Category: Linux

OpenSUSE AutoYast/AutoInstall Howto Part 1

Post author By Jon Smith
Post date June 15, 2009
1 Comment on OpenSUSE AutoYast/AutoInstall Howto Part 1

OpenSUSE and SLES (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server) both come with AutoYaST which is a very powerful tool that allows administrators to quickly and easily deploy servers that have an identical configuration for rapid server deployment.

In this three part series we will explore creating a repository for use with multiple systems, creating and customizing the AutoInstall file, and finally running through an install procedure.

Part 1 – Creating a repository for use with multiple systems

In this part we will look at creating a local install repository for use with installing OpenSUSE. This can be done in several ways, one from the CD/DVD or with an RSync’ed copy of the repository.

Tags AutoInstall, AutoYast, Linux, OpenSUSE

Cacti Linux Sys Admin

Monitoring Linux Disk Statistics with Cacti

Post author By Jon Smith
Post date June 9, 2009
11 Comments on Monitoring Linux Disk Statistics with Cacti

I firstly want to acknowledge the work of Mark Round and Linux iostat monitoring with Cacti. The following work was inspired and based on the ideas found in Mark’s post.

My main objective when I started looking into disk monitoring was to get some similar stats into Cacti for Linux that can be found with the Windows PerfMon utility. I found Mark’s post and didn’t quite like the way it used cron to collect its statistics, and wanted something that I could easily add to snmpd.conf without needing to change much more. I was also keen on obtaining the mount point data for each partition as looking at “cciss/c0d0p3” doesn’t mean as much to management (and sometimes to me) and hopefully “/home” does.

Tags Cacti, Disk Stats, Graphing, iostat, Linux, sysstat, vmstat

Linux

Linode Linux VPS

I have just moved my Virtual server from Web24 to Linode. I was suffering from pretty much the same IO issues as described here (http://hostingfu.com/article/moved-web24-linode).

Pings/Latency was great at around 35ms from home, but when you were logged into the server sometimes the most basic operation (ls for instance) would take seconds to complete.

So i bit the bullet and went for an overseas VPS from Linode, I went with the Linode 540 which with 540mb RAM, 24Gb Disk and 300Gb network transfer is much more then I need at the moment (All for less then what I was paying for my Australian VPS).

I have to say I am very impressed. Along with my VPS, i get free access to Linode’s DNS servers to host what seems like an unlimited amount of domains. This means I don’t have to worry about Primary/Slave’s and redundant configurations/Bind security issues. Linode also provide an API to access server stats as well as manage DNS configurations, this has allowed me to create some cacti graphs based on Linodes Stats (CPU Load over Time and Network Transfer and Allowance) which I will post later on.

Support is top notch, I had a configuration error on my server (my fault, not theirs) and logged a support ticket at about 11pm on a Saturday night (Australian Time) and within 5 minutes had a response and another 5 minutes after that the entire issue was solved.

So to anyone thinking of getting a VPS for their hosting requirements or as a test server give Linode a go. I cant fault the performance of the box or the services/support offered.

If you are interested please click on the following referral link:

Linode.com – Xen VPS Hosting

Tags Linode, Linux, Virtual Server, VPS

Cacti Linux Sys Admin VMWare

Monitoring VMWare’s Free ESXi 3.5 with Cacti

Post author By Jon Smith
Post date April 23, 2009
24 Comments on Monitoring VMWare’s Free ESXi 3.5 with Cacti

When I realised that the free version of VMWare ESXi only kept an hours worth of logging information I went looking for a solution to keep more statistical data. This is what I have come up with so far.