BaerConsulting LLC Blog

Unfortunately, we had to dump the old BaerConsult.com on a rather rapid time table due to some incompatibilities with the newest forms of a few programming languages that seemed to introduce some security holes that we’re not comfortable with. We will soon be working on the new BaerConsult.com. Until that website is complete, you will be directed here, to our blog, will we will be keeping as up to date as possible from now on.

Well, the Bears’ season is over and we’re back to maintaining the blog. We’ve had some interesting developments as far as projects and news for BaerConsulting. First, we will soon be posting a great way to turn an old computer in to a network media server and using it as a media storage server. The best part of that is that it is completely free of charge. The software will not cost you a penny. Depending on the age of the computer, you may want to consider adding or replacing the hard drive in the machine, however.

Secondly, BaerConsult will soon start developing applications for the Android platform. If you are unfamiliar with Android, it is an open source operating system made by Google. They have geared this OS towards mobile platforms for the time being but have been in negotiations with Netbook manufacturers and have already started prototypes for Netbook tablets with Android running on them. For reference, Android is known as the iPhone killer. It will crush the iPhone. Originally, the G1 made by HTC was really the only phone running Android and it was only available on the T-Mobile network. However, HTC followed up with the MyTouch, also only available with T-Mobile. Soon after, the first non T-Mobile Android devices were made publicly available on other networks such as Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T as well. Since Novemeber, Verizon’s/Motorola’s DROID (A855) has sold over 500,000 units. The first 300,000 were sold in the first 2 weeks of retail availability. What makes this platform so interesting is that Google spent quite a bit of time making it the fastest and most stable OS available on smartphones to date. My DROID boots in about 1/10 the time it took my Blackberry Storm to boot. It really is the best platform available. If you own an Android phone, make sure to look for us in the marketplace under BaerConsultLLC for the developer name. Our first project is still being kept quiet at the moment, but it will hopefully hit public beta in the coming months.

Virtual Machines are great ways to test something before actually using a physical computer. Programs such as VMWare Workstation ($ – Windows and Linux), VirtualBox (Free – Windows, Mac, Linux), and Parallels ($ – Mac) have been used for years by administrators for running different operating systems under a pre-existing operating system. They function just like a normal program. You double-click on it and you can specify your desired hardware settings even down to the number of CPU cores that you’ll want (keep in mind that the hardware that you plug in should not exceed the hardware of the machine that you’re running the application on), and you can install an operating system within that application just as you would on a regular machine. We here and BaerConsulting love them because if we’re trying something new or untested, we can simply install and configure it within a virtual machine. If there’s a mistake, you can delete the virtual machine or the hard drive file just as you would any other file. Some companies even use these in a production environment. Say you were to have a dual quad core processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 2TB hard drive in a physical computer. You could run a Web Server under Mac OSX (if you can get Mac running in a virtual machine), a Monitoring Server under Windows 2003 Server, a Mail Server under CentOS, a NAS on the actual machine running whatever flavor of OS you prefer, and a PBX Server on Ubuntu, all running on that one physical machine. They would all run flawlessly because of the physical hardware specs you have on the physical machine. It’s a great way to learn Linux without having to clear your drive and dump Windows as well. Linux is free, so is VirtualBox, the only thing you’ll lose is some time and hard drive space.

We’ve swapped around the home page a bit. Gave higher priority to the promotions as they are the most important item on the home page. We moved some information to the contact us page. And replaced the old promotion with a new one! 50% off your first 6 months of a 24 month contract. That should bring in some new clients and help stimulate the economy!

Oooo such a dirty word. In all actuality, Nagios is only intimidating. Once you find the right walkthrough and decide for or against compiling from source, you’re already through most of the battle. We decided that a free Windows based monitoring system that had device and probe limitations just wasn’t going to cut it anymore. Since we have a very beautiful 5TB total available storage NAS with a dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM sitting there just storing data, we figure we might as well use it for some monitoring. We went through Zabbix and determined that it was going to take longer to get it set up than most of the server would even be in production. Not to mention SNMP based monitoring of system resources can be a security risk as well as difficult to troubleshoot. Nagios has a very comprehensive support base out there. It has been customized and modified to do just about anything that is desired, so we opted for Nagios.

As previously stated, the NAS is a Ubuntu 9.04 desktop with the hardware specs above. Luckily, Nagios and most plugin packages are in the repositories, meaning that can be downloaded and install using your favorite package manager, on Ubuntu, by default, it’s apt. From there, it’s quite simple to figure out how to monitor things. We did print outs of all the commands that were available in the /etc/nagios-plugins directory with (while in /etc/nagios-plugins) ‘cat *.cfg > all.txt’. Marked each one that we’d like to use and started making our host .cfg files. Whenever you make a change to the Nagios configuration files (any of them), you have to restart Nagios for the change to take effect. This is where Nagios can get somewhat tedious. We highly recommend doing one host at a time. Do a few hosts one at a time, restarting after each one. When Nagios catches an error, it won’t restart successfully and it will usually tell you why. Go back in to the config file and make the necessary changes. Once you’ve mastered hosts, you should start adding services to the host files. You can do your file structure however you like. We used one .cfg file for the mail server, one for the web server, so on and so forth. This way, if you take that server out of production, you can just remove the file or move it to another file with another extension. Also, if something goes wrong, you’ll know exactly where to start looking.

Also, there is a Nagios ‘agent’ called NRPE that is used to monitor system resources on the local machine and sends them back to Nagios. The nice thing is that NRPE uses one single port and utilizes SSL so it’s pretty secure. Those commands are defined in the nrpe.cfg file. We have ours running under xinetd which means we can modify commands as much as we want without having to restart NRPE, although you will have to restart Nagios when you add your check_nrpe command. It’s basically a beefier version of SNMP. We’ve only had one hiccup where NRPE failed SSL handshakes for about an hour, but we believe it was due to an NTP misconfiguration. Time is very important when dealing with secure connections. Right now, we’re experimenting with adding some extensive Zimbra monitoring utilizing NRPE. We just altered some perl paths to get Nagios monitoring the postfix mail queue on the Zimbra server, letting us know whenever it reaches a certain point. This tells us that it is possible to do some very interesting things with Nagios. We’ll post the most interesting parts.

We have not and will not post anything pertaining to the actual set up of Nagios such as a walkthrough. Honestly, it took about 15-25 hours to get it successfully monitoring 52 different services, but that includes setting up NSClient++ (basically NRPE for Windows), NRPE on the Mail Server (CentOS) and the Web Server (Ubuntu), importing all publicly available and privately available services such as POP, SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, etc., public IP addresses, private IP addresses, and domains. We went through and used at least a dozen walkthroughs. At some point, we may set up an additional box just to do the walkthrough, but don’t hold your breath. Nagios documentation is pretty thorough. Google NRPE documentation in order to find the best document for the job. It’s posted by Nagios but couldn’t be readily found on the site. Nagios mailing lists are great resources when all else fails. Also, don’t forget your notification profiles. IT IS HIGHLY ADVISED THAT YOU USE THE ‘NEVER’ NOTIFICATION PROFILE OR CREATE ONE IF YOUR SPECIFIC INSTALL DOESN’T HAVE ONE ON EACH AND EVERY HOST/SERVICE UNTIL IT IS UP, RUNNING, AND STABLE. I’D SAY ONCE EVERYTHING IS GREEN, LET IT RUN FOR A WEEK, THEN YOU’LL KNOW YOU CAN TURN ON NOTIFICATIONS. OTHERWISE, YOUR INBOX WILL FILL QUICKLY WHILE YOU WORK OUT THE BUGS.

Well, it was a long hard road over the past month or so. Quite a few unexpected twists and turns but what can you expect when trying to build this type of machine. There’s about 80 total pounds to this beast. 15 of those pounds in hard drives. A brand new 3ware 9650SE and 8TB of data. We opted to go with RAID1 (1TB + 1TB) for the operating system array/server backup array. Then we utilized RAID5 (2TB + 2TB + 2TB) for the remainder of the storage area. Sad to say, we lost some performance with RAID5, but since we opted for gigabit through, we’re pushing anywhere from 400mbps down to 200mbps (mainly the loss of performance on the RAID5). That’s writing, though. We’re hitting ~500mbps for reading! If anyone is considering building a NAS and is reading this; save yourself the headache and get a hardware RAID card. See the attached picture to see why 3ware is convenient.

3ware has a utility called 3DM2, which comes in handy when rebuilding or troubleshooting RAID arrays

We’ve altered the theme of BaerConsult.com to be more user friendly with older video cards that may not support high resolution or widescreen. This new theme looks and functions better than the old one. If you notice something is off, please let us know at the Contact Page which is also a new addition.

We’ve added a new promotion for our services. For businesses, you can receive E-mail and Web hosting for only $250/month guaranteed for two years. There is a two year agreement that is required. Here are the conditions:

• For e-mail: Limit of 1GB of storage space per e-mail box. Up to 20 accounts. 120 day message storage. Allotment of 500 Contacts.
• For website: Your website will be comparable to BaerConsult.com or Blog.BaerConsult.com
• Requires a two year agreement, you have a 30 calendar day trial period of the services mentioned in this ad. You are responsible for providing content that you want visible on your website and providing a list of e-mail addresses and employee names for those addresses within that 30 calendar day trial period. An ECT (Early Contract Termination) fee of 100% of your remaining contract will be assessed in the event of early termination.

Each of our contracts allow a 30 day trial period, we just normally deal in yearly contracts only. Spread the word! This deal can save an average of $5,000 per year.

We’ve made a few more changes to this site. You’ll notice that we’ve joined Twitter on the right. That will keep you up to date in shorthand on the projects that we’re working on. Also, we’ve managed to get favicons going on both the blog and the main website. Don’t know what a favicon is? Add us to your bookmarks or check out your browser tab. We’ve truncated the main logo and chopped it down to just “BC” for the favicon purposes.

How was everyone’s Fourth of July?

In our never-ending quest to add features and increase user friendliness, we have created, uploaded, and added demonstration videos to our website. We tried with both Keynote and Powerpoint to create a comprehensive demonstration but it took entirely too much time and the end result was at least 45 minutes longer than it should have been. The new videos can now be found at Our Zimbra Demonstration Page. Feel free to view them and see what Zimbra can do. We will be adding more and more as time allows. I have included one below, which touches on SPAM and Filters.