Well as one of the last steps in getting my business organized and ready to start marketing I have been working on a billing system that would do most things for me.. to make my life easier.. and so I don’t forget to send out a bill ..

Well as I’ve posted before I am a FreeBSD shop.. well I got a vpn with CentOS to handle my monitoring system and after realizing how out of touch I was with Linux commands I decided to put Linux on the spare server I had at the office to build my backup host on.

I tried to install Freeside about a month ago on one of my backend FreeBSD servers and was rather unsuccessful.

I tried a few days ago to install it on the CentOS box and it was a slightly better experience although I still didn’t get it working..

The software is built on Debian and was designed using a Postgres database.

At this point it was clear I had two things going against me. 1.) I’ve never used Debian and 2.) I’ve never used Postgres.  The main installation issues were regarding both of those issues due to the fact they were either dependency issues or database errors.  (As I was trying to use MySQL which isn’t fully supported)

I eventually solved these problems by installing Debian Etch as a VM and not surprisingly I used apt-get to install the dependencies and then compiled and installed Freeside perfectly.

I’m still having a few issues getting RT going but that’s nothing I didn’t expect since I had such a hard time getting it working at work (although that was partly due to the Exchange server being the main mail relay)  I’m just happy my billing system is up and going now!  I was really dreading having to do everything manually using QuickBooks.

Well.. I finally got an external vps account so that I could monitor my growing network accordingly. I got Nagios installed pretty easily, however NagiosGrapher is utter annoyance. First, I had installed the Nagios RPM which for some reason on Cent OS 5 installed in some really odd directories. Nagios was working great but I spent 16 hours battling with NagiosGrapher trying to get it to work.

I eventually uninstalled Nagios and re-installed it via the source (which is what I prefer anyhow). I then installed NagiosGrapher without any problem as the default layout worked great for the ./configure script.

However, it took me quite awhile to get things to work right. The forums at NagiosExchange.com aren’t all that active the documentation for NagiosGrapher is sub-par at best.

I also have Cricket installed on this server and after I had finally got all my graphs working in Nagios I checked Cricket and noticed that the text was not showing up. I had to change some of the RRDTools permissions to get NagiosGrapher to create PNG graphs. I guess that broke Cricket; After fiddling with the permissions again I finally have a solution that works.

Life is definitely flying by right now. I have had a total of 16 hours sleep since Tuesday so I am just about dead. I only have a few other things to get in line before I can really start advertising my service and hopefully get some real clients. As far as the service things have been going great for three weeks with 100% uptime!

I am working on a wiki project right now to help organize some config files, etc. As soon as I get that up and going I should post the Back to Back DSL HOWTO as well as some Nagios Plugins that I have adapted as well as a full detail of NagiosGrapher config files with examples, etc.

*that last part might take awhile, as I am still learning it!

–begin rant–

Please explain to me why you would not release a new version when you have 156 patches that must be applied.

–end rant–

I just installed vim on 4 machines today and it was rather annoying.. So i thought I’d complain about it.

Among other things I now have my external monitoring system working as well as a few clients up.  Now it’s just time to move into salesman mode and pray nothing goes wrong