Posts Tagged ‘sysadmin’

I know I’ve mentioned how much I love the sysstat package before. I use sar regularly to help with performance diagnostics (Analyzing Linux System Performance And Finding Bottle Necks, CPU Performance Analysis In Linux, Baseline Analysis Is Important, CPU Performance Analysis In Linux Revisited). I wrote this little Nagios plugin to collect the performance metrics that sar collects.

I use this plugin with Zenoss and I set any performance thresholds there, more important to me was collecting the information for historical graphing. I searched around and didn’t really find any existing solutions thats why anyone wanting to do similar perhaps with cacti is stuck with my craptastic code (or please point me to a better implementation).  Anyway if you want to grab the plugin and check it out its on github.

check_sar_perf

If you hadn’t already guessed I am a big fan of the Xen hypervisor. Lately I have been using the Citrix XenServer release because it makes it quite palatable for my co-workers. One annoyance that I do have about XenServer is the requirement that you license it (with a free license) every year. If you fail to license it the GUI stops working. Now I hate relying on GUIs but the fact of the matter is others in my team expect to have a working GUI when they need to do something. And I dont know about you but I don’t really log onto the management console very often. Really I only log on to it if I need to provision a new server so its entirely plausible that a license would expire and I wouldn’t know about it until I really needed to do something.

I ended up writing a little Nagios plugin that checks the license expiration date using XenAPI. I don’t know that it’s 100% compliant with the plugin specification but it does work for me. I actually don’t prefer to use the warn and critical states with the Nagios (I use the performance data with Zenoss and apply thresholds there. I find that to be a bit more flexible.) but I did implement them. The plugin can be executed on the XenServer (you may want to reference how to install nrpe on XenServer) or on from your monitoring host as long as the host performing the check has the python XenAPI installed.

The plugin check_citrix_xenserver_license can be found on github.

I hope someone can find it useful.

Have you ever had a machine that was a bit flaky? You know those ones that occasionally crash and don’t write anything useful into the log file. Sometimes you can capture those messages with netconsole. Just revisiting a small walk-through I wrote a while back.

Remote kernel logging with netconsole for fun and profit

I like to have as little run in dom0 as possible. However some things you really need checked from dom0, like the status of your raid perhaps. Just some quick instructions on getting Nagios NRPE running in XenServer.

1. Install EPEL repository and disable it by default (remember we don’t want to accidentally install unnecessary packages)

   wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/$(uname -i)/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm
   rpm -hiv epel-release*.rpm
   sed -i 's/enabled=1/enabled=0/g' /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo
   

2. Install nrpe and configure it to start on boot

   yum install --enablerepo=epel nrpe
   chkconfig nrpe on
   

3. Modify the firewall to allow NRPE connections. Add the following before the REJECT line in /etc/sysconfig/iptables

   -A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 5666 -j ACCEPT
   

4. Restart your firewall and start nrpe

   restart your firewall , and start nrpe
   /etc/init.d/iptables restart && /etc/init.d/nrpe start
   

5. Configure nrpe like normal and have fun

I was recently asked how I became a Systems Administrator. I answered with the normal story of my life and moved on. However, it got me thinking about what has actually led me to where I am. A colleague of mine had recently mentioned how people love top x lists and best x lists so I sat down and came up with my list of top 10 traits of a Systems Administrator. (more…)