Will Bradley

Getting notified by SMS is better than via email, I think, because then you can tell the difference between midnight spam and a server fire. Here’s my command for sending a shortened message (to #yournumber#@YourCarrierSMSGateway.com)

Add these to your commands.cfg and then change your contact settings (usually contacts_nagios2.cfg) to use the appropriate command.
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I like the Whiteline icon set for Nagios’ statusmap cgi, but it’s too big; here it is resized to 40px wide and I added an Ubuntu icon as well.

Download: whiteline.zip

See my earlier Nagios post

Sometimes padlocks, zip ties, sternly-worded signs and keyed ignitions just don’t cut it. Maybe what you’re looking for is something more like…

…a web-enabled RFID interlock loosely based on 23b’s Open Access Control system?
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The Minecraft release party, MineCon, was this year in Las Vegas. In a flash of inspiration, I knew I’d found my first cosplay opportunity. Most people would wear cardboard boxes, which isn’t very Vegas. What Minecraft-themed costume would fit Vegas, aside from old people in sweatpants gambling their retirement checks away? A suit, of course! With a Notch-inspired Fedora, and Creeper-print fabric to tie it back to Minecraft. Hours of sewing later, I’m the proud owner of a Creeper shirt (and fedora.)
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The movie ‘Hackers’ came out in 1995, when I was still in elementary school. So by the time I grew up and watched it (along with the Matrix and Tron) I knew that the kinds of computer visualization depicted in those movies was something I wanted. I’m a very visual person (and I think computers are generally way more cerebral than visual) so I’ve always wanted a more visual, physical representation of computer systems. Imagine if we had a tricorder or sick bay analyzer that could show you every little invisible detail of complex systems like the environment, human bodies, or networks? This is one small step towards that.
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People want lots of money these days for digital signage, but lots of it is mediocre at best and especially lacking in third-party data sources. How much money is it worth to edit HTML by hand? About the cost of decent digital signage software! So I made my own with pure Javascript and JQuery goodness:
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So you’ve got Ubuntu 11.04 and think you’ll use Nagios and its fun plugin, NRPE, to monitor your cloud servers, right? Sure! There are some gotchas though. Read on. Note: You may want to check out check_mk instead of NRPE as it is reportedly sexier.
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Why buy an expensive disk or flash drive duplicator when you can make one yourself with Linux for free or cheap?

Here are the cloning scripts you can use to copy a disk and then write it back to a large number of target disks. Modify the IMAGE.img and /dev/DEVICE as desired. It even beeps when it’s done! Make sure to mark the scripts as executable (chmod +x) so you can double click them, or run them by typing ./SCRIPT.sh in terminal. (more…)

This is the line I put in a Scheduled Task to download a remote directory and save it locally. You should be able to use it in reverse to upload something.

"C:\Program Files\WinSCP\WinSCP.exe" /console /log=winscp.log /command "option batch on" "option confirm off" "open USERNAME:PASSWORD@EXAMPLE.com -hostkey=""ssh-rsa 2048 00:11:22:33:44:55:66:77:88:99:AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF"" " "get /home/backups/* c:\backups\*" "exit"

Separated for readability:
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Ever needed to access, or maintain access, to a computer that’s behind a firewall? Just run one of these commands on that computer (in Linux or maybe Mac) and you’ll get a tunnel to that computer’s port 22 (SSH) over whatever port you type for the PORTNUM in the examples below.

First example: ssh -R PORTNUM:localhost:22 USERNAME@SERVERNAME

So if you ran the command ssh -R 5001:localhost:22 user@example.com you’d be able to login to example.com and then run ssh user@localhost.com -p 5001 to connect back to that computer.
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