gary’s web sofa

I’ve replaced Cacti and Nagios with Zabbix to monitor the company infrastructure. Nagios is nice but there are some things you can only monitor using agents as Linux’s SNMP support is just too fragile. It’s also nice having monitoring and charting built into one easy to configure web application as opposed to drowning in config files.

My one pain point was state flapping. A service can go unresponsive for a fraction of a second under heavy load and come back right again. All to frequently my inbox would get swamped with problem…ok…problem…ok….problem…ok messages. By the time I’d log in everything had settled down. It’s not a perfect situation, but doesn’t warrant getting out of bed to repair either. Nagios has a flapping detection function but Zabbix doesn’t.

What I’ve found is that the AVG function can be used to average the status values (“1″ or “0″) over a given period and only trigger an alert if it drops below the alert value. For example

{server01:net.tcp.port[, 80].avg(30)}<1

will only trigger a second alert if the web server stays responsive for at least 30 seconds between outages. Also

{server01:net.tcp.port[, 80].avg(30)}=0

Will only trigger an alert if the service stays down for more than 30 seconds at a time. Further you can combine the two in

{server01:net.tcp.port[, 80].avg(60)}<0.5

to only trigger an alert if the service stays down for more than 30 seconds and only trigger an OK if it stays back up for 30 seconds.

I bought a new laptop recently. This isn’t my first PC upgrade. I think I’m on my 9th laptop at this stage. It’s always been a dreadful chore, exporting, packaging, burning, installing, copying, saving, importing and then configuring everything. it used to take a solid weekend before I was 100% comfortable. This time around was very disconcerting. I basically switched on my new laptop, installed a few tools, entered my MS Office license key and I was pretty much good to go.

Because my current work style is very fluid, where I hop between my office and home PCs, a laptop, a netbook and an iPhone, it made sense to try and keep my data where I could access it regardless of device. I basically have 3 categories of data: email, my web browser environment (bookmarks, stored passwords, history) and unstructured data (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, JPEGs etc. files). I use a few cloud based services to supplement these, but more on them another time.

Documents: I’m fairly neat when it comes to organising data on my laptop. Everything is in the My Documents folder. I used to use Beyond Compare to manually sync my desktop and laptop but for the last while I’ve been using Microsoft Live Mesh Beta to keep everything in sync automatically. A change or addition on any system ripples around to all the rest in real time. This means I can start work on a document in the office and seamlessly pick up where I left off when I get home without having to do a thing. On the new PC I just installed the Mesh client and left it to do it’s thing over night. It pulled my data from the online copy and placed it just where I’d expect it.

Email: POP is for noobs; IMAP is king. Seeing as Google are generous enough to give away 7GB+ of email storage I’d be a fool not to use it. A few years ago (pretty much as soon as it was available) I created an @garypigott.net Google Apps account and shoved all my email up there. Right now there are 118,527 emails, occupying 2298MB of space, and vitally, it’s completely searchable in exactly the same way you’d search the web using Google. I access exactly the same data using Gmail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird, and the iPhone mail client.

Web Browser Environment: My browser of choice is Firefox,  which is handy a) because it’s multi-platform and b) because of Weave. Weave is an add-on that moves your bookmarks, history and passwords into the cloud. You can install the add-on on each of your computers, regardless of OS and everything is kept in sync. Weave is open source, so surely some enterprising and generous developer out there will churn out a Weave add-on for IE, Opera and Safari…

Prof. Martin Curley has got together with some other eminent economists and has written a book called “Knowledge-Driven Entrepreneurship – The Key to Social and Economic Transformation”. The core argument (I think. I’ve only read the press coverage), is that the quickest way to improve society (and by implication get out of this financial mess) is to concentrate on the knowledge economy. Professor Curley says that the west has lost the ability to innovate and take risks.

Risks are manageable if you’re a large corporate, but it’s a huge ask if you’re a start-up. Start-ups need capital and for most of us in Ireland that means the banks.  If you do somehow manage to get approval for a loan or overdraft, they’re routinely requiring personal guarantees before handing over the cash. For small fry that means that if your business fails in a big way you could end up bankrupt and lose everything and be on the sidelines for 12 years.  With risks like that is it any wonder that young knowledge workers aren’t willing to try the entrepreneurship route?

In the USA you can be in and out of Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 bankruptcy in a year and get back on the horse. As importantly, your core family assets (house, car and household goods) are safe. While never to be entered into lightly, it’s almost regarded as a right of passage for the entrepreneur in training.

Banks need to get fair in their business lending and government needs to put a proper structure in place to manage the failures in a humane way if they want to see a real culture of entrepreneurship grow in Ireland.

Barky posted an easy to follow set of instructions as a comment on moblin.org. It’s bound to get lost as the old comments get purged so I’ve reproduced it below so I can find it again myself

I bought Macromedia Homesite 5.5 from Macromedia’s web store back in 2005, just after Adobe bought Macromedia. They’ve long since killed off Homesite but it’s never been beaten in my opinion as a HTML/web code editor. I had a need yesterday to make a minor change to a PHP file and I decided to dust off Homesite rather than edit in notepad. I went to my CD wallet and couldn’t find the CD so I thought I was pretty much stuffed. Most of my on-line purchases have been from Digital River and I expected similar treatment (at best) from Adobe. DR expects you to pay a premium to download your software again later. Here’s a sample from Symentec’s online store provided by DR. It’s a total piss take, but what can you do?

I dug out my old order confirmation email and clicked on the link to Macromedia’s web store. I got redirected to the Adobe store login, where my old Macromedia login worked, and could go straight to my order history and not only re-download my purchase 4 years later, I could also view my license key! If only all online stored operated this way I’d shop online for software more often.