Recently I setup logcheck, but found it was sending email reports purporting to be from localhost, which is absolutely useless for anyone trying to manage multiple servers (aren't we all)! Digging into the cause, I found logcheck gets the local hostname by using either hostname --short or hostname…
It's important to know when cron jobs fail. One way to do this is to put an entry in the crontab like MAILTO=me@example.com. But for this to work, the system needs a sendmail agent. A rather simplistic option is ssmtp; this is a good option…
To swap, or not to swap still seems to be a common question. Modern computers often provide massive amounts of memory, which is great because memory is fast. Swap, being disk based, is slow. The benefit of swap is that it provides more memory resources for a system with high…
SNMP is a great utility for systems monitoring. Some systems support SNMP better than others. I was working on an gateway product and ran into the limitations of OID 1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.10 (ifInOctets). This also applies to 1.3.6.1.2.1.…
On my LAN, I have 6T of storage. I've been working on upgrading this to add capacity and improve data duplication for backup purposes. Through the upgrades, I've been introducing disk striping and NIC bonding to improve performance. All my disks are managed using LVM because…