New URL and Design

Posted by Abi Rendon in Home | Personal | Sysadmin | Technology - (2 Comments)

As some might have noticed, I’ve recently updated my domain to abirendon.com and I’ve also applied a new wordpress theme, just made a few tweaks but it all seems to be working splendidly and it looks good.

I’ll be posting some guides on setting up and configuring VMWare ESXi, converting VMWare Server VMs to ESXi format, configuring a raid 5 array on an MSA20 via linux command line and hopefully some more interesting pictures.

I’ve also just bought an iphone so I’ll probably be messing around with doing updates on the go.

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Splunk on SUSE with Firefox 3, forever loading…

Posted by Abi Rendon in Sysadmin - (1 Comments)

If you’re using SLES or any other Suse variant you might be wondering why your Splunk installation is constantly in a loading loop unless you browse to it using Internet Explorer. After lots of hacking around, reboots and google searches I emailed the splunk team about my problem. At first they didn’t seem to understand my problem but they did suggest I take a look at this article in their troubleshooting documentation.

http://www.splunk.com/doc/latest/admin/UnableToGetAProperlyFormattedResponseFromTheServer

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My Job, Syslog, and Splunk

Posted by Abi Rendon in Sysadmin - (0 Comments)

I have been working as the Senior Systems Engineer in the operations group at a company called Airbiquity for the past year or so.

As part of my daily job I come into contact with many new and interesting products and things that help me do my job better.

Firstly, how often do you find that you need to constantly debug several machines at one? Tailing syslogs on each box can become a nightmare when you have more than one machine to look at. Consider these options…

  1. Configure your systems with syslog-ng to forward to a centralized syslog server where you can “tail -f” your problems easily.
  2. Buy expensive products such as SolarWinds syslog and snmp trap collector.
  3. Use a free (500mb/day) syslog collector and search utility called Splunk

After messing with the SolarWinds products for a while I decided to move against it towards open source and free/cheaper options.

At Airbiquity I configured all of our servers and network equipment to send their syslog requests to a centralized syslog server. This was great for work debugging but I had trouble letting my boss have an easy utility that they could search with.

This is when I setup Splunk, it’s easy to install and while it can be load intensive it was a lot more intuitive and easy to use than the SolarWinds offering. So far it’s been great and we’re going to start looking into AD integration and clustering to support our multiple data centers.

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