Well about a week ago I got an email from one of my host’s that they were discontinuing their VPS offerings.  It also stated that I had until March 20th to move somewhere else.  That was pretty much the gist of the email.  I had filed a support ticket back in December stating that the Virtuozzo backup system was not working.  They said they’d have it fixed in a day or two.. well it’s March and it still isn’t working.  Not to mention, they no longer answered support calls and always seemed to be “away” at the Live Chat screen on their website.  Before they had Excellent customer service but I believe they truly dropped the ball on this one.

Trying to find a solution to my situation I called my other host (the one I use for my web hosting clients) to see if they could set me up a VPS running Cent OS in which they said they hope to have that capability someday but for now they only offer Fedora.  So then, I had to try and find a new host, however, this time I decided to get a powerful enough package to handle my Nagios installation as well as all of my webhosting clients.

I was able to find a fairly decent price with a reputable (I hope) host.  My next journey was trying to consolidate two servers and get them to actually work together.  At first transferring all my clients over seemed like a hard task and then I realized that going from Cpanel/WHM to Cpanel/WHM was about the easiest thing in the world.  So far, I have everything working better than before with one exception.  I could not get Cricket to work on my new VPS which I believe has something to do with some crazy suexec details that I finally gave up on.

Also,  when I transferred over my Nagios installation I decided not to try and get NagiosGrapher set back up as it was such a pain the last time.  I know quite a few people have stopped on this site looking for guidance on installing it and now I finally have some to give. RUN AWAY FROM IT!  I decided on an alternative this time called PNP (PNP is not PerfParse).  It was very simple to install, seems to be updated reguarly, and has plenty of support behind it.  I have not mettled with the customizing the graph displays but they support all of the regular RRD details so it shouldn’t be a problem.  Installation was a breeze!  I suggest that you try it and I believe that you will be impressed as I was as well.  Other notes, would be that you should grab the -CURRENT branch of Nagios as it has some great improvements as well.

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

Well.. I got delivery of three new servers last week and I finally had a chance to set one up yesterday.  I finalized some things on it today and moved all the network printers over to it so that I could demote one of the aging domain controllers on the network and turn it into a FreeBSD box to act as the local Intranet server.  The three new servers run Windows Server 2003 R2 and so far I like the Print Management Console but I haven’t had a chance to explore the other features of R2.

I also converted all of the Faculty over to Roaming Profiles last week as well as re-directed their Desktop folder to their home directory and so far logins are as fast as ever and no one has complained after the initial 1+ hour logins and logoffs the first day

My next objective is to start sorting through the Group Policy that is currently in place and restructuring the OUs in Active Directory so that I can effectively publish printers to the users that need them when they login depending on which computer they are at.  I also plan on using GP to roll out Firefox, Adobe Acrobat, and other programs that require way too much time to install on every computer after a re-install.

I still have a few issues on imaging some of the other machines that are in place on the network but I think I am close to a solution.

In other news I am very close to getting all of the users happy so things are looking up.  I am still working overtime but I have a vacation coming up that should be great.  I did get a bit of relaxation this past Saturday as it was the opening day of Dove season.  I was only able to hunt about 2 hours before I had to get to work but I did manage to get 6 and all of us together got 20 so it wasn’t too bad.  Hopefully I’ll get a chance to go a few more times next week.

I stumbled upon this site today and it’s just plain awesome..

http://smithii.com/slipstream_xpsp2

Props to this guy for his scripting.. but whats even better is that it uses wget which I had no idea I could get for windows.. that makes me especially pleased with this find!

http://users.ugent.be/~bpuype/wget/#download

Now I have to get back to imaging these two labs before Monday..

Well the day is finally here and it comes at the perfect time. School starts Monday and I finished up today. All the classroom computers work, the network is 100% functional, and I have documentation of everything. Today has left me with the biggest feeling of success since I started the job. This means that I will go to work at 7:30 and be able to leave at 3:30 every day.. that is just wonderful. I thought many times that I wouldn’t be able to make the deadline with everything that kept getting added to my agenda.. but in the end everything worked out great!

Also, my T1 will be delivered very soon, and I go to finalize all my insurance needs on Monday so I am ready to start installing customers whenever the get the backbone put into place..

As far as notes about the servers I will be working on that.. I am going to try and setup a wiki for some public info or just so I can put tech stuff up that I don’t want to forget or search for/learn twice.. I got that idea from a great book. I recommend it for anyone that manages IT for a living.. “Time Management for System Administrators” by Thomas A. Limoncelli the tagline at the top of the cover is “Stop Working Late and Start Working Smart” and it’s perfect!