Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.
Rita Mae Brown
I wanna taste love and pain – Wanna feel pride and shame – I don’t wanna take my time – Don′t wanna waste one line – I wanna live better days – Never look back and say – Could have been me – It could have been me
The Struts - Could Have Been Me
Net-SNMP version 3 and OpenNMS
To monitor your systems you rely heavily on SNMP, it gives out of the box a lot of possibilities getting important performance and status information. The main topic security is often not considered. SNMP version 1 and 2c transmit everything in plain text over the wire. There is also no user, password authentication method, just a shared community string which gives access to the information. To address these problems SNMP v3 was introduced. Continue readingIPv6 prefix delegation with FRITZ!OS 7.50 and Ubiquiti ER-4
I started working remotely in 2010 for OpenNMS as an open-source network monitoring advocate. I have a little home lab with some real hardware that allows me to play on various things without giving me a big surprise bill from a cloud provider at the end of the month. I have a FRITZ!Box 7530 connected to my ISP 1&1. I get native IPv6 and IPv4 connectivity over an IPv4-in-IPv6-Tunnel. As my main router, I have a Ubiquiti ER-4. Continue readingRunning a private container registry for testing
When I signed up for my DockerHub account in 2013, I never thought sooner than later everything ends up in a container image as it is today. DockerHub was the first public free as in free beer registry to distribute your container images. Containers are now everywhere, and DockerHub, a corporate entity running and funding DockerHub, introduced usage limits for the free tier and started commercializing its registry service. I need to play with software in a micro-service architecture on a platform like Kubernetes, and these limits can be daunting. Continue readingBuild pmacct on Mac OSX from source
I need a way to generate real-world NetFlow data, and pmacct is a great tool that helped me with various things. I couldn’t find a precompiled package so I have compiled it from the source myself. To get it running on my MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon, I had to jump through a few hoops to get it running. Here is a quick guide to making it work for someone else, including my future self :) Continue readingAPT Monitoring with Prometheus
As soon you run a Linux server, you need to make sure your systems are up-to-date. It would also be handy to know if you had Kernel upgrades which require a reboot of the system to get applied. I came across a blog post from Tom Henderson which provided a solution using the Node_Exporter with Prometheus. The way he solved this is pretty slick. I had to tweak the scripts a bit to get it running. Continue readingSNMP vs. Prometheus – On The Wire
I’ve been working with network monitoring tools for a long time. Working with network devices, there is still today a very high probability you have to deal with SNMP. If you work with modern applications or infrastructure, especially in dynamic environments with containers, you will inevitably run into Prometheus and its ecosystem when you need to design and build monitoring solutions. By design, both agents have different goals in mind. The world was very different when SNMP aimed to be “simple” in 1980 as it was for Prometheus in 2012. Continue readingThe biggest concern for any organization should be when their most passionate people become quiet.
Tim McClure