Eh? I mean, seriously.
At work, we started using Nagios to monitor the hosts and their services for any issues, so we can, proactively, take actions when we see trouble coming (hard disk that fills up rapidly, restarting services, etc).
Recently we change the Nagios host to another IP address and found ourselves having to change a few dozen NSClient.ini files on the server. Even though we use DNS names as monitoring host (only nsclient access on port 12489/tcp is allowed from a certain host), NSClient by default caches the IP address (Using cache_allowed_hosts, which is set to “1″ by default) so we were bound to change quite some files.
To do this, we have to do the following: Continue reading…
At work, we have a lot of HP Blade servers, and manage these through HP Onboard Administrator. By default, the server names are adapted from the Windows hostname, due to HP Insight Management agent tools. When running Linux, there doesn’t seem to be a option, or at least I couldn’t find one.
While questioned a few times on HP forums (such as this thread), questions rose to “installing windows on the server, then reinstall Linux”, it is possible in the web interface to be set. It’s not obviously placed, and hence might require some searching. Continue reading…
I received from several BlackBerry IM contacts the following message:
Hello, greetings from RIM (Research In Motion) proprietors of BlackBerry. This message is to inform all of our users, that our servers have recently been really full, so we are asking for your help to fix this problem. We need our active users to re-send this message to everyone on your contact list inorder to confirm our active users that use BlackBerry Messenger, if you do not send this message to all your BlackBerry Messenger contacts then your account will remain inactive with the consequence of losing all your contacts.
We apologize for the inconvenience but this is the only way possible to resolve this problem. Sincerely Research in Motion. For more information visit:
www.blackberry.com/inactiveuser
Of course it doesn’t take much to realize that this is a chain-mail type of IM. The web page itself doesn’t exist. Wonder how many people forwarded it..
All hail, newspapers and radio’s stated that VoIP calls are now allowed in the UAE, but.. -and there’s a catch always- only “through licensed operators”.
In layman terms, VoIP calls will be billed and the prices will be set by those operators. So we’d have to wait and see if there will be big savings on VoIP calles, if any at all. The licensed operators would be:
- Du
- Etisalat
- Thuraya
- Yahsat
Of course, skype and vonage and the likes remains blocked, as they don’t generate revenue for the local market. Normal for a country with a large number of expatriates, whereby the telco’s main revenue is from overseas calls.
Thank you,
Michael
Hi all,
In our intranet development environment we run Microsoft Virtual Server, it was setup by the consultants who developed our Intranet’s first phase. Now, the second phase is about the start, we dusted off those servers and found out that the virtual machines all had no network adapters installed anymore.
After cursing, and making a plan of migrating this to VMWare’s ESX (sorry consultant) next week, we found out that the only way of solving this was to remove the virtual adapters from the Virtual Server console, and adding them again. In the client machine’s, a static IP assigned adapter was trying to fetch an IP address (yeah, go figure). By just setting it to dynamic (dhcp), and then reassigning the static address, it was solved.
I guess Microsoft is about just re-trying it, rebooting, re-adding. But we’ll be switching to ESX anyways.
Thank you,
Michael
Dear all,
We are in the process of changing the monitoring system on part of our network from Zenoss to Nagios. This is not a Zenoss vs. Nagios debate, as both products are awesome and do the things they are designed for very well. We (Christian and myself) use a combination of Cacti for bandwith monitoring and Zenoss for server and device monitoring. Now, recently we decided to change the latter to Nagios. It is know for its “great deal of flexibility when integrating Nagios into their environment” (Galstad, 2005)
As Zenoss was configured using SNMP Informant to grab information about the MS Windows servers (available disk space, CPU load, etc) and Nagios uses NSClient++; one of the time consuming tasks was getting the client on the server (thank you domain 
) and configuring each and every server on the Nagios server. I guess there should be some sort of discovery tool for Nagios, but I couldn’t directly find one.
In order to tackle the copy-pasting for a few dozen config files, and to brush up my bash scripting again, I wrote the Nagios Nsclient++ cfg maker Continue reading…
When reading about social media strategies today, I stumbled across follow excerpt:
In most big companies, IT, digital, marketing and sales not only don’t work together, they compete with each other. Until they start collaborating as a team, you will not succeed in social media.
If you’d change the last two words from “social media” to “business”, the statement, sadly, remains the same.
My home country’s Coat of Arms states “Eendracht maakt macht” (roughly translates to Unity makes strength). Aside from also being Brooklyn’s motto, it should be on several company’s mindsets.
In the current economic slowdown, many face a semi burnout feeling as jobs seem less challenged and less changes seem to be happening in the short term.
Here are a few things that I believe will increase the team spirit in an IT environment.
1. Destroy boundaries
My team (systems and applications) and the network team work closely together. In the office, we physically sit in cubicles next to each other. While thinking about tearing the cubicles down for a while already, last week we did it. This increased the “bond” between the teams.
We now see each other, and have a more lively atmosphere. Small things just get done more quickly, and communication (and occasional jokes, of course) improved dramatically.
If you minimize boundaries and distance between people, they just seem to work better with each other, and your team spirit increases. Break down walls, have informal team-meetings, and invite all for lunch together.
2. Create small project teams, and give ownership
Both the network guys and myself came up with a few internal “projects”, under a cleanup program to increase security, visibility and control. When we both started in Nakheel, we inherited a scattered infrastructure and thus we’ll be consolidating and streamlining this to make our operational tasks easier. This big program will have a gazillion sub-tasks, each with its own project manager, or rather, owner. This makes people feel more in control, and have them being more passionate about it.
Let users “own” a certain project or program, and they’ll pour more time into it. Make “empowerment” a value amongst your people, rather than just a fancy word on your core value booklet.
3. Create (relevant) tasks on what people want to do
Turns out that few of the members of my team love to do development. With this, we will be creating (or call it “hacking together”) several systems to make our jobs easier. One of these will be revamping our monirong infrastructure. We might create modules for our current systems, and publish them to the community, or if this is too hard, create our own humble monitoring system, and publish it open source.
Check what employees want to do, build one’s career is equally or often more important than building the company. See what your team members want to, and align accordingly.
4. Conduct internal trainings
With IT budgets altered, as all company budgets, companies often don’t have the luxury of “sending their guys” on external trainings. We’re conducting internal trainings to each other, for two reasons; first obvious reason would be to learn new things, second is to start conversations between teams to understand what each one is doing, and see if there’s room for improvement. An extra pair of eyes is never bad.
5. Ask your users what they want, and deliver it without too much hassle
A typical IT setup is that many tools are bought, without the clear need for it. I usually give a car related analogy, so it’s like buying an turbocharged SUV when you just need to pickup weekly groceries. When a department grows, many layers are introduced, to maximize control and give everybody something to do. This often turns into time consuming processes whereby many projects fail. We try to ask what our users want, assess feasibility and deliver it. You’d be surprised how happy you could make them, working with an agile mindset, and putting your techies with the business.
Just a few things, how we try to run things at our ends. We don’t succeed all the time, since I come from a start-up environment (and God do I miss it), and we just have enterprise boundaries to deal with. But we’re trying, and slowly we’re getting there.
