Monitoring the Health of Your Penguin?

codepunk asks; "I work for a large manufacturing firm in the midwest, working on a migration from Windows to Linux in the data center. We just completed installation of two full Oracle RAC 9i clusters. We are also in the process of configuring two clusters for our manufacturing floor's Linux desktop roll out. The machines that make up our data center are all Compaq Proliant Series machines. In order to facilitate hardware maintenance we are in bad need of a monitoring solution. HP offers Insight Manager as well as the Compaq Health Agents. This solution would seem like a natural but the drivers installed by these solutions are binary only. We have never managed to get these to work correctly and are really concerned about the stability of our systems with these modules loaded. We are not opposed to buying hardware in the future from a vendor that provides a more open solution. We are also not opposed to buying a open third party solution. Slashdot, what do you use for Linux system hardware monitoring?"

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[szysz]

You can also try the 'Just for Fun' Network Management System ,
its open source and extesible to fit any of your needs.

I'm the main developer.

Moaning Goat

[Johnny_Longtorso]

http://www.xiph.org/mgm/

HP SmartStart CDs now Linux based

[__aaaaxm1522]

Just noticed something else this afternoon. I normally don't bother using the HP/Compaq SmartStart CDs to configure my servers, preferring to do the OS installation by hand. For those of you not "in the know", HP/Compaq servers (at least the Proliant models) ship with a CD that will walk a new user through hardware config, OS install, etc. It automatically sets certain firmware/BIOS settings based on your chosen OS, etc... and helps you load the necessary drivers into your freshly installed OS.

Anyhow, back to what I noticed: The old SmartStart CDs were Windows based (yup, bootable Windows, or a subset thereof, on a CD). The SmartStart CDs that shipped with my new DL380 G3s are *Linux* based. They boot into a web browser from which all system config is managed. CTRL-ALT-F1 gets you a bash prompt. X is running on F3. Window manager is icewm. Browser is phoenix. PHP seems to be present as well, as there is a /php.ini file ... haven't looked much further yet.

cat /proc/version shows that it's running 2.4.18-4smp, and is the kernel shipped with RH 7.3 (or an update).

Very interesting, as this Linux-based tool helps people install Windows on their servers. For fun, I asked it to walk me through an OS install - it noticed that I had configured my OS in the BIOS as Linux (yes, there is a BIOS Linux-specific option), it told me that it couldn't assist a Linux install, only Windows. :)

Re:Wow - not at all flamebait

[Acheron]

Responding even though AC here has obviously been living under the bridge a bit too long and is rather off-topic to boot.

Load levelling/failover such as your speaking of in Windows Datacenter is definitely possible in linux. Please visit http://linux-ha.org/ if you're interested in learning more about some of those types of applications.

I'm not sure what your point is with hardware. Quality hardware is available from many vendors, including hardware which supports Linux. Yes, IBM, Sun, etc have systems which provide good hardware redundancy and replaceability, but so does Dell.

Your point about comparing a load leveled Windows Datacenter cluster to a beowulf cluster is comparing apples to oranges. The Windows Datacenter is a cluster of machines providing redundancy of service for each other, the beowulf is a cluster of machines acting as a single large processing unit. Completely different balls of wax.

I guarantee you that I could build with Linux and Dell a cluster that would be just as reliable as your windows datacenter, plus it would cost less and probably perform better.

Feel free to visit again. Careful though, I hear there's heretics around who don't religiously praise ANY hardware or ANY software at all!