As I already wrote about in the past I have a raspberry pi running at home. I do also have a VPS running somewhere on the interweb for an owncloud instance.

Being a sysadmin I wanted to know when my home devices become unreachable and when the owncloud instance is down. By mail in the first place if possible by sms message for free in the ideal world.

And guess what, I managed to reach the ideal world to monitor my instances. Over here I'll describe how I managed to do so.

msmtp

First of all you need to install …

Nowadays it becomes more and more relevant knowing which version of a package is installed and having an overview of the packages infected by some bugs or security holes. That way you could see which servers are possibly vulnerable for those on the dark side.

That's where pakiti comes in a clean web based overview of your servers listing all packages vulnerable against the CVE in particular.

It's a client server setup where the client reports the version of the packages to the pakiti server. The server on his turn checks those versions against CVE to see if there are …

Using multiple nice interface dashboards to get an overview of your services is a great thing. But navigating to them all separately could sometimes be rather pain full.

Therefore I looked for some central place to give a broad overview of all of them. During last year many passed through during my search on the internet. The 2 most interesting ones where team dashboard and dashing.

Team dashboard is a promising one which could gather extremely specific data and give those back in some nice graphics. That way you could create your own very specific dashboard with all graphics and …

Recently I started to try writing a customized script for the icinga monitoring tool. I will try to describe the steps I went trough to achieve this in this post. I assume you already have a working icinga setup. If not you can find documentation about this on http://docs.icinga.org/.

First of all you need to script. I created a script which will check if a service is running using the command

# /etc/init.d/service status

to see how to implement this in icinga. The script can be found on my github repo.

Once you have tested …