Friday, May 8, 2015

ICINGA2: Disable ping check for hosts

Sometimes you need to monitor services on a server where ICMP is not feasible to check whether the host is up. In Icinga2, even if you change your host definition to use 

check_command = "dummy"

it will still do a ping4 service check on the host. The issue is with the definition of the ping4 service as it will apply the ping4 service checks to all hosts that have "address" set.

One of the ways to bypass this is to change the ping4 service line to the following:

assign where host.address && host.vars.ping == "yes"

This way we can add a variable to only allow certain hosts to be pinged. This solution will force you to add the variable

vars.ping = "yes"

for every host you want checked via the ping4 service. An easier way is to modify the generic-host template to include the vars.ping = "yes" variable. You also need to create another template let us say generic-host-no-ping to not have the variable set to "yes" and to use the "dummy" check service which will always return 0 (OK)

template Host "generic-host-no-ping" {
   max_check_attempts = 5
   check_interval = 1m
   retry_interval = 30s
   check_command = "dummy"
   vars.ping = "no"
 }

Now when you create your host definition you just need to import the correct template.

Saturday, April 6, 2013

Using DELL SUU 7.2 on Centos 6.4

After readming through a couple of posts and blogs on how to use SUU on CentOS the following worked for me.

Please note that if you do not have the right rpm's installed the update process will delete your /tmp directory, so try this on a non production server first.

 Install the relevant rpms:

yum -y install glibc.i686 compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 zlib.i686 libxml2.i686 libXp.i686 libXtst.i686 ncurses-libs pam.i686 ncurses-libs.i686 compat-libstdc++-296

Mount the ISO image or dvd and run the following from the mountpoint

 ./suu -c (check if there are any updates)
./suu -u (update)

 you can do a tail -f /var/log/dell/suu/* to see what is happening.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Windows 8 UI

Read the post from Microsoft on the feedback they had for the Windows 8 pre-release. They keep missing the point. The user experience should be the key focus, not trying to fit the tablet experience to the desktop experience. One of the reasons people are moving to Apple products is the user experience. Windows 8 should not force a context switch when you try and use the product.

Compare the following, how does the start screen differ?


Saturday, October 23, 2010

Tech-Ed Africa 2010

If you ever have the opportunity to see Andy Malone speak on security, do so. Well worth the effort.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Monday, June 29, 2009