Mike Zupan’s blog has a nice how to on installing puppet’s dashboard on CentOS 5, following it I was able to get the dashboard up and running with ease. Since I have two puppet master’s that I’d like to report to the dashboard I found you can easily accomplish this without a full dashboard install on each master.
You just need to:
- Copy over ‘puppet_dashboard.rb’ with a modified HOST line to the other host.
- Modify /etc/sysconfig/puppetmaster.
- Turn on reporting on the clients.
- Restart puppetmaster.
Since the puppet_dashboard.rb is just making an HTTP post to the dashboard server, it can be coming from anywhere.
I recently ran into an issue where my I had Xymon clients on a network which was unpingable from the Xymon server. The clients could could send data to the server, but they were hidden behind network address translation and only on a local network. I had one box (the gateway for the unreachable clients), that saw both networks. I played with the idea of running bbproxy on it, but didn’t really want an entire Xymon server and it really was not necessary since the other clients could get their data out. Looking at hobbitlaunch.cfg I noticed it was really just a larger clientlaunch.cfg, which gave me the idea of just copying over bbnet and using on a client install – which worked perfectly. Read more…
After a recent job switch I’ve had the opportunity to setup Xymon from scratch and start developing even more scripts for new pieces of software and work flows. One of my first tasks was to setup a new “cluster” using all the software I felt most comfortable with as a show case in order to determine if my preferred tools worked as well or better than the currently used ones – or not. After a week or so of setting up a full Cobbler installation, Xymon and my own Glovebox, I presented it to my new employers with positive responses. After all that work I wanted to make sure that the people using the system were as happy as possible with the monitoring needs – one thing was mentioned more than others, which was the ability to easily see the status of Sun’s Grid Engine running on the cluster. I immediately set to work and came up with a quick solution for them using Xymon and a script that parsed the output of ‘qstat -f’ As with my Xen monitoring script, it runs in one place and sends in data for all the associated machines. Meaning for each execution node you’ll have a column with just its information, and a combined column for the qmaster. Read more…
Over the years I’ve had to write plenty of Hobbit / Xymon scripts to monitor various different things within my employers systems. Since most all of our applications are custom there are not always built in tests that will work for us. For example, we use Xen for our development virtual machines and being able to track what was going on with those virtual machines is important and being able to identify a VM within Xymon at a moments glance is important to us, so we created a test that does just that. We have created in house scripts for MySQL Status, MySQL Running Queries, our in house distributed services, Lighttpd (as discussed earlier on this blog), Apache, Memcached, etc. This doesnt include the hundreds of different snmp tests we’ve added to Devmon for monitoring our network equiptment.
Read more…