greg haygood

I recently needed to upgrade a client's servers from Debian Sarge to Lenny.  The client is not in the US, and has a low bandwidth (yet still high cost!) connection for their servers.  So running the netinst upgrade isn't a viable option since it will take so long and eat up so much of their quota.  On the other hand, Lenny is now up to 3 DVDs.  Even if most of what is needed is on the first disc, the hassle of configuring the CD repos is a big pain, considering that these are servers with a very tightly controlled set of packages already installed.  So I didn't want

I got Zenoss to gather messages from syslog today. Actually, I had it up a few days ago, but was having a problem that I finally resolved today. We already have a centralized syslog server in the data center using syslog-ng, so everything is hitting the monitor station. So logically it should be easy to feed the messages into Zenoss. But of course it never is. I ran into 2 problems:

Zenoss announced the release of version 1.1 today. Of course there'd be a new version just 3 days after I installed it! Looks to be very easy: just download the tarball, unpack, and run install.sh. But when I tried that, it died on the version of the python setuptools on the system. The Sarge backports repository only has 0.6a9-0bpo1, while Zenoss 1.1 requires 0.6c1.

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.