Ksysguard, Xming & Tofurkey I've been wanting to write about quite a few things for a while, but I just have not been in the mood, nor had time when I was in the mood. But tonight I vow to catch up on my blog, and watch some hockey.

it was Thanksgiving weekend (Canada), and I thought I would get the weekend to relax and catch up on some code or similar activities. it was the first hockey night in Canada on Sat, and I was excited to see hockey again. Nix to that says Fortress. I was woken up in the afternoon (I keep programmer hours usually), and found several IM logs, and emails. In my zombie like state I tried to figure out what the problems were. I had messages from people that upon reboot md0 was fine yet md1 failed. So immediately I think there is a RAID / disk problem. Logging into the servers is extremely slow, and sluggish. I did some md util tricks and rebuilt the array, and things were of no help. The /var partition is on md1 which would make sense to several processes not operating properly.

I called in the cavalry for another look. It always makes me feel like I've done my job when I hear Aaron say things like "neat" or "wow". It also makes me very very nervous. After some more investigation we determined the disks to be fine, and a network problem to be the cause. Try convincing others of that after claiming it to be a disk problem first. No dice. So I picked Aaron and Peyton up and we went on a field trip to the ponderosa where the servers are. We did stop to stock up on candy and appropriate amounts of other junk food.

We arrived and investigated every piece of hardware. Aaron drove, I drove, Aaron drove the clients radios and routers, and after several hours and really really really convincing it was a network issue on their side, it was realized that their new DOS prevention software marked the main mail servers as trying to DOS themselves, and clamped down the network. Nice. By this time Gregg and his family were home, and I had missed all of hockey night in Canada ... Peyton was over tired, and Aaron missed his movie with Mahlah.

While we were out there Aaron did turn me onto kysysguard for monitoring. ksysguardd also for remote monitoring. I love the ability to configure each and every page and sensor on each page. The next day I went to work, and installed such wonderful goodies on all my servers. Now I have a ksysguard which has too many tabs to fit on the screen, but I can monitor all the servers easily now.

This spawned my thoughts of how awesome this could be if we could use it on windows, and I started the looking into of Xservers for windows. I knew about Xming, but never really did much work with them ... c'mon ... when do I ever do anything on windows? But I must rave about it. It was super duper easy to install, and run a little wizard to log in with putty and run a program. I created a few little icons for Xlaunch files, and now I could run ksysguard on a windows machine. Mostly I thought this was cool for some other shared lower level admin people who survive in the land of windows. Neat though. I highly recommend it if you ever need to run X programs through windows.

Thanksgiving was good. I was invited to Mikala (sp), who is Mahlah's sister for diner. Brad (Mikala's BF) was there, and other friend, Mahlah, Aaron and Peyton. I brought Mikala a nice bottle of port as a gift. Since some folks were veggie / veganites. The joke of the night was the tofurkey. There was real food for everyone else, but some people were force fed the fake bird, just to see what it was like. I think Rob said it best ... "Alright ... but I think if I had to eat a whole plate of that I'd puke". All in good fun, but I can't stand that stuff ... it takes very much getting used to ... like 10 years of eating paste. ;-). I glad I'm back to being a carnivore ... I got tired of being hungry all the time.  ¶ 10:56:00 PM