Shawn on the net

I’ve spoke to Amazon a few times about a US-West region as so far the reply has always been that they are considering it but nothing is in motion yet.  Well the other day while making a request for a higher limit on my elastic ips I went to select the region I wanted them for and to my surprise saw US-West in the list.  Needless to say I was quite excited!

Unfortunately I couldn’t find the option to create new west coast instances and today the option is gone from the elastic ip page.  Hopefully though this is a sign of things to come very soon as I would love to be able to host all our servers with Amazon.

Zabbix is a network monitoring system which uses a central server and remote agents which report back to it. Today I setup my central server and after much document reading, and Google searching got it all configured and working with one agent. Going forward now that I’m familiar with the system the rest of the agents should be a lot easier to setup. Next task is to configure the screens.

During the server setup I ran into a few problems that you might have as well so read on and hopefully you’ll save yourself a lot of head scratching.

1. Zabbix doesn’t support SMTP-Auth. This is certainly a pain but thanks to this Forum Post it’s not that hard to work around. I started developing a patch to add in SMTP-Auth support and I might finish it off this week but I needed the alerts up and running right away so thats on hold.

2. Hosts, Items, Triggers, Actions oh my!
- Hosts are the systems you want to monitor, these need to have zabbix_agent/zabbix_agentd installed and configured for the server. When adding hosts select a template to get a bunch of default items/triggers out of the box, these will save you a lot of time.
- Items are things to watch IE. the amount of free space on a drive.
- Triggers are conditions of items that cause an alert. For example the amount of free space on partition /usr drops below 100MB
When you select a host template a lot of these will be setup so you’ll probably want to start off by just cloning/editing existing ones.

Thats really about it to get started I have personally just scratched the surface so I can’t go much further but this should be enough to get you up and running fast and give you some extra time to study the docs.

Grab Zabbix Today.

I’m a programmer by choice but a DBA/Sysadmin by need.  Thats not to say I don’t really enjoy the other two roles just that I don’t always focus on improving my skills in either as much as I do my development skills.  Given that a larger and larger portion of my work these days revolves around scaling databases and systems I’ve started to focus more on improving this side of my skillset.  This week I’ve started reading High Performance MySql Second Edition.  I’ve only read the first few seconds but already have a long list of notes about things I didn’t know about or worse yet thought I knew about but was wrong about.

I’ll post a full follow up once I’ve completed it but it’s starting out looking really good.

I’ve been working a lot with GoGrid lately as we needed some west coast servers and Amazon doesn’t offer US-west yet.  Maybe I’ve just been spoiled by Amazons offering but I’ve found GoGrid to be almost unusable for day to day work.  A few of the issues so far.

1. OS images – They only offer centos/RHEL for the linux side which I am not comfortable with plus I hate yum so I end up spending large amounts of time fighting the system to configure new servers

2. Load balancer – You get a free load balancer which is awesome! What they don’t tell you is that they are not configurable.  Add a new server to your cluster?  You need to delete the load balancer and recreate it which of course means downtime.  Like 10-15 minutes of downtime everytime you want to add a new server.  Thats just not acceptable.  Even support can’t change this for you when you call up.

3. No stored images – If you customize your servers quite heavily you will be heartbroken to find out that you cant store that image to use on new servers.  No instead on your next server you’ll have to do it all again so write it down.

4. no upgradeability – If you start with say 1 or 2gig servers and realize after a while that you need to upgrade them you can’t.  I spoke to support about this as well and was told to create a new server and delete the old one.  Thats fine if you can use the default image but I can’t so that means 1-2 hours wasted for each server I have to change plus see issue 2 I’ll have to have 10-15 minutes of downtime when I replace the load balancer.

I’ve been working a lot of cloud environments lately including 20 boxes on Amazon EC2, and 4 on GoGrid. I’m looking at Mosso this week.  Once done I’ll post a round up of them all.

www.atlassian.com has a special offer up today offering JIRA and Confluence for $5 for 5 users.  I grabbed both and I’m looking forward to giving them a try.  I’m always looking for the perfect issue tracker.  Heres hoping JIRA is it.

So tonight I started reading Programming Erlang again.  Well I started it last week too.  I’ll probably be starting again next week as well.  I’ve been so busy with work lately that I’ve found it difficult to study anything out of hours.  Assuming I don’t completely fail at concentrating I’ll be sure to post more about my experience.

Wow it’s been a while.  As for my last race.  I completed it! However it felt too easy to abuse so I decided not to launch it.  I plan to start posting more frequently now.