APT Monitoring with Prometheus
As soon you run a Linux server, you need to make sure your systems are up-to-date. It would also be handy to know if you had Kernel upgrades which require a reboot of the system to get applied. I came across a blog post from Tom Henderson which provided a solution using the Node_Exporter with Prometheus. The way he solved this is pretty slick. I had to tweak the scripts a bit to get it running. Continue reading
SNMP vs. Prometheus – On The Wire
I’ve been working with network monitoring tools for a long time. Working with network devices, there is still today a very high probability you have to deal with SNMP. If you work with modern applications or infrastructure, especially in dynamic environments with containers, you will inevitably run into Prometheus and its ecosystem when you need to design and build monitoring solutions. By design, both agents have different goals in mind. The world was very different when SNMP aimed to be “simple” in 1980 as it was for Prometheus in 2012. Continue readingThe biggest concern for any organization should be when their most passionate people become quiet.
Tim McClure
Containers and Capabilities
I have to work with container images from time to time, and sometimes I need to do networking stuff. Of course, you want to do this as an unprivileged user. Especially when you mix and match with Docker or Kubernetes, it gets sometimes a bit tricky and a lot of people in our community including myself struggled on this part. To document it for my future-self and the ones interested – here is my scenario. Continue reading
A cookbook for a K8s playground
In my last weeks, I had to work with deployments of OpenNMS with Kubernetes. Instead of spending dollars on cloud providers for my lab, I’ve bought a beefy cheap box for my home network for less than 1.500,-€ about a year ago. It saved me probably already more than I would have spent on similar resources in the cloud for my playgrounds. It has an Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-10880H CPU, 64 GB RAM, and 2 TB SSD which has enough steam to run VMware ESXi on it. Continue reading
ioquake3 in a container
Once upon a time, people had no internet access, or it was very expensive and slow. To have some fun, they spent weekends with their friends and hung out playing games over a local area network. It was so much fun it gained some interest and the space from your friends house was just too small for all the people. Parents and families went crazy and electric bills went through the roof. Continue reading
This website is not available in your country
Note to my future self. You might find yourself in a situation where you are blocked from an internet service because of your geographic location. A way to get around is using a VPN from a friend in a non-evil geographic location or using a 3rd party VPN service. Sometimes you don’t have that option right away and you need something quickly - Torbrowser for the rescue. Download and install the latest Torbrowser. Continue reading
BGP monitoring playground
Monitoring BGP can be done in various ways. First thing people want to know is if there is a way to get notifications in case a BGP peering session goes down. A pretty common way monitoring the BGP peering session state is using SNMP and the RFC1269 MIB. In OpenNMS Horizon we have the BGP session monitor which allows to track the state using the BGP peer table. The downside is, you need to configure for every peering session a monitor and this can be cumbersome and hard to maintain. Continue reading