7 – 11 June was full of presentations and tips- from both Linux Tag and Web Monday, on Ubuntu cleaning and Teltonika UTMS routers.
Beginning with events Bernd reported from Linux Tag in Berlin. He uploaded his presentation on “Open Source Data Warehouses or IT Management” from Wednesday. He also tipped off Michael’s speech on “Puppet and Subversion for Configuration and Change Management”, also available to download.
Manuela got excited about Web Monday held this time at the NETWAYS office. Presentations included “Application Scale Out – Best Practice” (Bernd Erk of NETWAYS), “Magento as an E-Commerce Solution” (Michael Rohrmüller of PIXELMECHANICS), “UKIJS – Simple UI Kit for Complex Web Apps “(Sven Winkler of Nix-wie-weg.de) and an appearance by Jürgen Enninger representing the Bavarian regional center of excellence in culture and creative industries. Projects in the limelight included Pecha Kucha Nürberg, Coworking Space and Twist Projekt.
Moving on to tips, Marius shared his Ubuntu cleaning tricks against accumulated data dumps. Ubuntu Tweak for Apt Cache files and old global configurations from uninstalled applications, GConf Cleaner for clean Gnome registration and finding old entries in the backend home to be saved for configuration reload. Lastly BleachBit for program specific individual parts eg. Bash history, Chromium Cache and leftover files from Windows and Mac users, freeing up the most memory thanks to its comprehensiveness.
Finally Hardware man Martin had a look at Teltonika RUT105 HSUPA UTMS 3G/EDGE/GPRS/ VPN routers, for cheap internet connections via UMTS. The router can be powered by POE, has an inbuilt WLAN access point and can establish secure connections via VPN. It’s handy for setting up WLAN hotspots at events and connecting remote locations with VPN over a mobile network. All that’s needed is a permanent IP address for the routers and a mobile data package from companies like Vodaphone who offer flat rates. Martin even offered a Teltonika guide to VPN configuration for those with sparked interest. Check it out at our shop!
NETWAYS Blog
Weekly Snap: Monitoring Config Interfaces, Icinga & Schorsch over 1 year plus Web Monday coming up
May 3 – 7 celebrated two first year milestones – Icinga’s first birthday and Schorsch’s end of his first apprenticeship/internship year on board. It also kicked off a new blog series on monitoring config interfaces and invited web aficionados to the Web Monday get-together in June.
From the consulting team, Tobias introduced us to his new blog series on monitoring config interfaces, to tackle the chronic issue of graphic tools for Nagios or Icinga configuration. He’ll cover LConf, NConf, Lilac, NagiosQL, NagiosAdministrator and compare them on the basis of installation pre-requisites, handling/user friendliness, feature set, use in enterprise environments and data import capabilities. Drawing from his recent mammoth monitoring project for over 3,000 hosts, 45,000 services on 5 Icinga clusters in a master/slave environment, there could be no better man to write on this config interface challenge.
Our apprentice/intern aka Schorsch reflected on his year with NETWAYS and the many different tools and projects he’s come in contact with. From inventory management with i-doit and Bacula backup, to monitoring systems- OpenNMS, Nagios and Icinga and MonitoringExchange maintenance. Soon he’ll be sitting a few exams to show what he’s learnt in technical IT areas, business, English and social studies – so we wish him the best of luck.
Manuela invited all web enthusiasts – thinkers, builders, designers, founders or financiers to Web Monday, a casual, non-commercial gathering to be held this time at NETWAYS, 2nd Floor, 15 -19 Deutschherrnstraße on 7 June 2010, 7pm.
She also congratulated Icinga on its first birthday, whose team has since grown 16 members from Australia, Austria, Germany and South Africa. In just 12 months, they have managed to release Icinga Core Version 1.0, integrate MySQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle database support, as well as build an API and web interface to envy. A big cheer to all those who have supported the project!
Weekly Snap: From Open Rhein Ruhr to Web Monday with IPMI plugin and Ethernetbox in between
Nov 2-6 hopped from one event to another, leaving the OSMC for the Open Rhein Ruhr and Web Monday.
Christian F tipped off Bernd’s appearance in Bottrop at the Open Rhein Ruhr trade fair where he made a speech on current open source data centre solutions on Sunday. To follow, Julian will hop off to the Nuremberg Web Monday tonight, to push the bounds of the net with a casual bunch of web enthusiasts.
Behind events came hardware, with Christian’s introduction of the new IPMI plugin we developed in partnership with Thomas Krenn. The Nagios / Icinga plugin retrieves all IPMI sensor checks such as fan speeds, temperature, voltages, power supply status, etc. and is available under GPLv3 to download from Thomas Krenn.
Hardware man Martin added his monitoring tip, with a transducer device from MessPC known as the Ethernetbox 2. By transmitting SNMP data over the network to a Nagios or Icinga monitoring system via 0-10V connector cable or 4…20Ma adapter cable, a range of environment sensors can be integrated by this one box.
From the hosting and managed services side, Bernd L gave us an early reminder to switch to IPv6, counting down the 2 year end to IPv4 address availability. For the migration, he recommended a functioning monitoring system to avoid false reports of unreachable components, and testing to ensure all applications are IPv6 ready.
Finally, Bernd E shared his Open Rhein Ruhr experience with a quick peek into Charly Kuehnast’s presentation on spam filters of large calibre and his own presentation on current solutions for open source data centers. From DRBD and Xen to Puppet, Kontrollbase and MySQL Proxy, Bernd’s open source tool mosaic can be downloaded off our blog already.
