Tomorrow is International Talk like a Pirate day

I have some content filters in place on the ISO blog that I will be testing in honor of this most sacred and special of days.  Please don't page anyone to report problems with our site tomorrow, it's all part of a scheduled, planned test.

Yesterday Kevin and I met with Danny and Harry and discussed how to address the proliferation of OU admins in the WolfTech domain from within OIT.  We now have 11 OIT OUs,  (OIT-AC, OIT-ComTech-CMS, OIT-OCC, ISO_PROV,ISO_SHS,ISO_RnD, TSS_CS, TSS_LSS, TSS-DS, TSS-SC not to mention ITD-DSP), which is causing problems because being an OU admin in WolfTech implies a level of communication with the rest of the admin community that simply isn't present in most cases.

FYI, I've adjusted the software firewall on license02 so that the new Nagii can monitor it properly.

Folks,

I added a drupal module, JTooltips, to the ISO blog.  I'm trying to make our site "richer" without adding a lot of work to content creation.  It shouldn't impact access, just AJAX things up a bit, but if people hate it, it's easy enough to turn off.

John

In order to reduce duplicate calls for ComTech, improve our security practices, and generally speed up request processing for QIP access, ComTech has created a QIP role named "oit-iso-tech"

This role provides access to QIP objects, and members can easily be added or removed from the role.  The initial membership of this role will be the staff in ISO-PROV and ISO-SHS (those that do production QIP work in ISO)

We've added a new check, "backup agent" to the "windows-hosted" servers.

This check tests to see if either the NetBackup OR Avamar agents is loaded.  If one is, then it return green, if neither are found or on any errors, a yellow alert is generated.

We'll be deploying this on other Windows machines shortly.

So, things are pretty wierd with 2/3 different DNS servers (NCSU,NCSU_LEGACY, and the Windows DCs) all offering "authoritative" results for the acsad.ncsu.edu DNS zone.

We had a couple of Windows hosts give the error "Could not get value" when checking uptime, and the extra mysterous "ERROR: Could not get data for 1 perhaps we don't collect data this far back?" while checking load.

Turns out the Windows performance counters had gotten sidewise, and need to be rebuilt.  With some help from the event log and http://eventid.net, we discovered

This plugin alows you to monitor a Microsoft SQL Server by checking more than 20 metrics.

Nagios Server Side config

In the old Microsys repo there is a RHEL5 package for the Nagios server side of this plugin. Note that this plugin uses the perl module DBD::Sybase.

Install the package check_mssql_health and/or put it in the kickstart file for the Nagios server for automatic installation.

We've run into several machines that can't upgrade to the latest NSClient++ plugin (the software that implements NRPE, the Nagios Remote Plugin Executor "protocol") because the installed version doesn't appear in Add/Remove programs.

Bizzare!

To uninstall it manually, assuming it's located in "C:\Program Files\NC State University\NSClientPP" issue the folllowing commands from a cmd prompt:

"C:\Program Files\NC State University\NSClientPP\nsclient++.exe" /uninstall
rd /q "C:\Program Files\NC State University\NSClientPP"