NETWAYS Blog

19 – 23 December bid all a Merry Christmas, with handy ideas for network monitoring, simplifying cluster source IP, using Windows XP on Windows 7 and new training course locations.
Martin S started by sharing his secret for fast network troubleshooting: Intermapper displays information on the structure, status, data transfer volumes, available bandwidth and potential network problems in real-time on a network map, via SNMP.
Markus N then announced new NETWAYS training venues for 2012. Alongside courses in Nuremberg, “Icinga Availability Monitoring” is now offered in Düsseldorf and “Puppet Configuration Management” in Zurich. “Nagios Availability Monitoring” and “SLA Reporting” classes will now be held at a second Nuremberg venue, at the Park Inn Hotel. What hasn’t changed however, is our training course content and concept – intensive knowledge transfer in small groups, in a casual and hands-on environment.
Following on, Ansgar explained how to run old programs on Windows 7 in XP mode with the help of Windows Virtual PC. As long as the hardware can support the extra virtualization load, both Windows XP mode and Virtual PC can be easily downloaded and installed, alongside the desired, old programs. Thanks to the “seamless mode” and ability to access Windows 7 files, this virtual solution is makes using older applications with the XP look and feel, a breeze.
As a final Xmas contribution, Carsten showed how to change the source address of a cluster with Pacemaker. As he found the existing OCF Resource agent script, known as IPsrcaddr to be somewhat unreliable, Carsten wrote and shared his own. Once his resource agent, IPsrcaddr2 is filed in the right place, configuration of Corosync/Pacemaker a one-liner. It can then be used to set the source IP address of Icinga checks. This is handy in a two-node cluster, as the cluster IP can be used as opposed to setting both IPs in the firewall or NRPE daemons.