I thought you were dead....

"Not hardly," as John Wayne would say in Big Jake.  Fourth quarter is always a busy time at work, but it has been fairly hectic for the past six months in general.  During that time I have pushed out a distributed Opsview deployment which is working very well.  I plan on elaborating more on that project in the next week or so.

Nagios evolved?

Look in the near future for some info on a monitoring product I ran across a while back called Opsview.  It's a super-polished version of Nagios that looks very promising.  I haven't had a chance to get it up and running yet (hence the frazzled bit in the blog description), but plan on doing so in the next week or two.  They have released an Android app that is mated to the normal web app that looks very promising!

Stay tuned for more info...

Ever heard of grammar check?

Just saw this in an email from our MS Exchange admin.  Apparently Microsoft only makes a product with grammar check, but doesn't bother using it!

CA ARCServe on Ubuntu

I've been extremely busy the past few months, but wanted to throw a quick post up before I forget.  If you're unfortunate enough to have to run CA ARCServe (BrightStor or whatever else they are calling it this week), then you know what I pain it can be getting it going on Linux boxen.  The install scripts aren't the best, and I have yet to find a single version that will install without some kind of tweak to the install scripts.
I had to update the agent on my Ubuntu desktop today and as usual, it barfed.  I happened to do a quick search and ran across a great port that provided a quick fix without all the usual hack-and-slash that I usually have to perform.
Props to Nik!
How to install CA ArcServe Backup r15 Linux Agent on Ubuntu

Not ready for IPv6?

Nothing much here, but thought it might be helpful.  I had a situation this morning where I needed to disable IPv6 on a server and a quick search yielded this nugget:

How to disable IPv6 in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

The usefulness of cloud storage

You've probably heard the buzz about or at least the term "the cloud" by now, but have you given it a whirl?  I finally bit the bullet and did a bit of research the other day to see what was out there.  Being a cheapskate, I only looked for free offerings, and wound up going with Dropbox.

I decided to try them first because they offer a native Linux client, and have been extremely pleased.  They give you 2GB of free storage which is upgradable to 50GB or 100GB for a monthly fee, but they will bump you up to 8GB in 250MB increments for referring friends.  Along with the Linux client which integrates with Nautilus, they also offer Windows, Mac, Blackberry and Android clients.  I'm currently running the Linux, Windows and Android clients.  Setup was incredibly simple and the syncing is spot-on and fast.  It's already come in extremely handy providing access to files for work while I'm at home and vice-versa, as well as being able to get to them from my EVO.

One other cool feature that Dropbox has is the ability to share folders.  I'm able to give co-workers access to files while I'm out of the office from both my home PC, laptop, or phone without having to fiddle with a VPN and slow transfers to a file server on the corporate LAN.  For that matter, they don't even have to be in the office either, which is full of win in my book.

If you decide to give them a try, you and I can both get an extra 250MB by using this referral link.

This box is so 1337

I've been hovering over this MySQL server waiting for the uptime to roll...

(click on the image for a larger view)