…unfortunately. I was hoping that I’d be able to implement an asterisk PBX system between our main office and our Vancouver project with the purpose of integrating them into our legacy PBX system. It would have been a really fun and educational project, allowing me to play with many really cool technologies including, but not limited to SIP, QoS, IAX, and a few others. Anyways – for now, that’s on hold, although there’s a good chance of me being able to implement it in the near future, in a scaled-down version for office-to-office calls.
However – I found another cool project that will be really cool when I’m finished getting it set up. I’ve been using MRTG for a long time to monitor the network traffic on all of our network devices at work – switches, routers, servers (both Linux and windows), access points, etc. It’s been working great, but it’s a pretty tedius process when I want to add a new host – everything is done through text files, which, while not the end of the world, it’s not overly convient.
Enter cacti. It’s a very robust front end to Tobi Oetiker’s RRDtool, which is the successor to MRTG. It allows the creation of new graphs/data sources/devices/etc from a web interface, and it keeps all of its data in a mySQL database. Cacti has support for templating both data sources and graphs, which allows for very easy maintenance and updates. And since RRDtool is able to graph pretty much any sort of data, I’m going to be able not only keep track of network usage (as I have been), but also to graph and keep a history of things like:
- CPU Usage
- Network latency
- Disk usage
- Memory/swap usage
- Chassis temperatures
- …and pretty much anything else
It’s going to take a bit of playing to get it right, but it’ll be great when it’s done…especially for a statistic junkie like me. :-)
/me goes off to figure out how to import 2+ years of MRTG data into cacti….
Now that the fileserver change has been completed successfully, my next task is to get an AMANDA server up and running. AMANDA is a project started by the University of Maryland to help facilitate backing up their servers. When I was at OSCON earlier this summer, I sat in on a class about AMANDA. Like many open-source projects, I had heard about it many times, but had never really given it much thought. After the class, however, I decided I really needed to give it a serious look.
Right now, the backup solution we’re using for the windows servers (which is working great) doesn’t really play well with the linux boxes…the remote backup agent for linux likes to run for a few days and then go into a zombie state – never to return. So…I decided that since I just retired a fileserver, which happened to be our old backup server, that I’d take the SCSI card out of it along with the Quantum DLT8000 (six tape changer) drive, and attach it to one of my linux boxes here and give AMANDA a try.
I installed the card and attached the tape changer to the linux box earlier today, and was able to get it to detect both the devices correctly. So now’s we’ll see how I do getting AMANDA configured.
So far so good – no complaints yet on the fileserver change.
In other news – have I mentioned how sick I am of house purchase-related paperwork?
I’ve finally completed the fileserver migration…and now it’s nearly 3:30 in the morning. Gotta love it. Sleepy time. Let’s hope I don’t get a call in the AM with file share problems…I think I’ll sleep it a bit later than usual.
Well I knew I was going to be doing a bit of work today, but I didn’t anticipate spending the entire day working. At work, we’re retiring an old fileserver and replacing it with a shiny new Dell PE2650. As far as systems administration go, this task is about as simple as it gets. Last week, I set up an rsync script to run every few hours that would sync the new fileserver with the old one. Theoretically, this was supposed to save me time today, as I should have just been able to do one last sync, remove the shares on the old server, create shares on the new server, set permissions, change the login scripts, and voila! New server!
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