What the heck is wrong with my server?!?

If you run services, eventually something will break. This session will cover technologies you can use to know when things go down, figure out what the problem is and fix it *before* your users start calling.

The first part will cover the setup and configuration of the “Nagios core” system monitoring system which can automatically monitor a host of network and system services 24/7. It’s simple web-based interface and flexible monitoring plugin architecture make it a breeze to monitor almost any service you run. We’ll also cover basic plugin development in BASH and PERL so you can see how easy it is to write your own plugins to monitor custom services.

The second half will cover using tools such as ‘telnet’, ‘openssl’, ‘dig’ and ‘wireshark’ to determine what’s going on and figure out how to fix it. You’ll learn to speak basic HTTP, IMAP, POP and DNS and verify the operations of basic network services.

— Note:

This session will cover both “foundational” skills such as network troubleshooting as well as intermediate skills needed to install and configure Nagios and make it work with Apache.  However, even those who have no wish to set up a monitoring system can learn valuable diagnostic techniques.

Key Concepts:

  • Installation and configuration of the “Nagios” monitoring system
  • Familiarity with some basic network service protocols, including IMAP, HTTP, SMTP, DNS
  • Basic understanding of SSL, certificates and TLS handshaking.
  • How to use ‘openssl’ to connect to SSL-protected services “by hand”
  • (If time permits) Basic understanding of TCP/IP and packet sniffing using wireshark on OSX.)

Intermediate Lecture – 75 Minutes

Josh Malone, National Radio Astronomy Observatory

Josh MaloneI’ve been a systems administrator since 2001, serving FreeBSD, Windows, Linux and MacOSX. For the past 6 years I’ve been the lead Mac admin for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (www.nrao.edu). I manage mail, dns, dhcp, samba, web, nagios and other services on Linux and I maintain over 100 Mac systems using Munki. I’m fluent in BASH, perl and PHP.

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