Rootdev

I spent years wondering why there aren’t timestamps in the bash history file, and why there’s no obvious way to add them as they would be so fundamentally useful.

Turns out there is a nice easy way to do it after all:

Set HISTTIMEFORMAT to some suitable string in your .bashrc, ie "%F %T", this puts a unix timestamp in the history file, and displays your easily readable format via the history command.

As usual, if you think something is worth doing then the chances are, someone’s already done it and you really should just go and look!

More bash stuff in the wiki

The wiki is finally online. Had a slight legacy issue with versions of PHP between my dev and live environments that took a little while to work out.

There are still a lot of gaps in the wiki, and quite a few dead links, but they should be sorted out in the next couple of weeks as I port the content across.

Meanwhile, if you find anything that is broken or any info that is clearly wrong, please let me know.

www.rootdev.com/wiki

What’s Wrong With Nagios?

Don’t get me wrong, I like Nagios. I think it’s an excellent piece of software and I have spent many years working with it, but I have just completed a proof of concept and gained approval to deploy OpenNMS as a new Enterprise Grade Network Monitoring System. And the main system targeted for replacement here? That’s right, it’s Nagios, which is primarily running via the remote plugin model, using the NRPE daemon to run scripts on remote hosts and report back to base.

Now anyone who has ever played with Nagios will know that it can be a beast of a thing to set up and get working satisfactorily. In fact, most places will devote a good year or so to the process. As a newbie, sitting in front of a freshly installed Nagios instance and wondering how to get it to do something can be an extremely disheartening experience. Once it’s up and running though it’s usually fairly low maintenance to keep it going, and not too difficult to add new devices or custom plugins as you go along. And, for the most part, it is good at what it does, so why would you want to replace it?

Well, despite having almost unparalleled abilities to monitor at the application level and perform any manner of esoteric checks, Nagios does have its limitations.

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