2012

OpenBSD as a monitoring server using Xymon

       706 words, 4 minutes

I’ve been using various monitoring software for a long time now. I always use two kinds of monitoring tools: service checkers, like Nagios, Monit… and metrics graphers, like RRDtool, Cacti, Munin, … I like the Xymon software, AKA Hobbit Monitor, because it can achieve both, uses very low resources and can be customized quite easily. I used to run it on a FreeBSD virtual machine with ZFS activated. The idea was to compress and deduplicate the RRD data. But in fact, the RRD files weight less than 100MB and ZFS is of no use here. Plus, it seems my 3 virtual disks configuration makes the system lagging a lot ; or is it just the FreeBSD implementation. Anyway, that machine keeps sending timeouts and I can get why. Plus, comparing performance of both VMs, FreeBSD and VMware tools doesn’t seem to use less of my ESXi resources. So it’s time to replace it by some OS that never fails me: OpenBSD.

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Update ESXi v5 without vCenter or Update Manager

       385 words, 2 minutes

This is just a quick note so that I can remember later on how to update my standalone ESXi v5 from the CLI.

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Monitor VMware vSphere from OpenBSD using the Perl SDK

       345 words, 2 minutes

Last time, I had a look at how to monitor VMware vSphere from FreeBSD using the Perl SDK . Quite simple using the ports! Believe it or not, installing and running the VMware vSphere Perl SDK on OpenBSD is as simple as breathing. Here’s the POC.

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OpenSMTPD as MTA relay on OpenBSD 5.1

       229 words, 2 minutes

On my servers, I don’t want mail alerts to stay locally but to be forwarded to root@. There are two ways to do so: either put a .forward file in the home of service user that may send e-mail or configure the local MTA to forward email to root@. Depending on your local MTA, this can be more or less complicated. Usually, I end using sSMTP. But this time, I want to do it using OpenSMTPD. Here’s how.

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OpenBSD 5.1 on Sun Fire V100

       410 words, 2 minutes

A long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away, TuM’Fatig ran on a Sun Fire V100. One day it was pluggued off for some apartment move and was never powered on again.

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