CentraLUG Notes, 1-October-2007: Michael Kazin on Nagios

[Ted Roche]

Ten attendees made it to the October meeting of the Central NH Linux
Group, coming from as far away as Nashua, Laconia, Peterborough and
Hanover. CentraLUG is a chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User
Group, and our meeting was held as usual on the first Monday of the
month at the New Hampshire Technical Institute's Library, Room 146, from
7 PM to 9 PM.

Michael Kazin presented Nagios[1], the host and service monitoring
system. Michael told us a bit of his colorful personal history, and his
exposure to Nagios as a student administrator of the Rutgers University
computer center. He had found a neat diagram of the relationships
between the configuration files in Nagios [2] (Nagios 2.x, though 3.x is
in beta) and went to explain how it could be used for businesses and
home users, keeping an eye on working systems, alerting the operating to
problematic conditions of low disk space, high CPU usage or
unavailability of resources or services. Nagios has a huge number of
pre-built modules, a 240-page manual, and documentation on how to extend
the system for your own use.

Michael ended up with a presentation of a working Nagios on his home
systems, and showed how shutting down a service would set the alarm,
allow the operator to flag the alarm as acknowledged, fix the problem,
and verify that the alarm cleared. While the audience watched,
participated and pestered Michael with questions, we identified and
fixed a couple of permissions issues with his install and got the system
to do things he'd never tried before. A good time was had by all. Wish
you were there.

Michael's slides are available on the GNHLUG site [3].

Bill Sconce was present to point out that modules could be written in
Python. Ben Scott was heckled. I made the usual announcements: GNHLUG
meetings can be found on http://www.gnhlug.org. Several affiliated
meetings are taking place this month: SwANH's annual infoeXchange, the
NEARfest ham radio gathering. See the web site for links.

Thanks to Michael for a fine presentation, to Bill Sconce for the
projector, to NHTI for providing the facilities and to all for attending
and participating.

[1] http://www.nagios.org
[2]
http://nagios.sourceforge.net/download/contrib/documentation/misc/config_diagrams/nagios-config.png
[3] http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/KazinNagios
-- 
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com