Dibbler's Net

Amazon.com now has this book in stock and available (finally they have the cover image). Please use the link to the right if you would like to order

I am one of the co-author’s of this book and it is my first published item. Quite a learning process for me but something that I would like to do again. Overall working with the author team and with Syngress was a real pleasure and a true team effort.

Look inside for many of my well kept Nagios secrets and some of my insight on how a NOC really does work. If your interested my company provides contract consulting.

D~

Nagios 3 Enterprise Network Monitoring: Including Plug-Ins and Hardware Devices by Max Schubert, Derrick Bennett, Jonathan Gines, Andrew Hay, John Strand

We have been working with the publisher regarding the book being published before the website was updated. At this time there is a delay as Syngress’s website was recently stopped as their parent company Elsevier http://www.elsevierdirect.com/index.jsp is centralizing the websites.

Because of this the companion website and vmware image have not been placed online yet. This is something we are very concerned about and we are pushing the publisher as hard as we can to try and get this resolved.

*Update*
Until Syngress is able to bring the full companion site online they have given us permission to put the source files online. Please visit http://www.elsevierdirect.com/index.jsp is centralizing the websites.  Because of this the companion website and vmware image have not been placed online yet. This is something we are very concerned about and we are pushing the publisher as hard as we can to try and get this resolved.  *Update* Until Syngress is able to bring the full companion site online they have given us permission to put the source files online. Please visit http://www.semintelligent.com/nagios/book/ for all the source files seen in the book.  D~ ” title=“http://www.nagios3book.com/”>http://www.nagios3book.com/ for all the source files seen in the book.

D~

I finally found time to install Nagvis this weekend on a small Nagios server I manage. http://nagvis.org/

Nagvis is a really interesting idea that allows you display network status in a more graphical option. I believe in simple, let the monitor show me only what is broken. But there are times and places where you want to show the overall map. The part I really liked about Nagvis is that it allows me to export any of my existing network drawings as a png and then add service and host data on top of it to make it dynamic. When I firs saw Nagvis in action I thought it would configure similar to Nagios 3D status or some of the others where you hand coordinate everything and it can take a long time to get everything lined up just right.

The Install:
Well as the sys req’s say Nagvis depends on NDO. I personally have worked to avoid NDO since I have always liked having my Nagios work without a Database dependency. However sometimes a DB is needed and I hadn’t been through the process lately. Luckily my PHP was already V5 and I had GD pre-compiled in. I am running on FreeBSD 6 and had one issue with mysql compiling right. That was easily fixed with a gcc -I that wasn’t adding in right.

Once that was done NDO was compiled and I was ready to start. Nagvis was easy to install but I do need to spend some time looking at the file perm changes it asks for. Once installed the configuration part was easy and pretty much worked right out of the box.

While I feel the use of this type of tool is limited for help desk use I do see where it has management and/or customer access appeal. Now that I have it running I will see how well it works on a running setup for a few weeks and report back. Overall I say kudos to the Nagvis team on a good extension to Nagios.

D~

http://www.nagios.org/development/changelog.php

Nagios 3.0.1 is now out (yes 3 was released about 2 weeks ago) but there were 2 issues with Trends and another item that Ethan put out a patch this week. If you are new to Nagios then stay tuned as you will see many more posts on this topic here including code samples and other tidbits.

If you have never heard of Nagios that’s okay. Nagios is a Fault Management and System/Network Monitoring application similar to Openview or Tivoli with two major differences. First it works, second it’s opensource. I won’t say it’s free cause any product you install will cost you time and resources. It just helps when the software is free.

With 3.x being released now is a good time for those of you with Commercial Monitoring apps to take a fresh look at nagios and see if it’s time for you to switch.

D~