Setting up OMD to get a working Nagios server is really simple, but what makes this monitoring setup really awesome is how easy Check___MK makes finding, configuring and running these checks. Setup the agent on your nodes, or just monitor SNMP/ping data, then tell Nagios/Check_MK which hosts to monitor and it will inventory and monitor all available checks it can find. This should create a check-mk-agent config file for xinetd at /etc/xinetd.d/check-mk-agent. We can edit one option for security, I haven’t tried running this as a regular user instead of root, but I should look into that. Uncomment the following line and specify your Nagios servers IP or hostname. ...

I’ve been a fan of Nagios for quite awhile. It has its issues, but with how easy it has become to setup with OMD and check discovery using Check_MK, I don’t know of anything else this powerful and simple to use. I’ll go over this first part which is the OMD installation and setup. ...

I use XenServer 6.2 as my hypervisor at home to run anywhere from 5-10 VMs. But I wanted to change up this setup and move to OpenStack Private Cloud deployment. Yes, it’s overkill for my use but oh well. I’ve messed around a few times with using OpenStack as replacement for my XenServer 6.2 setup, but always ran into an issue, usually getting the networking correct given my home network. Luckily with the OpenStack Havana release networking has become much simpler to get my head around and deploy. Also, a number of OpenStack installer scripts and how to guides have improved since the early OpenStack releases. For my deployment I used Red Hat’s RDO and packstack to deploy OpenStack Havana. From Red Hat, “RDO is a community of people using and deploying OpenStack on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora and distributions derived from these (such as CentOS, Scientific Linux and others).”. ...

Trove is an OpenStack project to supply databases as a service. Rackspace’s Cloud Databases API are based on this and so the trove Python client is compatible with your Rackspace provided Cloud Databases or your own implementation of Trove. This example we’ll go over using this with Rackspaces’s Cloud Databases. I’m using OS X so my example will be for that OS, but the client should be compatible with most Linux distros. ...

Connecting to a Linux console in XenServer is is easy as xl console, but slightly more difficult with a Windows VM since the terminal can’t display the Windows GUI. SSH tunneling and VNC to the rescue. First, grab the VNC port the Windows VM uses with the following command. You’ll need the dom-id of the Windows VM. xl list or xe vm-list name-label=YourWindowsNameLabel params=dom-id to find it. ...

In my previous post I showed how easy it is to get salt-cloud provisioning tool working with Rackspace Cloud to spin up and bootstrap your new Cloud Server with salt. The /etc/salt/cloud.profiles.d/rackspace.conf file in that example only included one 512MB Cloud Server running Ubuntu Server 12.04. I’ve updated this file with all of the Linux distros and server sizes included in Rackspace Cloud. You can see these from your salt-master with ‘salt-cloud –list-sizes rackspace’ and to view the images list you can run ‘salt-cloud –list-images rackspace’. ...