Just finished my first Python script. It’s a Nagios plugin to check Dell hardware components via the omreport utility. It’s designed to be used client-side via NRPE (or check_by_ssh). Additional usage information can be found within the scripts docstrings as well as the --help option. Some gotchas: In some instances NRPE will not execute scripts that start with #!/usr/bin/env. In these instances you will need to specify the full path to python . The plugin expects a symlink of omreport in /usr/sbin, you may need to add one if the OMSA install script didn’t. I hard-coded the path...

Creating a ramdisk on FreeBSD is straight forward but Google will lead you astray. The main problem with finding accurate results on how to create a ramdisk is that it’s not called a ramdisk. It’s technically referred to as a “memory-based disk” in FreeBSD. To make matters worse the name of the utility has recently changed. It use to be “vnconfig” and is now “mdconfig“. Most of the articles instruct the user to create a startup script run out of rc.local that initializes and mounts the memory disk at startup. However, FreeBSD added proper rc scripts...

After exhausting the official recommendations on tuning Nagios I begain searching for additional recommendations. I found several mailing list archives discussing the use of check_fping in place of check_ping (fping = fast ping). This sounded great since upwards of 30% of our 9000+ checks are ping. The net effect of one second faster per check is significant. Unfortunately, fping is only faster because its default behavior is to send 1 packet. For fping to remain comparable to our existing check it must send 3 packets. In my tests check_fping is actually slower then check_ping. # /usr/bin/time...

Last night at work our use of OMSA and Nagios paid off (it often does). Three crucial production servers showed up in monitoring with degraded RAID5 arrays. It appears all three servers had 1 out of 3 drives in state “foreign”! I was able to quickly log in and bring the foreign disks online. Without Nagios and OMSA we would have never known and the servers would have lived on with zero redundancy until their inevitable failure. Some people may not know about Open manage so I thought I would write a quick blurb.