tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28818035967395253392012-03-04T22:55:37.805+01:00This blog is about topics affecting developers and sysadminsChristianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585052970296274352noreply@blogger.comBlogger191100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2881803596739525339.post-85885948868397812922011-07-27T18:33:00.000+02:002011-07-27T18:33:16.895+02:00

Hi everyone, I'm aware Selenium 2.2 is out. I hadn't had the time to verify my check with this new version. A user gave me the feedback, the check is working with version 2.0. So hopefully it will also work with the newer versions. I'll try to get my hands on the new version as soon as possible.

Christianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585052970296274352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2881803596739525339.post-41702195225758741332011-01-23T16:17:00.000+01:002011-01-23T16:17:02.652+01:00

I've posted on new version of check_selenium to gitorious and Nagios Exchange. It has some improvements in error logging, command line parameter parsing. I also added ant targets, to create a tar.gz file for all needed files for the plugin and two other targets to create a tar.gz for the selenium server with wrapper scripts to run it as daemon or windows service.

Christianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585052970296274352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2881803596739525339.post-59253932103773608192011-01-23T16:14:00.000+01:002011-01-23T16:14:18.569+01:00

Hello everyone, recently I joined LOPSA and became a mentor. To get to know more about the LOPSA Mentorship Progam , take a look at the homepage: LOPSA Mentorship Program My first protege is Michael from Poland. His project is about securing Apache and Tomcat. This is also his first participation, so we both are very exited about how this will develop. As far as I can tell now, it is very

Christianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585052970296274352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2881803596739525339.post-22041963775640041482010-06-27T10:26:00.000+02:002010-06-27T10:26:36.882+02:00

"Don't waste my time, buddy. You're just a dogsbody sysadmin; I write the software and you merely service it. So just shut up with your petty concerns and do as I say, OK?" Comment from serverfault.com  Today I'm going to write about one of the main reasons, in my opinion, why cooperation between dev and ops is not working most of the time: respect and understanding of the other persons job.

Christianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14578019392373532253noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2881803596739525339.post-43222281228403700552010-06-05T18:57:00.002+02:002011-07-27T18:31:10.797+02:00

Hi, I've implemented a Nagios check for Selenium test cases. With this check it is possible to put your recorded test cases from your Selenium IDE into Nagios to use them for monitoring. In my opinion this has the following advantages: You can transfer your test cases to monitoring without making any changes. You can run the test cases with multiple browsers. This means, you use the JavaScript

Christianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585052970296274352noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2881803596739525339.post-47523827232740603422010-04-29T16:43:00.000+02:002010-04-29T16:43:40.853+02:00

In addition to my article about documentation and automation, I found an interesting statement in the book "The Practice of System and Network Administration". The author of chapter 9 ("Documentation") stats: Documentation is the first step to automation: If you don't know exactly how you do something, you can't automate it. I haven't thought of it this way before. In my opinion he is right,

Christianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14578019392373532253noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2881803596739525339.post-25441282990195700342010-04-28T18:17:00.001+02:002010-04-29T16:44:35.311+02:00

Hi, there are a lot of tools for automating multiple tasks in system administration, like puppet, cfengine, spacewalk, kickstart, fai, autoyast, nagios, to only name some examples. But why are they not used by everyone? I can think of the following arguments to use automation tools: Less work: You will do some tasks only once and after that you gain a lot of time by repeating it

Christianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14578019392373532253noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2881803596739525339.post-23469483456612429692010-03-25T16:45:00.000+01:002010-03-25T16:45:21.888+01:00

Hi, today I'm going to write about a situation every sysadmin has already encountered. The sysadmin gets a new version of some type of software and should install it on a server. After some hours of trying he calls the developer and tells him he's not getting the application to start. The first answer all of us get: "But it is running on my PC." Let the discussion start. ;) In my opinion it

Christianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585052970296274352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2881803596739525339.post-37350865777835416272010-03-25T16:38:00.000+01:002010-03-25T16:38:59.901+01:00

Hi, for some time I had the problem, that taking Java heap dumps with jmap took too long. When one of my tomcats crashed by an OutOfMemoryException, I had no time to do a heap dump because it took some hours and the server had to be back online. Now I found a sollution to my problem. The initial idea came from this post. It had a solution for Solaris, but with some googling and try and error I

Christianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585052970296274352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2881803596739525339.post-45682421795177289002010-03-19T18:30:00.008+01:002010-03-21T11:49:50.775+01:00

When you would like to use JMX with SSL you have to configure some points on both sides. First, create yourself a self-signed certificate (details here) and insert it into a keystore (details here). Let’s assume you want to use JMX over SSL with your Tomcat and JConsole on the client. Add these parameters to your tomcat script: -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=

Christianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585052970296274352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2881803596739525339.post-50569859667394419912010-03-08T20:00:00.003+01:002010-03-21T11:48:48.231+01:00

There are different check_jmx versions (ME, NE1, NE2 and CG) on NagiosExchange, MonitorExchange and Google Code but it seems none of them is still maintained. I tried to reach one author but got no reply. So I decided to put my modifications on the net. I also merged some other changes in this new release of check_jmx. To be sure other people can continue development, should I'm not be reachable

Christianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14578019392373532253noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2881803596739525339.post-80160631478464279662010-03-01T10:21:00.001+01:002010-03-21T11:44:49.083+01:00

Hi, and now the matching presentation to the podcast at redmonk I mentioned earlier. Their are some very good statements in this presentation. The tools section is not so important for the mentioned tools, but for the statements that are combined with the tools: single click build single click deployment monitoring for app and systems understanding for all metrics independent of app or system

Christianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14578019392373532253noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2881803596739525339.post-44837521951162381292010-02-16T18:28:00.002+01:002010-02-16T18:34:05.053+01:00

Hello everyone, here you'll find an article what devops is about by Stephen Nelson-Smith. It is a nice round up of what devops is and what it tries to achieve. devops

Christianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14578019392373532253noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2881803596739525339.post-57548548776642526792010-02-16T18:27:00.002+01:002010-02-16T18:33:34.316+01:00

Hi, this is a podcast with John Allspow (now at etsy). For me as a sysadmin, the talk at about 22:30min and 27:00min was very interesting. Have fun listening. devops, flickr

Christianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14578019392373532253noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2881803596739525339.post-37044665702581233072010-02-11T11:08:00.000+01:002010-02-11T11:10:54.496+01:00

I listened to the talk about cucumber-nagios by Lindsay Holmwood. Besides the slides the presentation also had a live demonstration. As I understood the presentation cucumber-nagios is not completely new. You could have achieved the same with some other Nagios plugins or their combination, but I have to say: It is cool! It seems to be much more flexible and extendible. I see cucumber-nagios as a

Christianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14578019392373532253noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2881803596739525339.post-51050658046442402022010-02-06T08:32:00.000+01:002010-02-06T08:32:41.992+01:00

Currently I'm on my way to FOSDEM 2010 in Brussels, Belgium. There will be some promising talks about Open Source Projects and the use of Open Source Software. I hope to see the following talks: Evil on the Internet (Link to fosdem site for presentation) Large scale analysis made easy - Apache Hadoop (Link to fosdem site for presentation) Scaling Facebook with Open Source tools (Link to fosdem

Christianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585052970296274352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2881803596739525339.post-89550046040521471792010-01-31T18:59:00.000+01:002010-01-31T19:01:20.004+01:00

Hi everyone, recently I've read an article in a german IT paper (iX 02/2010, p. 116, "Fit für den Betrieb" by Michael K. Klemke) about making applications ready for production (the german title would translate to "Ready for production"). In the last part of his article Michael is writing about logging in an application. I would like to state some of his points here and make some additions. Here

Christianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14578019392373532253noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2881803596739525339.post-3461473908773077242010-01-24T13:46:00.000+01:002010-01-24T13:46:38.263+01:00

Hi everyone, let's get this blog started. I have a lot in mind about what I would like to write. So to get you a first impression what awaits you in this blog and to give my thoughts a bit of order, here is a list of topics I'm going to write about (not in order of appearance): non-functional requirements project timeline organisational structures "the app is running on my PC" logging

Christianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585052970296274352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2881803596739525339.post-86585861724343465192010-01-12T10:09:00.000+01:002010-01-14T14:34:00.768+01:00

Hi, finally I got myself to start this blog. I've mixed feelings about it. But I will never know what would have happened if I don't start writing it. The main topic for this blog will be the work of developers and sysadmins and what is going wrong at the contact points in my opinion. I'm working as a sysadmin, so my opinions about this topic might be a little biased, but there for are the

Christianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10585052970296274352noreply@blogger.com0