Code|Beta

So I’m trying to set up my home network to have a lot of gadgetry and network appliances, such as Zenoss, so I’ve been busy trying to get this to work.

First came the FreeNAS which went pretty smoothly and I’m quite happy with that application and the features it offers. I recently started to play with the iSCSI functionality. I’m actually still looking for something out there that will emulate a tape device over iSCSI and that is open source so if you have any ideas on this please let me know.

I had previously seen Zenoss on Hak5, which is a podcast/vidcast that I often watch, and was interested in this project. I took irken, the Sun Netra T1, and installed it on this machine but ran into some trouble, ran a command by mistake and ended up reinstalling Debian on it. I lost count after the third reinstall of Zenoss but didn’t give up and the issue I got after almost getting everything up and running was that python decided to go haywire and started to use up all the processor time. I have finally been able to get it to a point where it works and it even gets quite a lot of information from the devices in the network. I just need to finish fixing some glitches and also configure the snmpd daemon in Linux and snmp service in Windows.

The number one problem I have right now is that SNMP doesn’t always report everything that I want it to report though it does report a lot more now than it did when I first got it installed. For FreeNAS it doesn’t show the mounted partitions, for the Windows machine it says that the processor is Intel and the printer doesn’t show anything other than the standard device information. SNMP is a new thing for me and everywhere I look it’s so lacking information that it still doesn’t explain the information enough so that I can successfully set everything up. I might even look into setting up some ssh config so that Zenoss can get the necessary information from the hosts without going through SNMP.

The other problem which I think I know how to resolve but can’t remember where to change the setting is that gen, the file server, shows up as being down because it doesn’t seem to respond to pings in time and this might be due to that iSCSI that I have setup…I might have to enable that other interface on that machine after all. I ran a ping command through Zenoss and it shows that the server is responding to ping but the first response takes 4.5 ms which I believe is above the threshold that this appliance has configured if only I remembered where to change this setting…

Once I get all devices up and running without any events being generated that are unnecessary I will proceed to get as much data monitored as possible, I will then proceed to add my mother’s PC and my dad’s laptop to the mix and finally set up the e-mail system so that it will send me e-mails when something goes down though the laptop might actually not go into the mix for obvious reasons I don’t want to get 200 messages in the morning saying that the device with the name blue doesn’t respond to pings.

-LM