSTEM access to various registry keys. Even after the permissions have been changed sometimes this still doesnt work, so it is essential to run the Microsoft Installer Clean-up utility, available here.
And – watch out for the Metropolitan Police virus. This one is a bit of a sight to see, it either inhabits the system shell to display a nasty .exe that really locks you out of most of the system due to its nature as running as the shell, or the .exe is put into the start up folder both physically (start menu) but also as an msconfig entry in the registry. Easy fix if you know how, both are done in safe mode with command prompt. Best explanations are found in this article and comments there of.
I am not expecting to re-write the books on blogging, nor am I any kind of web professional so if you are expecting the latest singing and dancing php and javascript magic then I can link you to a few examples, but that isnt what you will find here. What I am is a relatively young IT professional, I have been working in the industry for a few years now. What I hope to do here is post findings, fixes, points of interest and publish some of my own work/guides. I will also be hosting files that in the past it has taken me along time to find online, these are often quite old so I’m sure as times goes on these will be less and less useful, its mostly entirely selfish as going forward these files are now always available for me online when I could be on site and potentially need them.
Things I am currently working on: