A few days ago, someone on irc.lopsa.org asked for something like [Cacti|http://www.cacti.net], but smaller, easier to manage, and that plugs into [Nagios|http://www.nagios.org]. Having just brought up such a system a few weeks ago, I was able to recommend [NagiosGraph|http://sourceforge.net/projects/nagiosgraph/]. In our situation, we make very little use of SNMP, so Cacti would have been of…
Call me old-skool, but I like Pine. A lot of people like their fancy Thunderbird or Evolution, or even (shudder) Outlook, but I’m a confirmed Pine user. I like the speed, and I’m a CLI nerd, too. I know from #lopsa that a lot of other LOPSAns are Pine users as well. Mutt is also moderately popular, but I could never make the switch; my brain was already mapped to Pine key bindings.
As much as I like Pine, though, there were a few features I found lacking. The biggest one was a “Trash” folder. I’m delete-happy, and frequently find myself digging through the trash to get something out, be it a whole email or just an address. Pine is very Un*xy in its implementation: something deleted is deleted, sayonara, ciao, toodle-oo, [BALEETED|http://www.hrwiki.org/index.php/50_emails]! Continue reading
[Cfengine|http://www.cfengine.org] is an awesome tool for managing any number of machines between 2 and 200,000. You probably already knew that. If you’re using Cfengine, you probably also know that it can get pretty verbose, especially for more complex edits. If you have a configuration file wherein order matters, adding a line suddenly becomes nontrivial. iptables…
It was, I believe, at USENIX ’05 that I first heard about Mailping, a utility that would send an email message, check for its receipt, and report on the health of your mail system. Unfortunately, the utility had fallen into disrepair, and I couldn’t find an alternative. So I did what any hacker would do:…