The ramblings of a computer geek
SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is a protocol that can be used for monitoring and managing network connected devices. Personally I use it primarily for monitoring, it is a useful way to interrogate network connected devices for information about their status. For example querying to identify if a power supply has failed on a switch, … Read more
NagiosXI has a REST API that can be used to add, edit and remove objects from the configuration. Full details of the configuration and use of this can be found on your installation at: http://nagiosserver.domain.com/nagiosxi/help/?xiwindow=api.php (or you can find it through the Advanced Configuration menu). Each user has an APIKey which can also be found via … Read more
A quick guide to setting up SSH Public Key Authentication. SSH Public Key Authentication means you can authenticate to a remove server via SSH without needing to enter your username and password. Instead you create a public-private key pair, then place the public key on the target server. Then when you SSH to the server … Read more
The “Screen” command is a very useful utility that allows you to create a session (or sessions) which you can run programs in, but in such a way that you can detach from the session (screen) if you needed to logoff your terminal or reboot your client machine, but without loosing what you were doing … Read more
You can deploy an NFS server onto an Ubuntu Linux server to allow you to provide NFS exports to other machines on your network. The documentation below provides a very quick guide on how to do this. It assumes you have a Ubuntu Linux 22.04 LTS machine with some storage attached that you want to … Read more
We needed to install Ruby 2.7 instead of what normally comes with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, if we installed a later than 2.7 Ruby version, the particular application (i.e. Staytus in this case) would barf. The nice people at BrightBox have created some packaged installs of Ruby at various versions.https://www.brightbox.com/docs/ruby/ubuntu/#adding-the-repositoryhttps://launchpad.net/~brightbox/+archive/ruby-ng (Latest version supported 20.04) We first … Read more
Sometimes it is helpful just to get a script running on a machine to generate some disk IO load. I use this for two main reasons, one is during the testing or proving of a storage platform in terms of its availability during a fail-over or maintenance situation (e.g. it’s storage processors), the other is … Read more
During some upcoming changes I needed to test a mobile application to use a test IP address for a standard hostname. Problem is, I didn’t want to root my Android phone to be able edit the hosts file. There are apps such as “Hosts Go”, but in my case these didn’t work. On a normal … Read more
Just a quick one, let’s say you need to tunnel some traffic over an SSH tunnel, its pretty simple to setup, in this example I’m wanting a local port 3128 on my local machine to be tunnelled over the SSH session to a remote server via another server (i.e. an SSH gateway). Okay, let’s break … Read more
So you have a Python script (for example), and you need to store some access credentials for an API it accesses (for example), now you could put the username and password in the script. There’s lots of reasons not to do this however, a key one being that if you are using a version control … Read more