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NETWAYS Blog

Weekly Snap: Apache 2 Authentication, Hardware Starter Kit, LConf 1.2 & NoMa 2.0.2 Released

14 – 18 November was packed with new hardware, a Polish IT conference, a guide for Apache 2 authentication, and two new releases – LConf 1.2 and NoMa 2.0.2 our notification management addon for Icinga and Nagios.
Much awaited, Tobias released LConf 1.2 our configuration interface for Icinga and Nagios. Alongside bug fixes, major changes include: a return to installation per makefile, much consolidation of code for plugins such as LConfExp.pl, an option to use either the old or new OpenLDAP configuration, inclusion of a new test kit for developers to try out new features, and most exciting of all – host and service escalations. Improvements to the LConf for Icinga Web module were also made, in user masks and menus and configurations. Download LConf 1.2 and the LConf-Icinga-Mod 1.2.1 at netways.org.
From Managed Services, Marcus showed how to set up different authentication methods on Apache 2 per source IP. Using the example of a company that uses LDAP for internal authentication and MOTP for external, he applied an iptables rule to redirect queries from the internal/external sources onto a two different ports. On each of these ports, he then set up a VHost to offer the different authentication methods. Even better, he recommended iptables-save, to enable settings to be retrieved with an init script making life easier after a reboot.
Bernd spoke at an IT conference  in Warsaw on “Monitoring with Icinga”. The event focused on reliability and monitoring so in addition, we joined forces with our OSMC partner Thomas Krenn, to present practical business applications of open source in various showcases live.
Last but not least, our new hardware guru Georg introduced the latest addition to our online store – monitoring and SMS alerts in an all-in-one starter kit. It combines a SecurityProbe 5E Standard that can monitor up to 8 locations (with expansion units and Cat5 connection), a temperature sensor with a 0.3m cable (can add up to 300m extension cable with Cat5 connector) and a Teltonika Modem USB/G10. The AKCP SecurityProbe 5E Standard SMS Starter Kit offers simple monitoring for remote locations and best of all comes at an 11% discount. More sensors can be found at our shop.

NoMa release 2.0.2

Those of you who have been following the ongoing development of NoMa in the GIT repository
know that there are lots of exciting new features in the 2.x series; SQLite support, an improved configuration interface, a powerful timeframe concept, and much more.
Now finally we’ve packaged it all into a release 2.0.2 (with an installer, and updated documentation 🙂 ) available at http://www.netways.org/projects/noma/files
Many thanks go to Rune „TheFlyingCorpse“ Darrud and Sebastian Wolf for all their hard work
on the project.

Weekly Snap: PRIMERGY Solutions & New Noma, BP-Cronk and LConf Releases

6 – 10 December handed out a few monitoring addon gifts for Christmas and promised one more for the Fujitsu server family.
Bernd reported from his visit to the PRIMERGY Solution Briefing in Augsberg which gathered server specialists from across Germany. Thanks to a long-standing partnership with Fujitsu Technology Services, NETWAYS had the opportunity to contribute a presentation introducing the current plugin check_fujitsu_primergy and the integration of iRMC cards. Both can be found in our demo system, open to all. To top it off, he promised a new plugin in progress for the Eternus series which will be released at the year’s end.
In the same spirit of giving, Jannis laid out a bunch of new monitoring tool releases under the NETWAYS Christmas tree: NoMa 1.0.6, LConf for Icinga 1.0.1 and BP-Cronk 1.0.1. Alongside bug fixes, the latest version of NoMa (Notification Manager) features new filter capabilities. So rules can now be set with host groups as well as hosts and services, saving time and sanity. LConf for Icinga brings an optimized directory information tree that automatically unfolds to show changes made and accepts common keyboard shortcuts (e.g. Ctrl-C for copy) too. Finally, the latest Icinga Web cronk for Business Process Addons improved the configuration parser and made saving new configs more intuitive. All are available to download at netways.org or the Git with season’s greetings from the development team.

Project of the Month: NoMa up a notch

June 2010: In a large and distributed environment, multi channel alerts for hundreds of users can get complicated. Indeed that’s where NoMa came in handy for one of our longstanding clients. With no less than 60 alert definitions, NoMa had been managing Nagios alerts for the corporation’s 1000+ users dependent on central services, across their 80+ remote sites worldwide.
All was working well, but as always things can work better. One pesky characteristic was that if a highly interconnected component were to fail, not only would the admins receive that alert, but they would also receive individual alerts for all the other services and components that were subsequently affected. This domino effect inundated the admins with messages that ultimately stemmed from the same issue. So the proposal was put forward – how about bundling all related errors into one summary message, but still be able to individually (de)activate each alert?
Consultant William took on the challenge, thereby setting the foundations of NoMa’s latest release, version 1.0.5. By transferring the persistence coded in Perl memory to a database NoMa had improved stability and failover precaution built in. This enabled the new feature of central outage correlations and alert summaries. Further improving the user friendliness, the team also simplified the (de)activation of alerts to be executable on the web interface, without the need for restarts.
All in all, thanks to their sponsorship and close cooperation, NoMa will soon be available as v 1.0.5 equipped with greater flexibility. As the biggest contributor to NoMa, a company representative even presented the project at the OSMC 2009. Check out the presentation for more info and keep an eye on netways.org for the official release coming soon!

Nagios Voice Alerts bei der Stadt Augsburg

Wieder einmal haben wir unsere aktuelle Lösung zur Generierung von Sprachnachrichten durch Nagios bei einem Kunden erfolgreich zum Einsatz gebracht.
Die Nagios Voice Alarmierung von NETWAYS basiert auf einer Starface Appliance (ein Ableger von Asterisk), welche durch ein Skript von Nagios gefüttert wird. Dazu haben wir ein spezielles Modul für Starface entwickelt. Das Queuing wird dabei von unserem eigenen Notification Manager (NoMa) erledigt.
Über ein Sprachmodul werden die Nachrichten von Nagios dem Angerufenen vorgelesen. Dieser hat nun durch Tastendruck die Möglichkeit ein Acknowledgement zu senden.
Als ideale Ergänzung zu Email oder SMS kann die Sprachbenachrichtigung in die Eskalationskette von Nagios einbinden und so die Erreichbarkeit in Notfällen deutlich steigern.
Mit der separaten Box ist man nicht mehr auf ISDN-Karten angewiesen, die teilweise gar nicht mehr in neuere Server eingebaut werden können und die Integration ist flexibler und zuverlässiger als beispielsweise mit einer Fritzbox.