disgruntled-dutch.com

Deploying Zabbix once again

Yvo — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:49:25 +0000

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.

W00t… Exchange support on my NDA phone

Yvo — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 05:29:27 +0000

So with a certain fruit company announcing Exchange support for their one button phone 5-6 weeks ago, I signed up my department and we got approved even though I sponsored myself on everything (corporate didn’t and they did all the proper sponserships, heheheh. I guess the fruit company still likes the rule breakers :-)).

I can’t talk about it specifically because I can’t talk about it so it. However so far so good but it definitely is *beta* software. Some quirks like it wiping out your existing contacts when you enable the exchange calendar and contact sync (the calendar sync works great… the contact sync it self not so much). However the ability to get your email and acknowledge pages without opening up your laptop is fantastic. Once I disabled contact sync and forced sync my contacts back over I was good to go.

Haven’t tried the Cisco VPN yet, have to find my profile file to load that one.

All we need now is landscape SMS and MMS support :-).

simply put: ilo rules

Yvo — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 04:23:33 +0000

It wasn’t too long ago (2 years) where somehow it was required to be in front of a machine if it were to go down (as in it was no longer accessible via the OS) or needed an OS installed. Thankfully the most of the servers I work with now have remote capability like HP’s ILO which has a ‘virtual serial port’ interface or sun’s console access (ok prompt / ilom). It is how my colleagues and I can administer servers 3000 miles away or when we don’t feel like hanging out in the office we can do it from home. Like me tonight finishing up a kickstart (which also simply rules) and configuration.

Now if only we could remotely replace physical hardware without paying $150 per hour for a tech to do it.

Aruba!!

Yvo — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 19:15:50 +0000

So it took a week longer then anticipated but last night we booked our vacation to Aruba at the end of this month. Mmmmmm 7 days of glorious Caribbean sun.

Obama sweeps Saturday’s Democratic contests

Yvo — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 06:37:30 +0000

I am glad some of my faith was restored in the voters of some US states; today Barack Obama won all Democratic party caucuses and primaries being held in Louisiana, Nebraska and Washington State. Afterwards he gave a very electrifying speech quoting former great presidents (not necessarily Democrat either) such as Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR and Kennedy. Unlike the South Park episode a few years ago where the general population could either vote for a “big douchebag” or a “turd sandwich”. I hope come November we won’t be repeating those choices.

PS. In my 3 years of being a digg member this is the first time a submission of mine made the front page.

What I’m up to.

Yvo — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 09:29:11 +0000

It occurred to me that I should write more on this blog. Alas a lot of times I don’t have something interesting to say or I have to rant about something. Then there are those moments where I truly do want to post something up but another event pops up. I guess this will be a post where those that check in once a year or blue moon will still see I’m alive and doing well.

So what’s going on with me lately? I’m still working at Classmates. Its a good job. Its different working in a larger team then I’ve had in the past. I can definitely see some good things that this already has taught me. The biggest being that everything needs to be discussed and reviewed before implemented or changed. You also have to appreciate criticism instead of hating it. The job has also taken me to Virginia twice already since I started in August. One ended up being a three week trip, the other only 3 days. I can definitely see myself continue to grow there.

Cam and I are also doing well. Christmas came and then passed leaving us with only a small debt as opposed to larger ones in the past. I gave her a nice digital SLR like camera and she got me a TiVo HD. I was finally able to retire the Comcast cable box and replace it for a $1.79 per month cable card. The relationship Cam and I have is certainly a lot better then it was in the past. I’m glad we overcame our difficulties and problems we had earlier this year.

I hope that this year I can start taking part time classes at BCC or some sort of school. While I am gaining a lot of hands on experience in working with systems and year over year I see a dramatic improvement in my skills. However I really wish to improve my communications skills and managerial skills plus I’d be nice if I could get a degree out of it eventually so I have a backbone to my experience.

Hopefully I’ll be successful in my goal and I’m sure I’ll write about it here eventually. For those that do their yearly checks to see what I’m up to… hope all is going well in your life.

Yvo

Back to Virginia

Yvo — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 04:29:23 +0000

Going back to good ol’ Virginia for 3 days this time instead of 3 weeks. Hopefully HP will get their sh… I mean act together so all the parts I need are there when I get there. One thing is for sure, navigating the HP support tree is helluva lot harder then getting someone from Sun on the phone.

The Virginia transformation

Yvo — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 02:57:03 +0000

The last 3 weeks I’ve spent my time in Virginia, specifically in one of the Equinix datacenters in Ashburn. I was there to help build out a datacenter. When we arrived it was a box galore everywhere (165 HP DL365s, 50 Cisco 3750s, 30 Cisco 2960s, 2 Cisco 6500s) and the accompanying accessories for everything (supervisor cards, memory, the works). The racks and pdus had been setup, nothing else had. So over the course of 3 weeks we basically unboxed, racked, cabled and did basic configuration on everything. Hindsight is a bitch and the fact that pictures were frowned upon made it difficult to make a photo journey. However I do have 6 photos that represent what has been completed in the end.

All in all a very good trip. Got to see some of Washington DC too. WSDOT could truly learn something from VADOT concerning the implementation of roads, highways and what not.

Cart of Ciscos

Yvo — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 04:44:28 +0000

All in a day’s work. A cart full of 24 port Cisco 3750s… the 48 port variety is in another area.

In VA/DC for awhile

Yvo — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 18:06:08 +0000

I’ll be in VA / DC from November 1st through November 20th building out a new data center. Fun fun.