January 22, 2010
I use Nagios at work to monitor all of my critical production servers. We have a older Solaris 8 SPARC server that quietly sits handling database queries using Informix. Most of the time this server never needs to be touched but recently it has had some performance issues. Once we discovered the problem I decided to also add it to the pool of servers Nagios monitors. Needless to say, monitoring Solaris 8 with Nagios had its challenges to get setup.
I wrote up a detailed paper explaining the process and how to get around some of the problems I encountered while trying to get NRPE to play nicely with Solaris 8.
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December 16, 2009
I changed a couple of things around on my work setup I thought I’d share. First of all I moved to Fluxbox as my windowmanager on my Linux box. Fluxbox is lightweight, highly customizable and since I’m usually using a terminal to get things done it fits the bill perfect. I’m using conky as a lightweight system monitor to keep tabs on things like CPU usage, memory usage, network load, etc.
Below you can see my current Linux desktop. Conky is running on the bottom left of the screen with my customizations. My .conkyrc file can be found here.
As you can see I’m using two programs with conky. One to check my gmail account and another to check the current weather conditions. The perl script I’m using to check gmail can be found here. To keep up with local weather conditions I’m using a script that can be found here.
I also replaced my KVM setup in favor of having another monitor and using synergy to hop between systems. I’ll be writing a short paper on configuring synergy with a Linux and Windows system in the near future.
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December 8, 2009
I was recently researching a simple way to create a reverse shell on a remote machine without having to install any additional tools. A general overview of what a reverse shell is may be in order, this page explains the process: http://www.plenz.com/reverseshell
While researching I stumbled upon a great discussion on various methods for doing this. My goal was to start a listener on my system using netcat, then connect to the remote system and establish a reverse shell to my system without using any installed tools on the remote system.
The discussion on the subject can be seen here: http://www.gnucitizen.org/blog/reverse-shell-with-bash/. As you can see many interesting ways of achieving this goal have been posted.
The method I ended up using can be seen in the screenshot below.
On the right you see I started netcat on my machine “despina” listening on port 8181. On the left I connect to the remote machine “backup” with an IP of 192.168.4.10. Once I’m on the remote machine I connect back to my machine “despina” using the bash command on the left. Once the command is executed I’m immediately greeted with a shell on my machine.
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November 30, 2009
I had a client that needed to monitor multiple computers at the same time from one central location. Cost was a issue, so I started to research ways to do this “on the cheap”.
The first thing I stumbled upon was SmartCode VNC Manager. This looked like a nice product but was cost prohibitive. Digging further I found a project that was started by a teacher for his students computer lab. The projects website is http://thetechnologyteacher.wordpress.com/vncthumbnailviewer/. Once I got VNC installed on all of the client computers, setting up VncThumbnailViewer on the monitoring computer was simple.
Below is a screen shot of the thumbnail viewer with six workstations active and a example of the simple configuration file that can be used to load multiple workstations quickly.
If you’re looking for a cheap alternative to monitor multiple workstations from one central system I’d recommend giving this project a try.
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November 23, 2009
My contract with Verizon was up last month so I decided I needed a new more robust phone. Lucky for me as soon as I started looking around for options in the smart phone market the Droid was announced. I ended up purchasing the phone two days after its release. I also purchased a clear case and a screen protector for about $30, the only complaint I have is with the screen protector. When it was fist put on my fingers would “stick” to the screen so navigating around proved difficult. The odd thing is after two days the “stickiness” is gone so I can’t even call this a complaint anymore.
So far I really like this phone. The main feature I was looking for was a way to access client servers in a pinch remotely from my phone. So far the application market place for the Android is somewhat lacking but this is to be expected since this is a new release. I was able to find a SSH application called ConnectBot and it fits the bill perfectly. Another feature I was focused on was email. I wanted a system where I could incorporate all of my accounts into one central area and be alerted on my phone when a new email was available. Gmail’s integration with the Droid was flawless and works perfectly.
The screen on this phone is stunning. The display is clear, crisp and bright. I’m not fond of the physical slide-out keyboard, it’s a little cramped for my tastes. I usually resort to the virtual keyboard which works great.
Overall if you are due for a phone upgrade I would consider the Droid one of the top choices in terms of smart phones.
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November 19, 2009
Well, I finally made the jump back to a blog format. It only took me what? Seven years?
Truth be told I was blogging long before the term blogging was even known to the masses. If you check the Internet Archive for computerglitch.net you will see pages as far back as 2001, however I actually had the site running as far back as 1999. You will also notice long about 2002 I switched to Drupal for my CMS of choice, at that time it wasn’t very popular at all and customizing it was not the easiest of tasks.
So you may ask yourself, why choose wordpress for the current blog? Well it seems to be the easiest for me at this time and I wanted to give it a whirl, we’ll see how it goes.
I’ll slowly be moving all of the tips and howto’s into some type of integration into this site. Hopefully within the next couple of weeks I’ll settle on a format that will make it easy to access all of my papers.
Hope you enjoy the new format.
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