18 – 22 February was all about events, workshops and training courses in Puppet, Icinga / Nagios and development.
Eva began by counting 58 days down to the OSDC with Christian Winkler’s presentation on “Ultra performant websites with varnish MP4”.
She also announced NETWAYS’ CeBIT stand whereabouts this year and reminded interested speakers to submit their talks to the Puppet Camp 2013 Call for Papers before 15 March.
Puppet Labs then trained our Puppet trainers Sebastian and Thomas in preparation for the upcoming Puppet courses they’ll be running.
Continuing with courses, Eva dished the details on Dirk and Christian’s three Nagios / Icinga workshops with iX.
Lastly, Markus shared his .vimrc and favourite VIM addons as our dev team re-emerged from their two-day blue-sky think camp with new processes and photos to show.
NETWAYS Blog
Weekly Snap: Puppet 2.5, Python Debugger, OSDC Partners & Icinga/Nagios Training
26 – 30 March ended the month with a good mix of Python and Puppet tips, MySQL lessons and events.
Eva started by thanking our sponsors, Linux Magazin, Admin Magazin and SuSE in the lead up to the Open Source Data Center Conference on 25 – 26 April.
Sebastian then encountered a strange MySQL master-master cluster error while Eric explained how to use the Python Debugger and Bernd forwarded news of the latest Puppet Enterprise 2.5 release.
Lastly, Phillipp celebrated our inaugural Icinga/Nagios Availability Monitoring training course in Düsseldorf, with a second to come on 21 – 25 May.
Weekly Snap: MySQL 5.5 GA, Nagios Training 2011 and Xmas Office Fun
13-17 December introduced a new year of Nagios training workshops and celebrated the release of MySQL 5.5 alongside the office Xmas party.
Rebecca gave us the heads up on Nagios training courses for 2011. Starting on 11-14 January, with classes in March, June and September to follow, the Nagios Availability Monitoring workshops equip Nagios newbies with all they need to know to head off into their first implementation. The 4 day training package covers accommodation with wlan access, catering, notebook rental and training materials to take home. Register for the course right away or get more information on the training courses offered at http://www.netways.de/de/units/training/
Bernd got excited about the general availability release of MySQL 5.5, the product of an efficient development process which we’ve previously admired. For him, Oracle’s purchase of SUN Microsystems was no signal of MySQL’s downfall, rather one that signalled the mother company’s new ability to compete against the many small databases such as PostgreSQL, Sybase or MSSQL-Server. The enhanced 5.5 is now proof enough. With an array of optimisations, including the performance of the windows version and 15 fold performance improvement n read/write and Bernd’s favourite – a considerably stable semi-synchronous replication. For more on the latest release, check out the Oracle blog.
Manuela celebrated the arrival of Christmas and the NETWAYS party that accompanied it. Held for the first time before the New Year and for the first time with a Christmas Olympics, the party started under the office tree with a race between a jet, a monster truck, a racing car and a turtle to name a few. Once warmed by Karo’s special ginger lime punch, the then crew headed into the city for a tasty Italian feed with a snowball battle on the way. The party ended with a few karaoke songs and the Olympic runners sent off with the UPS Santa for children in need.
Weekly Snap: Watch OSMC 2010; Learn Nagios Online; Read on Puppet & Icinga 1.2.0
15 – 19 November was (multi)media dominated, with reviews from and of Linux and Admin magazines, online Nagios training and OSMC live streaming all topped off with an Icinga release.
To begin, Manuela forwarded news of Icinga’s latest stable release. Icinga 1.2.0 featured improvements to both the classic CGI based interface and new web GUI. The ‘classic web’ now too can compound commands, while the ‘new web’ enables scrolling and persistent views that can be configured with filters. She also noted its latest addons– Heatmap, Business Process Addon, LConf and PNP integration for performance graphing. See http://www.netways.de/de/produkte/icinga/ for more information.
On a roll, Manuela then recommended an article on Puppet in Admin Magazine and another on OSMC 2010 in Linux Magazine. In the 06/2010 edition of Admin Magazine, Puppet is introduced in detail as a configuration management tool for large environments. OS independent and declarative in nature, it acts as an ‘abstraction layer’ between the admin and his systems. Linux Magazine’s review of our OSMC too highlighted Puppet alongside SNMP, RRDTool and Munin to kit out monitoring, on top of the Icinga, OpenNMS, Shinken and Nagios Business Process Addons projects all presented there.
Finally Manuela reminded us of the OSMC live streaming archives at Linux Magazine. The streamed videos are available at 199 Euros with magazine subscribers receiving 20% off. OSMC guests can enjoy the videos as part of their conference package. Visit to view.
On the topic on multimedia offers, Rebecca introduced our new online training course in partnership with Linux Magazine Academy. A comprehensive introduction to Nagios is now available in both English and German as a 13 part video series. These cover installation, configuration and monitoring of Linux and Unix servers in a network, as well as useful addons the likes of NagVis and EventDB. A demo is available with a special introductory rate at 299 Euros till 15 December 2010 – so get in quick!
Weekly Snap: RT for mobiles, REST, Nagios Training and Jobs galore
9-13 August offered two jobs, Nagios training courses, Request Tracker mobile interface and look into the REST architectural style.
Julian tipped off a new mobile web interface for Request Tracker. The plugin automatically recognises the iPhone, Android and Blackberry, offering an optimised display of tickets and history. Tickets can be created and searched, attachments downloaded, and authenthication can be normal or external.
Karo was on the hunt for new colleagues to join the NETWAYS team, posting two positions – a Systems Engineer and a Developer. The Systems Engineer will join the Managed Services boys to implement and maintain internet platforms and independent projects, support customers on 1st and 2nd levels, prepare documentation and handover to customers. Of course all is based on open source and experience with Linux, MySQL, LVS, Heartbeat, DRBD is necessary. The Developer will have good knowledge of PHP and MVC frameworks, web technologies (HTML, AJAX, XML, XSLT and Java Script), Perl, and Object Oriented Perl, Eclipse GIT and Subversion, databanks (MySQL, PostgreSQL) and Linux systems and network technologies (Debian, Ubuntu). Applicants who enjoy customer contact and working on their own initiative are welcome to apply.
Bernd continued his development series on SOAP and REST with a look at the architecutural style of REST. As opposed to SOAP, Representational State Transfer offers an architectural model that is often found in the www,and a concrete method to deal with such interfaces. With the classic web commands- GET, POST, PUT and DELETE, developers can quickly and easily create applications, without needing to keep to defined transfer formats that SOAP requires. The decision lies however in the complexity and need for complex transactions to be bundled and routed. Most systems do come out nonetheless fine with REST and benefit from its simplicity.
Finally Manuela announced the latest dates for our Nagios training course for newbies. If you want to learn how Nagios works, how to configure it and monitor Windows and integrate SNMP based network components, keep the 6-9 September or 15-18 November free – or register with our „Blog 10%“ code to get 10% discount. Hope to see you there!
