Come on – it’s the middle of November, for heaven’s sake. I have two snowblowers that I’m dying to try out!
In other news, we just ordered one of these for work. Up until this point, we haven’t been doing any spam filtering on our mail, and it’s high time that we implemented something. We tossed around a bunch of options – Postini, exchange plugins, homebrew de-spaminating, etc, but it seemed like the barracuda device was the best option. Inside, it’s just basically an AMD-based PC. It’s running some flavor of linux along with spamassassin. It has a ton of very useful features that I’m excited to try out – and I’m especially looking forward to not hearing complaints from everyone about the spam issue. (as a sidenote, I *rarely* recieve spam to my account…perhaps people need to be a bit more careful with where they post their email, but I digress) So anyways – I’m excited. Hopefully the unit will arrive next week and then we can get it set up and running the week after Thanksgiving.
Peace out, y’all.
…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.
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