Details of Lab Monitor system & Nagios

[Greg Vickers]

Hey all,

Since I've received interest in how I did this, here are the details:

1. Compile NSCA under cygwin (lazy - or compile code to win32 C compiler) 
so you have a NSCA Windows executable (this was done about 1.5 yrs ago 
before I knew about http://support.tsmgsoftware.com/ which seems to be down 
atm)
2. Deploy the executable to your lab hosts (depending on your lab imaging 
management tool at QUT there are Rembo, Ghost and Deepfreeze) via Rembo or 
an Active Directory Global Group Policy, we did both.
3. Configure the services you want your lab hosts to send information about 
(on startup: "Lab PC available", on logon "Lab PC unavailable", "user 
<blah> logged on", on reboot "Lab PC unavailable" (not available until back 
to C-A-D screen), "user <blah> logged off"). I also crafted some other 
checks for use with Rembo, so we can tell if that computer re-imaged 
successfully last boot, got a couple of other services defined, full 
details upon request.
4. Use a cluster check on the "Lab PC available" service to determine how 
many lab hosts are in state OK (available) and how many are in state 
CRITICAL (un-available)
5. Build a cgi that runs the cluster check and builds a pretty HTML graph
6. Get told to use the corporate web template, insert said graph into 
template. (Template is all jsp thank god I know jsp - build jsp bean for 
retrieving graph via jsp)
7. Play with JDK 1.4 and write regex to parse list of Faculties on a 
campus, to return the URL of the 'next' page in the meta-refresh tag. (2nd 
new separate jsp bean.)
8. Get told to display booking information in said graph, retrieve booking 
information from central booking system, build functionality into cgi to 
parse for current and upcoming bookings. (SSH public/private key used for 
transferring booking extract for the rest of the semester, cron job for 
extracting booking information for tomorrow.)
9. Publish web site on central web server, fight with central web server admin.
10 Deploy to ~1500 lab hosts, add 5000 services to Nagios, cause Nagios web 
server performance to degrade :P
11 (bleck) Write up documentation

Liaise with all other Faculties who have labs they want on the system, run 
the whole she-bang since I'm the manager and all staff on the project :P

Screenshot of the finished product available on request (didn't want to 
spam the list with a screenshot), more details about specifics available on 
request...

I'll happily answer any questions you may have about it, criticisms will be 
| echo /dev/null :D

=================================
Greg Vickers
Computer Systems Officer
Student Support and Systems,
Teaching and Learning Support Systems,
Queensland University of Technology,
Kelvin Grove Campus,
Brisbane,
Australia

CRICOS No 00213J

Ph: 07 3864 3910
Fax: 07 3864 5539
Mob: 0416 001 674 SD: #66147 



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