The Debian Telemetry Box

SquadBoy writes "The fine people at Debian have created a Telemetry Box Distribution this is what they have to say about it. "Version 1.0 of the Telemetry Box Distribution has finally been released. The Tbox distribution is a Debian GNU/Linux 'potato' based custom Linux version for remote monitoring and maintenance of networks. A telemetry box allows remote management and diagnostics. It uses a customized version of netsaint to gather data. Netsaint has been enhanced so that the configuration is possible via the Tbox Webinterface through SQL structures. Netsaint logs into a SQL table. Tools on the Tbox can then display the data in a variety of ways (graphs or reports)."" Storie's a bit old, but it's a cool little box.

Comments

Re:Version Number Inflation?

[Anonymous Coward]

then it should be 0.1

Re:Debian sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian may be the only true distro left after all those other distro's like RedHat started dabbling with capitalism... however Debain has resisted this erge and has kept to its Marxist roots!

Re:for network monitoring...

[ksheff]

Cricket was originally written for WebTV Networks, Inc. It was subsequently publically released under the GNU General Public License. Without the full support of WebTV's management, Cricket would still be an internal tool.

I'm guessing that this was before M$ bought them out. Wow, I guess WebTV was useful for something besides getting grandmothers to use the internet! =) It would be great if more companies did this. Just about every place has their own in-house tools that were written to support some business function that couldn't be solved with existing Free or proprietary software.

Re:Version Number Inflation?

[noahm]

then it should be 0.1

Why 0.1? Why not 0.0000000001? Version numbering is completely arbitrary. Just ask RMS or whoever decided that Emacs would skip about 10 whole versions several years back. And then look at Debian's apt-get tool, which is very solid and robust, and it's only on version 0.3.19 or something. It's meaningless.

noah

Re:Sigh

[WhiteDragon]

Everybody loves screenshots, so check_url www.netsaint.org

that is not a url, it doesn't have a protocol specifier :-)

This sucker rocks!

[OldBen]

I read this story at 16:30 yesterday, and had the thing up and running by 18:00 (that includes downloading it and burning to CD). While I'll probably end up spending some time configuring things from the command line, the web interface is very usable, and would even be to a relative neophyte. This is a great solution for small datacenters that don't want to spend a lot of time messing around with monitoring. As for relying on email to send pages:

1: Install qpage
2: Hook up a modem
3: Stride briskly away

I'd much rather do that than hand over monitoring to a third party. Very cool system.

you are so wrong.

[No-op]

For those of us responsible for managing large networks that *ARE NOT* on the public internet (I know that comes as a shock to all you college students out there) having someone else monitor our systems is bad for two reasons.

1.) it's not us doing the monitoring. this breaks most security policies within any company of a large enough size, as well as just being bad form all around.

2.) as I mentioned, when you have arrays of firewalls between you and the net, it's really quite pointless to ask someone to monitor your systems, now isn't it?

When are all you little kids going to start understanding the world doesn't revolve around your bandwidth wasting napster using asses? it disgusts me.

Re:Sigh

[zippe]

Web interfaces are great for monitoring computers / sites. I work for one of the largest ecommerce companies on the web and we use netsaint for monitoring of our site. It allows us to have network operation folks monitor what is happening in an intuitive interface. They can alert the appropiate folks when a problem happens (also they get paged :-)). You can immediately get a great insight into all services being run and their current status. I wrote a few command line tools to gather the logs also from netsaint logs. Eventually when digging deeper into what the problem is people will use command line, but web interfaces are great for monitoring of how a web site / corporate network is operating and a large outside view. I think its great what has been put together and look forward at reviewing it.

I like it

[woodja]

I have been using Telemetry Linux 1.0 for almost a week now to monitor an ISP. So far I like what I see. It is also good for things like port scanning to find vunerabilities, but it will also monitor most of the services it finds. In other words, it is self-configuring for your network.

Overall, I'm impressed. It is a nice bundle and only takes 15 minutes to install (if you have fairly standard hardware).

"Storie"?

[penguinboy]

Last time I checked, it was story, Hemos.

Re:Sneak Netsaint in the Front Door

[Peter H.S.]

Yes, Netsaint is an impressive package. Been running it since v. 0.4 without any problems whatsoever.
It really gives you a good "feeling" on how the networks performs.
It also has a very good, and steady development cycle, and a good roadmap for future enhancements.

The nice thing about the web-interface is, that it makes it easy to show (management) what Netsaint is all about.
So you quite right. No need to sneak in Netsaint, it is that good.

If you need to monitor Internet traffic, the Ntop (www.ntop.org) is a really slick and impressive package, that looks like it cost XXXX$. It is in furious development, so it isn't ready for production yet, unlike Netsaint. But if you need something like it, it is worth to keep an eye on.
We plan to deploy it within the next mont or so; since we have a managed Cisco switch, we will use CPAN to duplicate the port running to the router, and lead it into a locked down box in the DMZ. That way we can sniff & map network traffic between LAN and Internet, without running a daemon on the actual firewall.

Regards
Peter H.S.

Re:Version Number Inflation?

[CentrX]

Actually, if one were to number based on which number release the package is, then it would be a whole number "1", rather than "1.0". If one uses a system with "1.0", then it makes sense that the first number, the major version number would indicate a feature complete and thoroughly bugtested release, and that any minor version number increase would indicate bugfixes or small feature changes.

Re:Sigh

[jtdubs]

Dude, it's a modified Debian box. Throw on whatever servers you want. Make it run ssh. They are only advertising the web-interface cause it's not something that you normally see on linux boxes and cause it's trendy.

Yeah, fine, web-interfaces "lack the power of the command line", so does EVERY OTHER GUI. That's why I said you can throw on the ssh server. And yeah, it does "lack all the ease of use of a convential gui application." That's kinda the price you pay for a web-app, and one that isn't bandwidth hungry. If you want to use XDMCP, go for it, but that's a LOT of bandwidth to use for monitoring a network. Half the packets you'd be sniffing would be your own traffic... :-).

Anyway, I just tend to ignore the corporate buzzwords. It looks like a cool box,

Justin Dubs

Sneak Netsaint in the Front Door

[skuenzli]

I work in an infrastructure applications group at a major semi-conductor company. Uptime and remote mgmt capabilities for our applications is paramount. However, some manager decided we would use NT everywhere, or at least we'd use it unless we had a very good excuse. (This is the first version of our system running on NT; we'll see how long it lasts.)

But I digress.

We're trying to develop a system/performance mgmt/monitoring system right now for our infrastructure. Without a truckload of time and cash, it's a real pain on NT. However, NetSaint + Linux is cake (set it up tonight w/ not too much trouble) and it's *free*, which ought to be a very good reason to use it in light of our recent layoffs. With the plug-ins capability, we can make it do exactly what we need very quickly. I haven't found that ability on a non-Unix platform yet.

I'll be showing my manager this combination on Monday.

Woohoo!

Stephen

for network monitoring...

[gol64738]

i've found MRTG to ROCK!!!!
if you haven't used it, it's worth a look for sure. it does network and machine monitoring and is highly configurable.

gol

Re:for network monitoring...

[noahm]

MRTG? Hah! That's not only obsolete but even the original author has ditched it for something better. Check out RRDtool and any of the many many front ends available. I use Cricket myself, and have found it to be *very* cool.

...Cricket is so cool, in fact, that I had a thoroughly wonderful time at LISA informing a vendor that their product was just about completely useless because it didn't do anything that I wasn't already doing with cricket! By the end of it they even agreed with me that that their features did provide any advantage over cricket. I don't remember who they were, though...

Check out http://cricket.sourceforge.net/

noah

Re:Carnivore?

[entrigant]

I believe that is the most uninformed statement I have heard in my entire life. It almost troubles me. Is it possible to be this ignorant? wow... don't score this funny... this is just.. well.. dumb.

Re:Debian sucks

[g_bit]

Okay ya freakin commies!

Re:Version Number Inflation?

[g_bit]

You are truly a douche bag troll.

Can you imagine. . .

[Tsar cr0bar]

. . .a beowulf cluster of these?

Bad cli considered harmful (Re: Sigh)

[Robert A. Heinlein]

Yep, we all love good a good CLI. But the vast majority of them are foul and evil things I would not wish on my worst enemy.

You get a few winners (JuniperOS, IOS) - but the vast majority of network device CLIs are like the TNT or Portmaster or PowerRail or anything from Netgear or... There is some excellent equipment out there limited by a bad (or barely adequate) CLI.

The direction we've taken on our in-house software is to have an internal set of management functions and add interfaces as needed. That way snmp, cgi, cli, and any buzzword enabled technology that may come up, will be consistent.

Our first tier NOC folks seem to love the web interfaces we have available. I can't stand them myself, but my job does not involve sitting around waiting for things to break.

Sigh

[Kara B.]

Another net appliance (sort of) with a web interface for management. What's the point? Any time you see something advertise that it has a web interface, you know that you're about to be confronted with something that lacks all the power of the command line AND lacks all the ease of use of a conventional gui application. These things make my ears steam.
Let's be honest, nobody has even figured out how to make a decent web interface to email, much less system monitoring. Why won't people just give it a rest already and realize that web interfaces, while useful for times when you don't have your laptop, are completely unsuited as a primary interface to any application.
Oh well, at least it's not java.
--Kara

Re:Sigh

[GC]

Any time you see something advertise that it has a web interface, you know that you're about to be confronted with something that lacks all the power of the command line AND lacks all the ease of use of a conventional gui application. These things make my ears steam.


No - It does have a command line version. The Web Interface is an extended feature, you can disable it if you want.

Re:Sigh

[Peter H.S.]

Netsaint is a really good program. And the web interface isn't neccesary for its functionality.
Basically, Netsaint is daemon, which through various plugins (premade or your own scripts), monitors your network. The plugins are just CLI programs or scripts. Netsaint either performs active service checks; e.g. the "check_pop3" plugins log into the pop3 server, and check if it works, or passive checks; the remote host delivers the result of a service check to the netsaint monitoring host. Of course, one can also perform remote checks through OpenSSH, if you don't want to run a deamon on the remote host, or the function one wants to monitor isn't a service as such (load average etc).
The results of these checks goes into a standard text logfile (just grep and awk). But the strong point of Netsaint is not so much its ability to monitor services, but in its handling of the service checks:
E.g.: if the pop3 doesn't work after 3 tries, and it is a working day, during business hours, send me a mail, and page me asap. If it is weekend, just send me a mail, but both mail and page Poor Joe.
If I haven't responded to the problem within X hours, escalate the problem to this list of people.
If the pop3 goes back online again, send me a mail too.

Or: if the 5 min load average during business hours goes above 1.5, write a warning in log, but don't mail me. If the 15 min load average goes above 2.0 mail me. If it goes above 3.0, write "Slashdot effect" in the logfile, and mail everybody on this list, turn on the sprinkler system, and dial out using this modem, on this spare POTS, and leave a naughty message on cowboyneals telephone answering machine.

Of course, one can also mointor and check whether the service checks are performed or not.

In short, Netsaint can monitor all kinds of events, and has a rather powerfull way of dealing with these events, and none of this is in any way, dependent on the web interface. This is mostly used for viewing log-files, or give one a quick overview of the health and status of the network. It is nice, but not neccesary.
So in this case, your "web interace prejudice" isn't warranted;-)

I somewhat agree with you, that web interfaces, as a primary interface, usually feels clunky and sluggish. But web interfaces can be quite usefull, not perhaps for the Sysadmin himself, but because it means that he can delegate rutine stuff to lesser mortals, like adding or removing users, managing mail lists etc., without exposing the l^Husers to anything "complicated", and at the same time, easily restrict them to only the small and limited subset of priviliges they need to perform the job.

Now, this Tbox looks very good. It is yet another reason, for "sneaking" in a Linux box on the network, or sell as a service; it is nice as a consultant or sysadmin to have good diagnostic logfiles, when the costumer calls in, and says "the Internet isn't working".
And better still, since Netsaint is pro-active, call your costumer in the morning, saying "Your /user partition is 95% full {sell HDD|remove files}"

Everybody loves screenshots, so check_url www.netsaint.org

Regards
Peter H.S.

Re:Sigh

[GC]

Any time you see something advertise that it has a web interface, you know that you're about to be confronted with something that lacks all the power of the command line AND lacks all the ease of use of a conventional gui application. These things make my ears steam.


No - It does have a command line version. The Web Interface is an extended feature, you can disable it if you want.

Only 50 MB?

[Feeling bored]

Wow, that's small.

WebTelemetry Rocks

[bierpub]

I agree with thgood.... WebTelemetry is a very easy to use alternative. Access it from any computer or WAP phone and it's very simple to use with nothing to install. I've been using it for a few months now and get notifications whenever my systems are down. Very reliable also.

No they haven't

[Jaldhar]

This is a customized version of Debian created by the people at siteROCK. Debian developers may have been involved but it isn't an official Debian project.

-- Jaldhar

Carnivore?

[LS]

Sounds like an open source Carnivore to me...

Hmmm...

[theseum]

a whole box dedicated for monitoring? Hmm...ssh and GNU tools seemed good enough for monitoring for me....

Re:Hmmm...

[knarf]

a whole box dedicated for monitoring? Hmm...ssh and GNU tools seemed good enough for monitoring for me....

For you maybe... for (insert company/organization with big network here) not. If your company relies on those network/service monitoring boxes, they'd better be stable and left to their job. For these applications, a dedicated monitoring box is probably the best way to go, since you can just install it and put a big 'do not disturb' sign on the console. With hardware prices being what they are now, this will save you both time and money, since it makes management of the monitoring infrastructure a whole lot easier...

Version Number Inflation?

[sparcv9]

From the linked article:

Note that we do not consider this version to be of production quality.

Then why give it a version number of 1.0?

Re:Why a customized version of netsaint?

[sparcv9]

Doesn't it violate Debian's gpl liscense if they bundle a proprietary version of netsaint?

It doesn't say proprietary; it says customized. And you can get the modified source code for it right here. So, no, it doesn't violate the GPL. (Note: GNU's GPL, not Debian's GPL -- there's no such thing.)

WebTelemetry Better Alternative

[thgood]

Check out WebTelemetry.com it offers similar features to NetSaint, but requires no installation. WebTelemetry monitors systems remotely from their servers, its no good having NetSaint on your network try to send you an email message to your pager when it can't get to the internet either! WebTelemetry also comes with a nifty JAVA applet GUI. WebTelemetry does have a server component, which you can install on your own server. The only need for this is monitoring systems behind a firewall. WebTelemetry also has WAP (wireless web) access already running... So if your are a server admin you can check on your systems from anywhere... very useful for diagnosing problems when you can't get to the internet via land lines... something that netsaint is now doing (or should I say copying!).