When looking for server and network device monitoring, there are quite a few options, ranging from very expensive to free. Today I focus on a free solution that I use, The Hobbit Monitor.
Hobbit is a system based on a plug-in for the Big Brother Monitoring software. Big Brother has been around for quite some time and was bought by Quest Software a few years ago. Hobbit is very comparable the Big Brother system, keeping most of the same general interface and functionality but adding many new features and overall speed improvements.
Hobbit is a monitoring solution for servers and network devices and allows you to write or use extensions to monitor just about anything that responds over a network connection. A central server controls and collects the monitoring and displays the results via a fairly easy to use web interface. It will track history and trends (via rrd) and provides a built-in reporting tool. If there is an issue (that you've defined), such as a down host, the interface will turn red and will performs any alerting actions that you've defined, such as sending an email or sms message.
A member of the Hobbit team provides a live demo here: http://www.hswn.dk/hobbit/
The alerting function has some great features and is very customizable, but is less than straight forward in its setup. An example the configuration file:
$PHONE=MAIL mycell@acme.com SERVICE=conn REPEAT=2h FORMAT=sms DURATION>10m
$SYSADMIN=MAIL admin@acme.com REPEAT=2h DURATION>10m TIME=*:0600:2300
PAGE=servers/siteone TIME=*:0700:2100
MAIL a_sysadmin@acme.com SERVICE=conn REPEAT=50h FORMAT=plain
HOST=%^win.*
$PHONE
$SYSADMIN
Breaking it down a bit, the configuration is in two parts, the definition and rules of the targets and definitions of the monitoring rules.
The $PHONE definition will email mycell@acme.com only if the conn test (ping test) fails, will repeat the alert every two hours, send the alert in sms format. It will also only trigger if the system has been in alert status for more than ten minutes. The $SYSADMIN definition will email admin@acme.com every two hours on ANY failed test lasting over ten minutes and only between the hours of 6am and 11pm. Those two lines define the targets (whom to email) and the conditions at which to email those addresses.
The PAGE=servers/siteone definition will monitor all the hosts on a page on the server. If your server is http://hobbit.acme.com, then it will monitor all the hosts on http://hobbit.acme.com/servers/siteone. Continuing on that line, the section TIME=*:0700:2100 will only trigger the alert if a host is in alert status between the hours of 7am and 9pm. The next line specifies a target, in this case an email address with some extra rules. The HOST=%^win.* will monitor any hosts that has win. in the name. For example, if you name several servers inside Hobbit win.server, like win.mailserver, win.fileserver, win.appserver. No matter where in Hobbit you have these servers, they will be monitored under this rule. The next two lines, $PHONE and $SYSADMIN just call the predefined targets and use the rules defined there.
As you can see, the alerting functionality is very customizable and, even if the setup isn't point and click, not that hard to set up once you have a little understanding about it. Hobbit also features an easy way to pause or stop alerts via it's web interface. You can stop alerts by test type (like ping test, telnet test, etc), set a duration for the stopage (like no alerts for this host for the next two hours, or until the test turns ok), or even schedule a stopage when you are scheduling some downtime for a host.
As I mentioned before, Hobbit can be extended and customized for greater functionality. You can add more tests either by enabling those built in (refernce the help file for details), by writing your own port tests (also in the help), or by adding extensions. See deadcat.net for a lot of extensions and additional tests. Although the majority of these are geared towards Big Brother, with a little bit of code tweaking they can be easily adapted to Hobbit.
Although this system seems to be Linux/Unix oriented at a quick glance, it provides a lot of functionality for Windows systems utiliziing an agent called BBWin. With BBWin, you can monitor resources such as CPU usage, disk usage, memory usage, running processes and services, uptime, and netstat results. You can also add additional extensions (called externals in BBWin) to test for other things. Configuration is done in an XML file on each server and is very customizable.
You can customize the default warn and panic levels for the CPU usage:
Disk monitoring can be configured with a default warning and panic levels:
Or you can specify specific levels per drive based on a percentage or just an amout of space left:
Remote drives and optical drives can be monitored as well:
Services can be monitored wheter they are running or not. You can also automatically restart the service if you so configure it. You can specify any process running on the server just by adding another line with it's service name. Processes are configured similarily:
Example of the Hobbit overview of some Windows servers utilizing BBWin:
Example of the CPU usage monitoring:
Example of the OpenManage extension I use for my Dell servers:
As you can see, Hobbit is a very powerful and customizable alternative to the other server and network monitoring products out there. With a little bit of reading and some work, you can get this system up and monitoring your systems without too much hassle. Hobbit is definately worth a try if you need a solution and don't have the funds to drop for a commercial solution.
March 31, 2008
March 16, 2008
So, a family member brought me a laptop from a small business owner who he helps with computer issues. Well, the laptop is broke. It looks like it'll boot into Windows (XP Home) and then blue screens. Safe mode does the same thing. Although the BIOS will see the disk, the Windows install media doesn't. And of course the laptop's owner really needs the company data off of it, can't afford data recovery, and, of course, has no backups.
We pulled the drive out of the laptop and used a IDE to USB converter to hook it up to my laptop. Windows recognizes the disk and assigns it a drive letter, but took forever (like 10 minutes) before it showed up in My Computer. Attempting to access the drive via My Computer, command prompt, or even by Run (e:\) would error out. So I figured the disk is in some way corrupt and a third party recovery software was needed.
I tried several recovery softwares, but the one that eventually worked was TestDisk. TestDisk is OpenSource freeware designed specifically for drives with lost partitions or recovering data from non-bootable drives.
From thier website, TestDisk can:
* Fix partition table, recover deleted partition
* Recover FAT32 boot sector from its backup
* Rebuild FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 boot sector
* Fix FAT tables
* Rebuild NTFS boot sector
* Recover NTFS boot sector from its backup
* Fix MFT using MFT mirror
* Locate ext2/ext3 Backup SuperBlock
It can also run under DOS, Windows, Linux, BSD, MacOS, and SunOS and can handle MANY different file systems.
For my issue in particular, I did the following:
1. Hook the drive up your computer. I used an IDE to USB adapter, but I'm sure setting the drive into slave mode and installing it into a PC will work as well.
2. Allow Windows to find the drive (I'm not sure if this is necessary since Windows XP found the drive for me. It may work without Windows recognition).
3. Open TestDisk (did I mention that no install is required?).
4. It asks to create a log file, I chose Create.
5. Select the drive and choose Proceed.
6. Choose the partition table type. Since this drive was running Windows, I chose Intel.
7. Here's the meat of the software. I chose Advanced.
8. Choose your partition you want to analyze. Some drives have more than one partition; even if there's only one presented to Windows, some manufacturers have a Diagnostic or Restore partition.
9. The next option I chose is List.
10. This should list the files on the drive. Select the drive by using the Up or Down arrows. Enter will bring you into a folder. The Left arrow will bring you up a level in the folder tree.
11. Select the file or folder you want to recover and hit the C key to copy. It will present you with an option to choose the directory on the local machine (the machine you're running TestDisk from) where you want to copy the file to. Hit Enter with your choice.
12. After the copy is complete, the text "Copy done!" will appear in green text. You can now choose another file or directory to copy or hit the Q key to quit.
Also be aware that if you copy a large amount of data it will be fairly SLOW. Or at least slower than most people's standards. But you will have your data, so a little time should be no big deal.
Seriously, add TestDisk to your Admin toolbox immediately.
September 07, 2006
UNIX provides hundreds, if not thousands, of commands with which you can manipulate a large variety of resources available in the kernel and user space. Martin Streicher, Editor-in-Chief, Linux Magazine, looks at three essential UNIX utilities that deliver the entire Internet to your command line.
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What is FreeNAS ?
FreeNAS is a small (less than 32Mo) Operating System based on FreeBSD 6 that provide Free Network-Attached Storage services (CIFS, FTP and NFS).
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June 29, 2006
You have Linux installed and running. The GUI is working fine, but you are getting tired of changing your desktop themes. You keep seeing this "terminal" thing. Don't worry, we'll show you what to do.
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June 21, 2006
Complete list of command line tools you would need. Check it out!
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Excellent review on GParted LiveCD 0.2.5-1 ( Gnome Partition Editor ). This review works you through the process of repartitioning a WindowsXP NTFS hard drive. The LiveCD is a must have for all Linux users.
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June 13, 2006
Running any Linux in Windows without a CD-ROM (for free): "If you are afraid of installing Linux in your hard drive, here you have an article on how to run any version of Linux inside windows without using a CD ROM and with only freeware. Using Easyvmx, VMWare player and a Linux ISO file."
This is incredibly awesome. I've used VirtualPC and VirtualServer (from MS), and both seemed to be fairly good (although I never used them for Linux). I've been plesantly surprised by the performance of VMWare player, and my installation of Ubuntu was quick, easy, and painless using the methods above.