greg haygood

There seem to be a number of fancy ways to get Windows machines to send their Events to a syslog server, but for downright simplicity, I chose evtsys from the Purdue Engineering Computer Network. To make it even easier, I added a silent installer on top of it using NSIS so we could deploy through our systems management tools.

Today I figured out how to check the various stats that are gathered by Zenoss. Took me a little while to figure out just what it does out of the box, how to turn on the rest, and where to look to see the pretty graphs.

I may have finally found the perfect monitor solution for my network: Zenoss. I have been using Nagios + Cacti + Smokeping for quite a while now. It works, but it's not integrated, and for many services, I'm running 2-3 checks. Running those every 5-10 minutes generates a tremendous amount of traffic (during the last 2 weeks, the monitor station has caused 20% of all traffic crossing the primary firewall!). The closest all-in-one I'd found previously was OpenNMS, which is so difficult to really understand and manage well, and so didn't fit my needs.

I've started helping out on Qunu. It's a great little service that matches experts with help-seekers, using IM for real-time chat instead of email, providing a much quicker and better solution to their problems than Usenet or Googling could. I just added their bot to my chat client (kopete, if you're curious), and can make myself available whenever I have downtime or a slow period. If someone needs help in an area that matches something in my profile, then Qunu asks if I want to help.

We started migrating from Frame Relay to MPLS this week. Decided to go with BGP routing during the turn-up, which sounded like it would be the easiest way. With traditional static routing, (I was told) our provider has to know about our network in order to get the packets to the right segment. With BGP, we manage our own routes and the provider's core doesn't have to be involved. Sounds perfect. I'm not a hardcore routing junkie, so it took a bit more effort than expected. But I did get it all figured out, and hope this will help someone else in the future.