Notes on Nagios setup

 Triviality  5 Responses »
Jul 312012
 

Trying to setup Nagios to play with monitoring facilities, turned out there are way too many things are NOT running out of the box. I’m trying to write as much as I can remember, so that I don’t have to Google again next time I step into the setup task again. Sure, others may be befinited from this as well.

A brief intro about the environment – I have my monitoring node in EC2 in east coast, another 3 servers to be monitored in EC2 west cost, all four are running Ubuntu 12.04, plus another physical box sitting in a IDC in Beijing, China, running Fedora 14 (the owner does not want to upgrade for some reason). Almost all servers are running classic applications for Web, such as Nginx, mysql, etc. Other than those public services I also need to monitor system status like disk space, memory utilization, ssh liveness, etc. Continue reading »

Sample codes

 Triviality  1 Response »
Jul 262012
 

I’m going to code some samples for following feathres:

  • Authentication
  • Captcha
  • Rate limit (on web pages)
  • OAuth (facebook, twitter, google+, etc)
  • Payment (PayPal for now, not sure what eles)

The idea is try to reserve enough code slices for future use.

Make everything else in the world a nail

 Triviality  No Responses »
Jul 262012
 

We are in the design phrase of a new product, since there are lots of features and it seems they can group up to twitter-like, blog-like, forum-like, mail-like, and so on, so we started looking around for existing open source products to fit in.

I was thinking about this while driving home last night, and a interesting idea jumped into my mind – maybe I can use my knowledge on mail system to contribute some stuffs.

Then this came to my mind – whenever all you have is a hammer, then everything else in the world would be a nail. I know this is not a praise, but I don’t care, I just want to do everything through an existing mail feature, or a little bit tweaked mail feature.

I’m going to write a series to see if I can make everything popular in this world (SNS, Mobile, etc) built up mostly on a mail system, “mostly” means at least 80% of the features. I’m not going to try to replace systems/infrastructures that support mail running, like storage, authentication, etc, since that will make things ridicolous (chicken and egg problem). I’m going to assume that there is a running mail system already, and I’m going to try my best to build everything else based on mail.

This is totally for fun, don’t follow this approach for your production system. ;-

EOL Fedora 15

 Triviality  No Responses »
Jul 232012
 

I failed to upgrade a friend’s Fedora 15 last year so I left it running there untouched, however, Fedora announced EOL of 15, which means I have to risk leaving it up and running without any further patches, or I have to do an on site upgrade.

Personally I prefer an on site upgrade to make sure everything is up-to-date, but my friend may not like this as the rental (i.e. hosting) will be ended in less a year.

Anyway, waiting for reply now.