Nagios

Lacie 2Big NAS



I purchased a Lacie 2Big NAS to act as backup storage - it was quiet and nicely designed - it fitted into a home environment. Unfortunately, the device only offered email notifications of failure - which didn’t fit well against my Nagios based monitoring approach. A bit of protocol reverse engineering and studying their released sources resulted in a Nagios plugin that could monitor the NAS’s health.

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Prowl as a Nagios Notifier

Prowl (@ProwlApp) works now (Apple it seems has finally sorted out its developer portal issues in relation to certificates) and notifications are flowing. All in all the presentation and configuration of alerts is great. Read More...

Prowl

As part of improving my reporting of Nagios alerts I decided to try using the Growl framework via Prowl to my iPhone. This was precisely the wrong time to do so as Apple is having an extended down time on their developer centre and a certificate renewal and hence his push notifications are not working. I have to praise the developer of Prowl as in spite of his obvious frustrations he has used Twitter to keep his users informed in a humorous and effective way. This is one of the best examples of handling a fault that is out of your control and crippling to your business that I have seen. Read More...

It is better when it is green

Monitoring systems are central to my happiness as a systems administrator. They tell me when things go wrong … hopefully before the phone rings … warn me when things are getting close to failing and can provide more directly useful information than direct customer reports. The major problem with monitoring systems is getting the information from the system to the human. Nagios’s web page will make noises and can provide a text based display; but sometimes you need a simple display that prompts you to go look for a problem. This is where traffic lights and other visual indicators are useful. Read More...