There are a number of standard nagios macros that you can use with your check commands, as well as some locally defined ones configured as $USERn$ macros. Nagios allows up to 32 $USER% macros, so we use these sparingly.

These local macros will not be displayed by any of the CGI pages, and can be used to refer to things that we don't want getting out into the wild.

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Hi Guys,

Barry asked that I put together some highlights from our meeting the other day....

Here they are!

Harry and I attended the OIT web team meeting this morning.  I don't have specific notes to share, as the discussions were mostly about implementation details of folks using the http://oit.ncsu.edu drupal site.  Issues of how the breadcrumbs are implemented, experiences with using the Word html filters, and status updates from the various units involved in migrating their content.

The purpose of this project is to consolidate the four OIT Active Directories into the WolfTech Active Directory. We need to move to this campus-managed AD environment in order to meet existing customer needs and position ourselves to securely deliver next-generation services at an enterprise scale. We will achieve this by combining and standardizing our services into a consistent focused environment, which will reduce confusion and costly duplication, while increasing flexibility.

I've added a new nagios function, "linux-hosted" to monitor machines run by the hosted services group.

At the moment, it's just a ping cannon, but in the coming days we'll be adding a bunch of snmp tests.

Clonezilla Live is an open source imaging software used for cloning workstations or servers.  Clonezilla is a good replacement for the older versions of Ghost.

Attached is a document that shows how to create an image of a server's primary partition on a USB backup drive.

More information on Clonezilla can be found at http://www.clonezilla.org .

Debbie's called an internal meeting this afternoon to setup some projects and get some timelines together for moving our various ADs to WolfTech

I figured I'd put out my project list to save some face to face time

Project: Migrate existing servers to WoldTech WSUS
Should just be a matter of mapping our "approval" models to the WolfTech ones, adjusting for any mismatches (eg does WT currently have a "all patches except for Office" profile needed by the Citrix boxen?) and set a timetable to implement.

I've been invited to participate in a "Managed Environment/Virtual Desktop" group looking into impacts and possible savings.  No meetings have been set as yet and I don't know who else is participating. I'll post more as it develops.

Brian Askills from the University of Washington has done a good presentation on FERPA which is available online at:

http://windows-hied.org/wiki/index.php5?title=FERPA_and_Active_Directory

It's 45 minutes.

The first 30 minutes are all about FERPA. It provides a good intro to the subject, with some interesting tid-bits. The last 15 minutes are FERPA & Active Directory. It is a little Exchange-heavy.

I think, being a Microsoft LiveMeeting ActiveX kind of thingie, it may require Internet Explorer. Opera don't work.

So Debbie, Harry and I have done some extremely rough counts trying to compute the TCO of the Pcounter system, and how much resource we stand to save when we decommission these servers at the end of the month.