habanero_joe

Greenshot – Open Source Screen Capture

Every technician, at some time, has wished he or she could email the error message on the console screen to whatever vendor support is working on the issue. In the past you either used PrintScreen and tried to edit the picture or used Snagit. Snagit is a great tool but it is not free.
Enter Greenshot.

(from the website…)

Greenshot is a revolutionary screenshot tool optimized for productivity.

  • Save a screenshot or a part of the screen to a file within a second.
  • Apply text and shapes to the screenshot.
  • Offers capture of window, region or full screenshot.
  • Supports several image formats.

Greenshot is an open source offering that follows other free tools to replace traditional business-use applications. As of January 11, 2009 Greenshot is on v0.7 beta. The installer is a small 349KB download. Installation took less than two minutes. Similar to Snagit, Greenshot runs in the System Tray. Simply right-click on the icon and select the operation you would like to complete. Here is an example of the Capture Region output.
As soon as you click on Capture Region, a cross-hair appears on the screen. Place the mouse at the top left corner of your desired capture, click and hold the left button and drag over to the lower right corner. Release the left mouse button and you have made your capture. One handy feature is the pixel count that displays as you drag across your capture area.
Greenshot allows many save options. The default is png. The included image editor is very handy as well allowing the edition of text boxes, lines, arrows and other shapes.

Download this today and enjoy the simplicity of this great practical application!

http://greenshot.sourceforge.net

Open Source NAS – Openfiler Update

Open Source Storage
The online debate over Open Source storage options is fast and furious. The two common names that keep popping up are FreeNAS and Openfiler. Do a Twitter search for either and you will have an afternoon full of reading.
I evaluated Openfiler (see April 7 post for Openfiler info) and have not looked back. The first box I installed as NFS storage has been running for 54 days with no data loss or corruption. The only issue at all has been the failure of one of the on-board Ethernet ports. My second box installed as iSCSI storage has been in production for thirteen days.

Hardware breakdown (retasked servers – nothing new was purchased):

filer1: Dell PowerEdge 2650, dual Intel Dual-Core Xeon 2.4 Ghz CPU w/512KB cache, 4GB RAM, dual on-board Gigabit Ethernet ports, (1) Maxtor Atlas 10k 74GB harddisk for Openfiler system, (4) Seagate Cheetah 10k 146GB harddisks for shared storage.

filer2: Dell PowerEdge 2850, dual Intel Quad-Core Xeon 2.8 Ghz CPU w/2.00MB cache, 4GB RAM, dual on-board Gigabit Ethernet ports, dual-port Intel PRO 1000 NIC (for iSCSI), (2) Maxtor 15k 74GB harddisks in RAID 1 for Openfiler system, (3) Seagate 15k 146GB and (1) Fujitsu 15k 146GB harddisks for shared storage.

Filer1 reports used physical memory of 97% while filer2 reports 8% physical memory in use. This is interesting as filer2 has a much higer load at this point. IRC chats, blogs and forums suggest Openfiler likes all the RAM it can get its hands on.

Plan Moving Forward
I will continue to use filer2 as iSCSI storage for two VMware ESX 3.5 servers. Planning to rebuild filer1 with additional RAM and add Intel PRO 1000 card. May convert storage to iSCSI for Citrix XenServer evaluation.

http://www.openfiler.com

Nagios Update

Oh how the time gets away from you…
I have Nagios (Refer to the April 15th post) installed and in production. I am still tweaking the configuration and rolling out device monitoring.
Adding anything to be monitored is time consuming. Some might even think it is very time consuming. The three main files are switch.cfg, windows.cfg and printer.cfg and all editing is done through either vi or some other text editor. There are also other configurations and add-ons for monitoring Netware and/or Linux/Unix machines.
Windows server monitoring requires two main parts: installing the NSClient++ on the actual server and adding the necessary configuration to the windows.cfg on the Nagios box. For a clear how-to on installing the NSClient++ refer to this blog post. You may find that additional server config, such as loading WMI or other SNMP reporting may be required to collect the necessary data.
The windows.cfg editing is fairly straight forward. This PDF file on the Nagios website will be very helpful.
1) Add the host definition (insert your values for the bold text)
define host{
use windows-server ; Inherit default values from a Windows server template (make sure you keep this line!)
host_name winserver
alias My Windows Server
address 192.168.1.2
}
2) Add the services or counters to be monitored
define service{
use generic-service
host_name winserver
service_description NSClient++ Version
check_command check_nt!CLIENTVERSION
}

define service{
use generic-service
host_name winserver
service_description CPU Load
check_command check_nt!CPULOAD!-l 5,80,90
}

define service{
use generic-service
host_name winserver
service_description Memory Usage
check_command check_nt!MEMUSE!-w 80 -c 90
}

NOTE: Any time the Nagios cfg files are edited you MUST verify the config and then restart the nagios service. Failure to do this will not show the correct config in Nagios Service Detail or may cause a failure of the nagios service.

/usr/local/nagios/bin/nagios -v /usr/local/nagios/etc/nagios.cfg
service nagios restart

Check this tool out and join the 3 million other users!

http://www.nagios.org

MySQL – Poor Man’s Database

MySQL is a relational database management system that runs on a wide variety of platforms including MS Windows. There is an estimated install base of over 11 million. Practical operation is the same as other SQL server applications, whereas multi-user sessions can simultaneously access stored data.
Previously owned as a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, as of April 20th, 2009, Oracle has announced intentions to purchase Sun. Oracle Buys Sun
One of the most popular uses of MySQL is for web applications and is used by many high transaction websites such Facebook. MySQL is fully OBDC compliant as well.
MySQL has consistantly be shown to be very fast performing and highly reliable, both critical to use in a production business environment.
Currently MySQl is available in two license formats: Community Server and Enterprise Subscription.
For the minimal annual fee of $599/server/year Enterprise offers a consistent monthly and quarterly release schedule. Compare to other sql server apps and you will quickly appreciate the value.
Community Server is available for download at no charge and has sporadic updates.

http://www.mysql.com

Open Source Advertising

Have a need to host your own ad server? Don’t want to pay a lot? OpenX Ad Server makes this possible.

“OpenX Ad Server is a powerful open source platform that manages advertising for more than 150,000 websites in over 100 countries. More than 300 billion ads run through OpenX Ad Servers each month. And since it’s available as a software download or as a hosted service, you can decide to run it yourself or let us take care of managing the infrastructure for you.” from openx.org

OpenX Ad Server is fully supported on Apache web server in a Linux environment and is very flexible in terms of implementation. System requirements are fairly common, the main requirement being PHP support. MySQL and PostgreSQL are supported for database connectivity.
There is also full community support for this product with the usual forums and blogs. Version 2.8 has just been released.
For IT shops not wanting to host this, there is of course and hosted version available which includes up to 100 million ad impressions per month for free.

Just released yesterday, OpenX Market is a new platform to maximize your ad content and ad space. The idea is to bring advertisers and publishers together in an ad exchange. While this is not a new idea, it is becoming more relevant as advertisers move more from offline to online.
OpenX News Article

OpenX.org

Nagios Enterprise Network Monitoring

Large IT shops use enterprise-class network and application monitoring on a daily basis. Implementations of suites such as HP OpenView, CA, and others can run in to hundreds of thousands of dollars and required expert knowledge. While it will meet your every need, smaller shops typically cannot afford this kind of investment.
There are also many mid-sized IT management applications targeted toward the MSP model. Kaseya is one that is excellent. There are also strong offerings from Microsoft.
However, what can you do if you have zero budget? Its time to turn to Open Source…
Nagios is an enterprise-class network and application monitoring solution that runs on various Linux platforms and Apache webserver. Installation and configuration, while well documented, will be challenging for novice Linux users. However, once installed and working, this package will cover your needs out of the box. If not, there is a large community developing plugins of every flavor, including environmental monitoring device support. Nagios also has hooks that can be connected to other packages suck as Splunk for advanced indexing, search, etc.
Nagios runs very well in a virtualized environment, just one more reason to check it out (no need for additional server hardware!).

http://www.nagios.org
http://www.splunk.com
http://www.apache.org
http://www.kaseya.com
http://www.openview.hp.com
http://www.ca.com

Spiceworks – Free IT Management Software

Do you have an outdated helpdesk ticketing system? Need to add costly licenses for additional IT staff? Throw that system out the door and check out Spiceworks.
Spiceworks is a free web-based IT management system that has many features such as helpdesk ticketing, networked device inventory, asset reporting, ticket reporting, change tracking, Exchange monitoring. All of this is packed in to a 17MB download. Spiceworks is supported by inline ads in the Dashboard only. Users adding tickets do not see the advertising. The benefits and features of Spiceworks far outweigh the minimal advertising impact.
Spiceworks must be installed on a Windows server or desktop. For more than a few users, load on a server. It works very well as a virtual machine on an ESXi box. The hardware requirements are fairly basic: 1GB RAM, 1GHz Pentium III processor.
Active Directory integration provides easy user set up. There is no need to create multiple login lists. When a user needs to place a ticket, Spiceworks will pull the account info that is logged in to the PC and autofill email and other contact info. IT staff is added in the Spiceworks Dashboard and login with email address and Spiceworks-specific password.

My IT department has been using Spiceworks for over a year, when our previous vendor stopped returning calls to purchase more licensing. We are a small company with seventeen locations and 200 employess (four IT staff) and approximately 350 network devices. At this time, Spiceworks provides everything we need to support this company. Senior management likes the reports that can be generated as well.

Give it a shot and you will be pleasantly surprised!!!

http://www.spiceworks.com