Abi Rendon - Sysadmin » work

My Job, Syslog, and Splunk

Abi Rendon — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:19:33 +0000

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…

Configure your systems with syslog-ng to forward to a centralized syslog server where you can “tail -f” your problems easily.
Buy expensive products such as SolarWinds syslog and snmp trap collector.
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.

Installing Splunk is as easy as pie, just download the RPM, they even provide a wget url.

Once you’ve downloaded just install using your flavor’s package system. They even provide a source version which you can install on any Linux distro, as well as an executable Windows version.

Redhat, SLES, etc.

rpm -ivh .rpm

Ubuntu, Debian etc.

dpkg -i .deb

Everything Else

tar -xzvf .tgz; cd ;./install.sh

Once you’ve installed splunk you can enable auto start like so…

/opt/splunk/bin/splunk enable boot-start

Pretty easy and you just run your new splunk init script to start it, you’ll then be able to connect to it using your servers url on port 8000.

http://:8000

Job Search

Abi Rendon — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 04:57:50 +0000

So as some of you may know, I’ve been looking for a new job. If anyone knows of any job openings just let me know. So far I’ve applied to a few but due to the holiday season only a couple have gotten back to me in a timely manner. I hope to get some … Read more →

Joomla?

Abi Rendon — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 20:21:24 +0000

NetRiver is officially using Joomla as a CMS solution. Because of this I’m working on a way to automate installation and templating from our development team. Currently it takes me about 3 hours of modification to successfully template a Joomla install.

I’m working on a way to automate most of the process and basically get those 3 hours of my time back to put towards other things.

So far I’ve made a base SVN trunk for our Joomla installs. The trunk has a default basic template and a set of our “supported” modules. We currently have a similar setup for our Chambergate product and I’m going to be maintaining our joomla base install. Hopefully the way I’m doing it will make it easier to roll out mass updates for people and also allow us to document a set of static features.

You can check out my default install here

I Heart Chinese

Abi Rendon — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 02:31:26 +0000

I was recently contracted to do work for a fellow goon over at the something awful forums, so far it’s going pretty great.

The project is called “I Heart Chinese“, it’s a really neat idea. Teaching Chinese with online flash animations, it’s online learning but in a fun and easy way. So far I’ve been working on the base system, the base system is built around my own database abstraction layer working with ADODB. It’s also using the smarty template engine, no particular reason other than it helps keep the code managable.

I’ll be updating as I write more, but so far it’s hard to show any recognizable progress.

Plans for netriver

Abi Rendon — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 01:51:24 +0000

Recently I’ve started a new marketing idea for NetRiver, we moved into our new facility and I’m tired of it being mostly empty so I’ve taken it upon myself to help fill it up. I have connections all over so it shouldn’t be too hard to bring clients the only hassle is going to be the countless hours it is taking me to fill the content and design the website.

If you want to track my progress (anybody actually read this?) check out http://netriver.nr-dev.com.