(14:14:23) theBastedo: hahahaha
(14:21:15) friend: lol
(14:21:19) friend: you're bad
(14:21:41) theBastedo: hah
(14:21:45) theBastedo: don't judge me
(14:21:48) theBastedo: lol
(14:22:38) friend: i can judge you whenever i want
(14:22:40) friend: hoe
(14:22:41) friend: :P
(14:35:49) theBastedo: hahahahaha
(14:35:58) theBastedo: well as long as you give me a reach around when you judge me
(14:36:33) friend: hey man whatever turns you on
(14:36:34) friend: :P
(14:36:49) theBastedo: lol
(14:36:57) theBastedo: thats a never ending list there buddy\
(14:39:35) friend: hahah
(14:39:46) friend: hey i can only do so much without the right tools
(14:39:48) friend: :P
(14:40:05) theBastedo: hahahaha
(14:40:11) theBastedo: i got the all purpose tool for you!
(14:40:33) friend: lol
(14:40:50) theBastedo: you just gotta find it, its hidden in my pants :D
(14:40:52) friend: hahaha

(05:37:10) thebastedo: this project blows my nuts
(05:37:29) friend: hey
(05:37:33) thebastedo: huh?
(05:37:33) friend: i thought only i got to do that
(05:37:37) friend: lol
(05:37:40) thebastedo: nope
(05:37:43) thebastedo: work is above you
(05:37:47) thebastedo: cuz they pay my rent
(05:37:48) friend: loll
(05:37:52) thebastedo: they get what they want
(05:37:54) friend: who pays yer souP!!!
(05:37:55) friend: =P
(05:38:04) thebastedo: well you pay my rent too i'll let you be the only one
(05:38:10) friend: i should atleast get top priority below work
(05:38:19) thebastedo: well you get it whenever you want
(05:38:24) thebastedo: as long as i'm not currently engaged
(05:38:39) thebastedo: but my nuts are exclusive to you
(05:39:55) friend: hahaha
(05:39:56) friend: ok

sorry I just wanted to help save some of my funny comments with my friends from when I'm up way to late working.

So about a month ago we put in a new hosting infrastructure and me as the sole admin needed an easy way to monitor and keep an eye on all of my servers and the services and resources of each server.



So after some digging around I found that an application I use to use was now a new application Nagios. Now this application is great, took me about 2 days to set everything up as it is now, but once I found everything i needed it was great. Nagios uses SNMP Protocol to monitor almost anything on your server. It has a very OO configuration allowing you to reach some pretty complex setups. Mine didn't get too complex so i can't speak to all of that but it was pretty easy to setup once I got the hang of it. After I found these two Nagios Plugin pages I knew I was truely in heaven. NagiosExchange and Manubulon Nagios Plugins.



Nagios does a lot for me. It watches my partitions and lets me know if one gets close to full and notifies me before it gets full, watches RAM / Swap usage, checks to see that Apache, MySQL and SSHD are up and running, and even checks the status of my mysql replication to my backup server.

Though nagios was great, it didn't completely satisfy all my needs. Though it watched to make sure everything was up and running I couldn't see trends in usage and such. So I went out and installed MRTG on my monitor and began setting up MRTG stuff to log usage of network connections, cpu, ram, and hd usage on all my machines. This helps me to better see when I may need to upgrade things hopefully before even Nagios knows.
MRTG Page

All in all the key to a happy administrator is preparedness. Trying to keep this in more of a proactive environment than a responsive one. If anyone has any more questions about either of these apps let me know I'd be happy to answer some questions!

one of my coworkers sent me this link today, haven't had a ton of time to play with it but looks pretty sweet.

WWW SQL Designer

Which is a nice interface to GModeler that Grant Skinner made which runs in flash. Gmodeler seems a little more geared to software architecture than db modeling. Both fun and handy little tools

GModeler

Well this is it kids, i caved in and made a blog. I'm going to use it to document my journeys through the interweb, mainly covering LAMP development and some related topics. SO... if you wanna be as cool as me get on the bandwagon and start readin! Oh and i don't spell well or have good typing gramar so eat it! ok?