July 22nd, 2008 Yvo
Life would be boring without change and lately I’ve gone through a lot of it. Other than my lack of updating of this blog, things have changed.
Some of the things that have changed, in no specific order:
- In May, after almost 4 years, Cam and I broke up. While she may have written extensively about this in her blog, I feel that there is nothing left to say on it. She cheated on me and that is just simply a deal breaker. Attempts to justify this is simply wrong as there is no excuse for that type of behavior.
- The colors of my condo have finally changed. The living and dining room was this nasty mustardy dark dark yellow, bordering light brown, now its bright yellow with a tint of orange. The bedroom went from a dark brown (with green) to a ice blue. Yum. Pics will be made soon.
- As of today a new couch. This thing kicks ass; fantastic to lay on.
My focus at work has also changed. Previously I was doing just system administration stuff but over the course of the last few months I’ve taken on more responsibility in the area of storage. So now I work with HDS, Netapp and a few Sun X4500s. Each have their own specific uses and it truly is exciting stuff, especially since who used to administer it left room for some major improvements to be made.
I have realized that I’d like to travel more. I am definitely not looking for a new job as I’m actually having a good time at Classmates with the one exception that if a job landed on my doorstep that would require me to travel a good amount (like 50%+) then I’d go for it.
Welp thats all for now.
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July 3rd, 2008 Yvo
So 18 months ago I deployed Zabbix at McGraw-Hill. Now I am doing exactly the same, only with a bit more hardware at Classmates.com
The setup.
Run Zabbix 1.5.3 in all 3 environments. Don’t customize so we can upgrade to 1.6 when that’s released in Q4 08.
Web / zabbix_serverd process server
1 for each environment (corp, prod, va). Machines are HL DL385 with an exception in VA where is a DL365. They are Opterons with RAID 1+0 and about 8gb of ram with dual nics connected to 1gbit ports. The work load isn’t here, its just the messenger. Runs RHEL 4.6.
Database server
3x Sun Fire T2000 servers, one for each environment. Running Solaris 10 05/08 and an source compiled optimized coolthreads build of MySQL 5.0.51b. Specs are 16 core Ultrasparc T1 procs with 8GB of ram again. Chuck Goolsbee would love these servers due to the amount of lower power they use but yet are so very functional These make perfect MySQL database servers. With about 200-300 hosts doing about 20-30 checks per host in each environment, they’ll need it too.
All three are in a distributed monitoring environment, where two child/slaves report back to the parent/master node. The big kahuna node will be in my corp environment with the child/slaves reporting back; similar to how our BI dept collects data.
Rolled out zabbix agent installation via cfengine packaged in a RPM for our RHEL4 based installations and added auto discovery rules as such in Zabbix. With 10 minutes I had an entire environment reporting various items back to the server. Unfortunately the configuration of server wasn’t this quick :-).
Things left over to do:
- The T2000s come with two filler trays for two more SAS drives. Plan to get 2x 146gb 10K SAS drives and run a ZFS pool on them for the MySQL db.
- Perform nightly db dumps to each environment’s Sun Fire X4500, Sun’s not so eco friendly 48TB disk drive monster.
Observations
-With corp completely done. The load on the mysql database server is about 7.x-8.x, thus there is still a full 50% left for expansion.
-Database is growing at a rate of 100MB a day, in part because historical data takes up a ton of space. This should slow down to a crawl on day 90 when it takes trending data (about 10% the size of history data) until day 180. The total DB size I am guess will be around 10-12GB.
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