The ins and outs of Yvo’s life.
October 3rd, 2006 Yvo
Over the last few weeks I’ve been looking for a decent monitoring system that would monitor the 40 odd servers at work. Now anyone with even a small foot hold in the open source world has heard of nagios. Nagios is very open ended system that is very flexible but at the same time can be a behemoth to configure. Not to mention that it primarily depends on the SNMP protocol (yes it supports others as well) and there are a ton of plugins to chose from but hardly any clear documentation as everyone has *their* way of running Nagios.
So enter Zabbix. Another open source product that is also backed by the same company with a support contract. Easily to get support via the forums located on that website (Nagios does *not* have official support forums, but links to unofficial support forums) and the main product manager, Alexei, is very easy to contact. Not to mention that the product is stable and after you get the interface down (which is a blessing / hateful considering how entirely segregated the “configuration” section is from the “monitoring” section) its very easy to configure and setup. On the client side I can either do A. SNMP or B. an agentd that runs on the client machine. I have chosen B for all our Linux machines (Fedora and Debian). Easy to setup and it only requires two ports to open on the firewall (makes it easy for the corporate red tape).
It does everything I need: monitor logs, check processes (like httpd/apache, (x)inetd, mysqld, oracle, jboss), monitor critical files for any alterations (via checksum), monitor network bandwidth (out and in), process load (1m, 5m, 15m), memory usage (swap & physical) and uptime. The agent hardly produces any additional load on the machine nor is it a memory hog.
Currently its monitoring our internal machines (3 development, 1 proxy and itself) and it does a mighty fine job. Oh and load on the zabbix server machine. Well monitoring 5 machines is producing a 0.05 - 0.10 load. This is after upgrading the debian box from the 2.4.27 kernel to 2.6.17… when it was running the 2.4.27 kernel its load was 0.8 - 1.0. The thing that takes up the most load is mysqld (mysql 5.0.24) which isn’t too surprising since it does approximately 30,000 queries every hour for the 5 machines currently being monitored.
Posted in tech related, work related | 2 Comments »
May 26th, 2006 Yvo
It isn’t every day where I come across a posting where I think to myself, wow that is nicely written. Recently Alexander Kjerulf of postiviesharing.com wrote about on how not to lead geeks. I have seen articles like this before but what sets this one apart is that it is written clearly and its not a ‘rant’, rather it is an open letter to managers of geeks worldwide. Personally I’d like my “fearless leader” work on #8, #6, & #4 (thats in proper order as #8 is truly bad at times with a #6 trailing in a very close 2nd).
Here is the read up….
http://positivesharing.com/2006/03/how-not-to-lead-geeks/
Posted in general, tech related, work related | 1 Comment »
May 11th, 2006 Yvo
About two weeks ago (and two posts below) I reported that my Mac was back. Well that lasted about 2 weeks. On Friday last week it started spontanously freezing up at random times to. It could go hours without freezing up but at other times it would insta-freeze at the moment it was done booting up.
This bothered me greatly. Here was a company I basically represent at my work and my product at home was sucking badly. Hell I even convinced my mom to switch over to Apple (who is still happy to this day). On Monday night I vigorously started a report on bbb.org’s website and sent it off (first doing a triple check for unnecessary attitude as you will get no where with no company if your first, of possibly many, emails is a nasty one). I included all possible details I could such as receipt numbers, repair numbers, times I brought it in, etc. I also mentioned that the last time the technician failed to plugin the CPU fan. For the resolution I wrote that I wanted a refurbished rev C G5 or refurb rev A/D Intel Core Duo as previous companies had offered (such as HP in the past) as I certain that the machine I owned had gremlins and that I still see PowerMac beige G3s perform fine in our datacenter to this day (and they been on non-stop for 6-7 years).
However the bbb.org can sometimes take weeks to contact the company as it has to go through all these official channels. I remember that a year prior I sent an email to sjobs@apple.com asking if the iMac G5 was a good product. Considering I was going through these problems, now would be a great time to tell the team that responds to that email address that it has been far from wonderful. So off went a brief summary that I had contacted the address a year prior and that I basically have been going through hell with it. Attached was the BBB report stating that this is coming down the pipeline as well.
Less then 24 hours later I was contacted by Apple’s Executive Customer Relations team. Someone named Arin contacted me. He left a message on our answering machine at home and Cam relayed the information to me stating that someone from Apple had called. I returned Arin’s call from my desk at work but got his voice mail. We played phone tag throughout Wednesday.
Thursday morning I contacted him early and he picked up directly. This time we talked about the problems I have been experiencing and he was in full agreement that my unit needed to be replaced. At this point he offered me a new unit straight from the factory or store shelf if they had stock. I was surprised, in a very good way. All those bad thoughts I had about Apple the last few days simply were put aside by the fact that they are the extra mile to replace my bad unit. This is unlike HP where I had to convince the lady to possibly be open to providing me a refurbished unit (which I didn’t go for as it was far less superior to the unit I owned).
So summary… tomorrow I am going to the Bellevue Square Apple Store and picking up a new 20″ iMac Intel Core Duo. I am still going to be slightly reserved about the iMac and remain careful to judge it, however Apple Corporate certainly has done their part by providing me a new unit. The only cost for me is the new memory module I will have to buy as it doesn’t take DDR400 but rather DDR2667 SODIMMs.
Posted in general, tech related | No Comments »
April 28th, 2006 Yvo
Well its official, the iMac 20″ rev B has definitely some issues. Sure it could be streak of bad luck, but really… its gone back now twice for the same exact problem: Logic board & power supply problem. Two times now have they had to replace it. The repair costing $900 (covered by warranty and soon to be AppleCare) each time, already basically paying for the iMac (2x $900).
This time around they, the southcenter Apple Store, was a lot quicker at fixing the Mac but at a hefty cost. First thing I did when I took the iMac out of the box is open up the back to take a look since I have to insert my elsewhere purchased memory (from Crucial.com) as Apple won’t even touch my Mac if I dont take it out. When I opened up the Mac from the back I noticed something immediately. The cable that runs to the HD sensor (which is awfully close to the memory banks) was basically blocking the first memory bank from having any memory inserted, thus the Apple tech put it in my 2nd bank. A simple fix with a flat head screw to push the cable down made this problem go away. However my 2nd observation is when I noticed the power cable to “FAN1″ was completely disconnected. As in, not even close to plugged in. “FAN1″ is the fan to the CPU, aka the blazing hot G5 that Apple is literally running away from. At this point I get worried and do a complete inspection with what I can see without removing any components. I didn’t find anything else, but a lot of the iMac is covered with various pipes, heatsinks and what not.
It worries me that the Mac genuises did such a sloppy job. I know dealing with ipod after ipod can deter you from working on computers, but this was a pretty terrible job. I say this knowing my girlfriend works at that very same store. I am just glad that the iMac rev B (and A) allow easy access to work on the computer, however Rev C & the new Intel iMacs do NOT allow this so if the same Mac genuis had worked on a Rev C and my computer started smoking, I’d be in deeper problems.
So the moral of the story: I’d rather wait 10 days (like last time) for a computer that comes back without flaws then 3 days where my dad could’ve done a better job.
Yvo
Posted in rants, tech related | No Comments »
March 21st, 2006 Yvo
On digg.com:
This woman doesn’t understand how Windows/Firefox profiles work and leaves her fiance of 5 years after finding info about dating sites he visited. Then she then files a bug about it on Bugzilla.
read more | digg story
This story is sort of funny, might be cruel, but funny none-the-less. Did you know that Firefox could also unhide those saved passwords. All you have to do is hit “Show Passwords”.
Posted in digg.com, tech related | No Comments »
February 20th, 2006 Yvo
This is the right way to do it. I have tried it now on 4 different boxes, 5 different versions (ranging from 4.9 to 6.1-prerelease).
After you cvsup the kernel…
cd /usr/src
make buildworld
make buildkernel KERNCONF=(namehere)
make installkernel KERNCONF=(namehere)
mergemaster -p
make installworld
mergemaster
reboot
You can leave out KERNCONF if you just want to use the generic kernel (which is a good idea if your upgrading to a major version number say 5.4 to 6.0.
Posted in tech related, work related | No Comments »
February 4th, 2006 Yvo
The movies span subjects from iMac ads to the SNL spoof of Steve Jobs.
Sure, these videos are available in other places on the net, but the folks at the Different District have organized them and made them searchable, two big pluses.
read more | digg story
Finally a central place of where they can totally brainwash my brain to think Apple.
Posted in digg.com, tech related | No Comments »
January 15th, 2006 Yvo
I love this ad. Boy am I happy that Apple finally came out with a Mac ad again instead of the continuing iPod ads.
Oh and the voice is by Kiefer Sutherland.
Posted in tech related | No Comments »
January 15th, 2006 Yvo
On digg.com
OH…MY…GOD!!! You’ll love watching this video taken by the Havard Japan of Club, showing the Japanese “Train of Tomorrow” SWOOOSH past!!!
read more | digg story
Wow… this is an awesome video. Can’t wait till this becomes the norm 50 years from now :-).
Posted in digg.com, tech related | No Comments »
January 14th, 2006 Yvo
From digg.com
One can notice that the processor is not soldered to the motherboard, but via a socket. So, it will be potentially possible to change it in the future, if Apple does not prevent such modifications by some hardware or software trick.
read more | digg story
I have the pictures available locally as the site that this is originally hosted on is a tad bit overworked.
Keep in mind that these pictures are from the front end of the unit, not from the back end (User Serviceable section), thus it looks kind of… ugly.
Click on post to see pictures.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in digg.com, general, tech related | 19 Comments »