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Domain: bb4.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to bb4.org.

Comments · 7

  1. Big Brother and Project Observer by charnov · · Score: 1 · on What Would You Want In a Large-Scale Monitoring System?

    Big Brother (or Sister) which uses push agents so you are not generating vast amount of SNMP polls and you get instant feedback on a stupid simple dashboard.
    http://www.bb4.org/

    Project Observer is super easy to set up for SNMP and can auto-discover Cisco gear (with CDP). A good, simple SNMP monitor but it has serious scaling limitations.
    http://www.observernms.org/

    Nagios for hard core up/down monitoring with good flap detection and Cacti for performance monitoring.

    OCS Inventory for push software distribution and inventory control.

    Or you could drop some serious cash and just get Unicenter TNG and go bald from ripping your hair out.

    Seriously, though, try a bunch of things and see what actually works for your team.

  2. reliability, raid, updates, security, monitoring by Khopesh · · Score: 1 · on Cross-Platform Company Storage Architecture?
    You mentioned needing a support contract. What happens if the system goes down? Does the company go out of business after a few hours of downtime? How about a day? Do-it-yourself solutions don't have full software support, even if your hardware support is above reproach and you subscribe to RHN or whatever. In 24/7/365 environments with big money on the line, you need to go with NetApp like everybody here is telling you. Always ask your sales reps how long it will take to get a support expert ON SITE after your system dies at 4PM on a Friday.

    Looks like there is enough advice on vendors and hardware specs ... the only thing I'd add is that SATA is NOT reliable enough for this purpose unless you're comfortable replacing a drive or two every month or so (don't do SATA RAID 5; try RAID 1 or 10 ... see WikiPedia:RAID for more). ... Use SCSI despite the price hit. SATA in stripes (a la RAID 10) will partially compensate for the RPM hit. Oh, and get redundant power and a battery backup (UPS). If you can get an on-board battery for your hardware RAID card, do it.

    The file server and ALL systems connected to it must have synchronized time. Also, be sure it's on a gigabit ethernet, hosts only a VERY minimal number of services, and is completely locked down from the internet ... not even SSH should be visible; force administration to go through a bastion machine first. Keep the thing updated, and set auto-updates to do dry-runs and email you what they could do. I have my Debian box set up to apt-get update; apt-get -y --download-only upgrade; apt-get -qq -s upgrade |mail -s "Updates for `hostname`" root every night (note, that's a hasty summarization; I actually have a nice shell script for that ... ask me and I'll post it online for you ... ideally, this should be a part of the daily logwatch output and only a seperate email when there are security updates).

    Lock down the file server. NOBODY but an admin doing admin work should even have the ability to log into it, for any reason. If there is such a need, make a nice little dummy machine that mounts the network shares and give them access to that.

    Monitor the system from afar. Intrusion detection (NIDS like Snort or LIDS) is nice, maybe even essential for you, but I'm referring to something more basic ... you need to be alerted the moment something on the server fails. There are a few solutions for this out there (I use a home-brew one), but the nicest I've seen is Big Brother, which is freeware unless you depend on them (in which case you would want to pay for support anyway). BB4 is open-source but non-free (a look-but-don't-touch "Better than Free" license).

    In over your head yet? Get a NetApp. They're the Apple of the NAS/SAN world; their products just work.

  3. reliability, raid, updates, security, monitoring by Khopesh · · Score: 1 · on Cross-Platform Company Storage Architecture?
    You mentioned needing a support contract. What happens if the system goes down? Does the company go out of business after a few hours of downtime? How about a day? Do-it-yourself solutions don't have full software support, even if your hardware support is above reproach and you subscribe to RHN or whatever. In 24/7/365 environments with big money on the line, you need to go with NetApp like everybody here is telling you. Always ask your sales reps how long it will take to get a support expert ON SITE after your system dies at 4PM on a Friday.

    Looks like there is enough advice on vendors and hardware specs ... the only thing I'd add is that SATA is NOT reliable enough for this purpose unless you're comfortable replacing a drive or two every month or so (don't do SATA RAID 5; try RAID 1 or 10 ... see WikiPedia:RAID for more). ... Use SCSI despite the price hit. SATA in stripes (a la RAID 10) will partially compensate for the RPM hit. Oh, and get redundant power and a battery backup (UPS). If you can get an on-board battery for your hardware RAID card, do it.

    The file server and ALL systems connected to it must have synchronized time. Also, be sure it's on a gigabit ethernet, hosts only a VERY minimal number of services, and is completely locked down from the internet ... not even SSH should be visible; force administration to go through a bastion machine first. Keep the thing updated, and set auto-updates to do dry-runs and email you what they could do. I have my Debian box set up to apt-get update; apt-get -y --download-only upgrade; apt-get -qq -s upgrade |mail -s "Updates for `hostname`" root every night (note, that's a hasty summarization; I actually have a nice shell script for that ... ask me and I'll post it online for you ... ideally, this should be a part of the daily logwatch output and only a seperate email when there are security updates).

    Lock down the file server. NOBODY but an admin doing admin work should even have the ability to log into it, for any reason. If there is such a need, make a nice little dummy machine that mounts the network shares and give them access to that.

    Monitor the system from afar. Intrusion detection (NIDS like Snort or LIDS) is nice, maybe even essential for you, but I'm referring to something more basic ... you need to be alerted the moment something on the server fails. There are a few solutions for this out there (I use a home-brew one), but the nicest I've seen is Big Brother, which is freeware unless you depend on them (in which case you would want to pay for support anyway). BB4 is open-source but non-free (a look-but-don't-touch "Better than Free" license).

    In over your head yet? Get a NetApp. They're the Apple of the NAS/SAN world; their products just work.

  4. JFFNMS, BB, Hobbit,etc by falzbro · · Score: 2, Informative · on Server Monitoring With Munin And Monit

    Since we're on the subject, others have mentioned Nagios and MRTG of course. Be sure to check out JFFNMS (Just for fun). Horrible name for what it does, since it's quite powerful. For Big Brother users, I would recommend checking out Hobbit Monitor as a replacement of the server portion. It's compatible with the BB client, but has far more features and includes some basic MRTG graphs.

    I have yet to find an all in one integrated open source solution for monitoring (cpu, processes, port reachability), alerts (email, sms, etc). The closest I've found is JFFNMS, but writing alert rules and such is difficult to say the least.

    While on the subject, if it's not too terribly off-topic, what do people use to bill based on network usage (MRTG, RRD). Both claim that you should NOT bill off of that information, but I have yet to find any other open source solution.

    --falz

  5. Has The Rat ever heard of Big Brother? by Myrrh · · Score: 1, Troll · on OpenBSD 3.9 Adds Sensor Framework

    Wow, this latest move is sure to rocket OpenBSD to the top.

    I mean, the network performace will likely still suck, especially compared to the competition, but at least now we can monitor our servers!

    Big Brother's given us this capability for years. Nothing to see here, move along.

  6. Monitoring Tools by Plake · · Score: 3, Interesting · on Network Monitoring and Alerting?
    Personally I've used an array of the free monitoring tools and find most of them be decent. For larger sized monitoring you'd want something that can have the clients push data to the monitoring systems so they do far less work.

    Here's a couple of the monitoring solutions:

    Opennms

    Mon

    Big Brother

    For system information polling I'd go with:

    Cacti hands down this is the best polling system out there and it's simple to setup and run.

  7. Another fun tool by outcast36 · · Score: 1 · on Managing Huge Networks with Open Source Tools?

    A great tool that I've got some experience with is big brother
    The monitoring won't blow your mind, but the notifications are pretty cool. It looks like they've decided to go with a less than free license though. I don't know if you're a crusader for those sorts of things. They do offer source code, and many platforms for their client software.