|
|
|
| Browse NETS topics: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | |
These are the notes about the CentOS distrbution that's part of the GroundWark VMware appliance that I used for testing.
To set up the Dvorak keyboard layout in GNOME, first add Dvorak to the list of available layouts.
I started the OS and it seemed fine, except that it hung for a while trying to ifconfig eth0. Once it was up, I used ifconfig to get the machine's MAC address (00:0c:29:c4:77:fa), and then I asked Greg Woods to add it to the ones recognized by the DHCP server on the .8. net. I rebooted and I had an IP address (128.117.11.40). DHCP did it's job: the CentOS machine can use DNS. Greg's dynamic DNS did it's job: it used the name supplied by the CentOS machine and defined the name 0-c-29-c4-77-fa.scd.ucar.edu.
At the bottom of the screen, it said
The first thing in the online "Bookshelf" docs is to "Verify the installation". When I clicked on the link, the cursor started spinning. Many minutes later, it was still spinning. I gave up.
Tom Ammon at Utah uses GroundWork.
GroundWork is distributed for Red Hat, Suse or CentOS. No support for Debian. You have to install MySQL, Java and perl-DBI yourself. This may be fixed in version 5.3, which will be released in ~March 2009. That release also works with Nagios 3.0. GW assumes that you have a dedicated server. The GW install process assumes that you can install the tested versions of Java, and that you can remove any other versions.
GW community edition is fine for less than 500 polls a minute. If you want to scale larger, or you need the DashBoard feature, buy the commercial version.
GW has automatic discovery. It populates a MySQL relational database, and then generates Nagios configs from the database. It detects "parent" dependencies used by Nagios.
Check out http://www.nagiosexchange.org/ for plugins. Like, is there an ExtraView plugin?
There are several kinds of dependencies in Nagios. We use the simplest kind - network dependencies. We could use service dependencies. You can define a service dependency on another service that exists on a different machine.
Nagios doesn't do Host polling. It only does service polling. When a service fails, then Nagios does a host check.
GW/Nagios does "Performance Monitoring" and stores data in RRD files. We do this now with John's ping graphs. Can we do more of this and less Cricket? In any case, GW can integrate with Cacti (maybe only in GW commercial version).
GroundWork add-ons include
If you want to monitor web servers via HTTP, try WebInject. It can replay an HTTP transaction via Nagios. Not sure how this is better than check_http.
GW provides a set of AJAX interfaces that are like Nagios's CGI interfaces, only better. GW folks are in the process of re-implementing their web portal code to move away from "guava" and to "jboss".
GW has a host-service table that says what services are on each host. This breaks from the the Nagios model, where each service definition has to say what host the service is on. In other words, in Nagios you can't define a service that isn't attached to a host. You can in GW, so GW can distribute a library of tested service definitions for use by customers.
GM also defines host and service profiles, which are like Nagios's templates.
All the documentation is in "BookShelf".
There's a thing called "weathermap" that does graphic displays of Nagios networks.
When you install GW, don't load your existing Nagios configuration files into Monarch. You can do it, but it's much better to use auto-discovery.