All enterprises depend on reliable servers, network devices and business applications. Any downtime hits your bottom line. To ensure maximum IT performance across your business, you have to identify and resolve problems before they impact the user experience or security of your data.
May 19
This post is based on research we’ve undertaken to develop a pilot mash-up style, charting dashboard for our monitoring solution, Opsview Enterprise. However the concepts we discuss could be used when building a dashboard that displays information from many other enterprise solutions. The assumption we make is that the reader is familiar with Java and the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). For more information about GWT and the other libraries used in this blog please see the Resources section at the end.
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Sep 11
Cfengine is one of the most powerful tools available for automating Linux and Unix system administration. Unlike shell or perl scripts cfengine allows you to describe the desired state of the system rather than specifying how to perform each operation. Because of this cfengine scripts are concise and simple to create.
Cfengine is designed to act as part of a ‘computer immune system’ with capabilities including:
- Ensuring correct file and directory permissions
- Backing up, archiving and synching of data
- Tidying the filesystem and removal of obselete files
- Management of NFS mounts
- Anomaly detection – similar to tripwire
- Automated editing of system configuration
- Process management
Cfengine is designed to be centrally managed greatly simplifying the task of administering multiple systems.
At Altinity we use Cfengine for the following tasks:
- Initial configuration of hosts
- Ensuring system integrity
- Automating routine admin tasks
- Automated error recovery (restarting processes, removing lock files, etc).
We’ll be making sample scripts available on this site shortly.
Links
Cfengine home – http://www.cfengine.org/
Cfengine downloads – http://www.cfengine.org/mirrors.html
Cfengine documentation – http://www.cfengine.org/documentation.phtml
Cfengine overview by Æleen Frisch – http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/05/29/essentialsysadmin.html
Opsview is a leading Open Source application and network monitoring suite. Labs is where our engineers discuss new projects, new approaches and new frameworks they’re using.
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