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evol262
Nov 30, 2010
#!/usr/bin/perl

The Third Man posted:

Is it possible to lab Nagios? I'd like to be able to claim some sort of monitoring experience when I try and get a new job.

Sure. Or Zabbix. Or whatever. But please don't put "I had 5 hosts monitored on my home network" as monitoring experience.

E:

WHen I see experience on someone's resume, I assume that means "at scale, in a production environment". You're never going to watch a Nagios host choke because of database problems at home. Or see flapping alarms because there's packet loss on a trans-continental link. Or set up slave servers in different DCs to report to a master. Or... This is the same reason why shade tree "Linux experience" guys who've installed Ubuntu at home and used it for 2 months to get "Linux experience" that they put on their resume don't look good. By all means, tell interviewers you've touched Nagios. If they ask. Don't put it on your resume if you've only touched it in a home lab.

Agrikk posted:

Oh god what am I about to do?

I am building a new storage server to replace my current iSCSI target that is buried under the SQL server / Hyper-V / ESXi requests I throw at it. I'm putting together this box based on my familiarity with each of the hardware components and availability on eBay:


Supermicro H8SGL-F motherboard - $180
Opteron 6128 (8-core @ 2GHz) - $45
HP SmartArray P410 array controller with 512MB battery-backed cache - $150
2x Mini SFF-SATA fan cables - $15
16GB DDR3-1333 RAM - $80
500w gold power supply - $90
4x Samsung 840 Pro 512GB SSD - $1800
4x 1TB SATA HDs <exists> - $0
Mellanox ConnectX-2 HBA - $190

Total: $2550

I'll be using Server 2012 R2 for my iSCSI target so I can play with its tiered storage capability. 180,000 iops available and over 1 gigabyte of read/write speeds from the SSD array with a 2TB storage tier. and the Mellanox card will give me a theoretical limit of 20gbit throughput via RDMA (SMB Direct) making the storage throughput available to the network.
M1015 instead of P410.

$1800 of SSDs is complete overkill.

evol262 fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Sep 18, 2013

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Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Agrikk posted:

Oh god what am I about to do?

How big is your home lab where you need that much raw ssd space?

ZFS with some SSDs for L2ARC and ZIL?

Agrikk
Oct 17, 2003

Take care with that! We have not fully ascertained its function, and the ticking is accelerating.

evol262 posted:


M1015 instead of P410.

$1800 of SSDs is complete overkill.

M1015 doesn't have battery-backup or on-board cache or advanced RAID configs.

Overkill? Not really. Expensive? most definitely. If I want 1TB of SSD space and want to avoid parity calculations, then my choices are RAID-0 and RAID-10, and I'm not using RAID-0 to store data. So I'm stuck with 4 SSDs in RAID-10.

I suppose I could do 4 256GB drives in RAID-10 and add additional pairs to expand the array onto, though.

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug
What kind of work are you doing on that monster?

Agrikk
Oct 17, 2003

Take care with that! We have not fully ascertained its function, and the ticking is accelerating.

Moey posted:

How big is your home lab where you need that much raw ssd space?

ZFS with some SSDs for L2ARC and ZIL?

It's actually a personal lab that is hosted out of a datacenter (power, bandwidth and cabinet space for free. Weee!) running 2 ESXi hosts, two Hyper-V hosts and a SQL Server 2012 cluster.

My problem is that I've databases totaling over 280gb in size. VMs I can put on my existing slower storage nd live with it, but my databases are clobbering that storage with average disk queue lengths averaging over a thousand and access times measured in seconds during some processes.

L2ARC, though. hrm... That bears some consideration, although I'd have to rip the storage guts out of my lab and redo it...

A weekend of work away from the fam or dropping stacks on SSD. Meh.

evol262
Nov 30, 2010
#!/usr/bin/perl

Agrikk posted:

M1015 doesn't have battery-backup or on-board cache or advanced RAID configs.
Doesn't Windows Storage Server have something that'll handle advanced configs and SSD cache layering?

Agrikk posted:

I suppose I could do 4 256GB drives in RAID-10 and add additional pairs to expand the array onto, though.

This is what I meant. That while 1TB of SSD storage is juicy, it's probably overkill, and 512MB RAID10 is probably 1/3rd of the cost.

Agrikk
Oct 17, 2003

Take care with that! We have not fully ascertained its function, and the ticking is accelerating.

evol262 posted:

Doesn't Windows Storage Server have something that'll handle advanced configs and SSD cache layering?
It does, but for an extra $50, I can have the flexibility in case I want to put the card to use somewhere else.

quote:

This is what I meant. That while 1TB of SSD storage is juicy, it's probably overkill, and 512MB RAID10 is probably 1/3rd of the cost.

It's actually more like 2/3. The 256GB 840Pro is $300 on Amazon and the 512GB is $440. Maybe I buy two 512GB disks in RAID-1 and then expand it to RAID-10 if I need more. Problem is that I then lose half my IOPS.

The Third Man
Nov 5, 2005

I know how much you like ponies so I got you a ponies avatar bro

evol262 posted:

Sure. Or Zabbix. Or whatever. But please don't put "I had 5 hosts monitored on my home network" as monitoring experience.

E:

WHen I see experience on someone's resume, I assume that means "at scale, in a production environment". You're never going to watch a Nagios host choke because of database problems at home. Or see flapping alarms because there's packet loss on a trans-continental link. Or set up slave servers in different DCs to report to a master. Or... This is the same reason why shade tree "Linux experience" guys who've installed Ubuntu at home and used it for 2 months to get "Linux experience" that they put on their resume don't look good. By all means, tell interviewers you've touched Nagios. If they ask. Don't put it on your resume if you've only touched it in a home lab.

Thanks for your advice, I definitely wouldn't be putting that as a bullet point on my resume. I'd just like to be able to say I have at least a passing familiarity with it since I don't have the opportunity to actually use it in my current position.

luminalflux
May 27, 2005



The Third Man posted:

Thanks for your advice, I definitely wouldn't be putting that as a bullet point on my resume. I'd just like to be able to say I have at least a passing familiarity with it since I don't have the opportunity to actually use it in my current position.

For the full Nagios experience, create a script that sends you 40 texts at 4 am.

Agrikk
Oct 17, 2003

Take care with that! We have not fully ascertained its function, and the ticking is accelerating.

luminalflux posted:

For the full Nagios experience, create a script that sends you 40 texts at 4 am.

This is my favorite.

Hey. Windows server DB1 is unavailable.
Hey. The database $database1 on DB1 is unavailable.
Hey. The database $database2 on DB1 is unavailable.
Hey. The database $database3 on DB1 is unavailable.
Hey. The database $database4 on DB1 is unavailable.
Hey. C: is unavailable.
Hey. D: is unavailable.
Hey. Q: is unavailable.
Hey. R: is unavailable.
Hey. S: is unavailable.
Hey. T: is unavailable.
Hey. U: is unavailable.
Hey. Memory counters for server DB1 are unavailable.
Hey. CPU counters for server DB1 are unavailable.
Hey. Disk space counters for server DB1 are unavailable.
Hey. The network interface E1000 on server DB1 is unavailable.
.
.
.

alo
May 1, 2005


Agrikk posted:

This is my favorite.

Hey. Windows server DB1 is unavailable.
Hey. The database $database1 on DB1 is unavailable.
Hey. The database $database2 on DB1 is unavailable.
Hey. The database $database3 on DB1 is unavailable.
Hey. The database $database4 on DB1 is unavailable.
Hey. C: is unavailable.
Hey. D: is unavailable.
Hey. Q: is unavailable.
Hey. R: is unavailable.
Hey. S: is unavailable.
Hey. T: is unavailable.
Hey. U: is unavailable.
Hey. Memory counters for server DB1 are unavailable.
Hey. CPU counters for server DB1 are unavailable.
Hey. Disk space counters for server DB1 are unavailable.
Hey. The network interface E1000 on server DB1 is unavailable.
.
.
.

I realize this is tongue in cheek but... nagios shouldn't do this unless you've changed a bunch of check intervals. Once a host is marked down and a notification goes out, no more service notifications should be sent (until the host recovers). Also, if a service is detected as down, nagios will immediately re-run a host check.

Usually.

CrazyLittle
Sep 11, 2001





Clapping Larry

alo posted:

I realize this is tongue in cheek but... nagios shouldn't do this unless you've changed a bunch of check intervals. Once a host is marked down and a notification goes out, no more service notifications should be sent (until the host recovers). Also, if a service is detected as down, nagios will immediately re-run a host check.

Usually.

Not if you set it up wrong and don't make the services dependent on the host...

Docjowles
Apr 9, 2009

CrazyLittle posted:

Not if you set it up wrong and don't make the services dependent on the host...

Otherwise known as "how every monitoring system on earth is set up" :smithicide: To be fair, it's drat hard to get all the dependencies right in any non-trivial environment. Though I'm talking more about the "core router is down, don't have all 1000 servers page me too" kind of dependencies.

capitalcomma
Sep 9, 2001

A grim bloody fable, with an unhappy bloody end.
Got a quick storage question.
I've got a spare HP Microserver that I want to set up as a NAS box for iSCSI. I have a mix of platter disks and SSD's that I want to throw in it, but I'm not sure how well the linux/BSD-based NAS distros handle mixed storage.

How well-supported is tiered storage in FreeNAS, NAS4free, and the like?

capitalcomma fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Sep 20, 2013

IT Guy
Jan 12, 2010

You people drink like you don't want to live!
Not sure if this has been covered in this thread before but I was looking into buying some new hardware and setting up a home lab so I can finally study/practice for some certs. I was going to build a server with like 64GB of RAM but I noticed that vmware esxi only supports 32GB with the free license. What are my options here? I could likely run all my labs on one machine, that's no question, but I have other servers that I wanted to consolidate into one VM host. How much would it cost me to move up a license for 1 host? Or is there any other hypervisors out there that I could use? Scratch that, I'd rather use vmware.

Docjowles
Apr 9, 2009

If you can wait for ESXi 5.5, it removes the RAM limit on the free edition.

alo
May 1, 2005


IT Guy posted:

Not sure if this has been covered in this thread before but I was looking into buying some new hardware and setting up a home lab so I can finally study/practice for some certs. I was going to build a server with like 64GB of RAM but I noticed that vmware esxi only supports 32GB with the free license. What are my options here? I could likely run all my labs on one machine, that's no question, but I have other servers that I wanted to consolidate into one VM host. How much would it cost me to move up a license for 1 host? Or is there any other hypervisors out there that I could use? Scratch that, I'd rather use vmware.

Can you wait for 5.5? Supposedly they're removing the memory limit.

You can run ESXi without a license for 60 days (no limits).

I'm not sure if you work for an educational institution, but your school can plop down 250 bucks and get access (albeit only for faculty and staff) to ESXi and vCenter Standard licenses... good for 1 year. http://labs.vmware.com/academic/licensing-overview (find your school here http://onthehub.com/download/software-discounts/vmware ). If not for you, it might be useful for someone else, so I'll mention it.

IT Guy
Jan 12, 2010

You people drink like you don't want to live!
Ah perfect, yes I can wait for 5.5. Is there a release date?

incoherent
Apr 24, 2004

01010100011010000111001
00110100101101100011011
000110010101110010
Can you nest in ESXi? My primary hypervisor is hyper-v (turns out you can put up with a lot of poo poo for unlimited VM rights) but I do want to get in on VMWare learning.

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug

IT Guy posted:

Not sure if this has been covered in this thread before but I was looking into buying some new hardware and setting up a home lab so I can finally study/practice for some certs. I was going to build a server with like 64GB of RAM but I noticed that vmware esxi only supports 32GB with the free license. What are my options here? I could likely run all my labs on one machine, that's no question, but I have other servers that I wanted to consolidate into one VM host. How much would it cost me to move up a license for 1 host? Or is there any other hypervisors out there that I could use? Scratch that, I'd rather use vmware.

The trial mode does not have a limit, and you can "upgrade" your esxi to reset the timer. 5.5 also drops this limit.

IT Guy posted:

Ah perfect, yes I can wait for 5.5. Is there a release date?

If you run the 60 day trial you you most likely have 5.5 as an upgrade before then

incoherent posted:

Can you nest in ESXi? My primary hypervisor is hyper-v (turns out you can put up with a lot of poo poo for unlimited VM rights) but I do want to get in on VMWare learning.

ESXi will run Hyper-V, Citrix Xen and ESXi ! You supposidly can run esxi on hyper-v but I haven't had much luck :/

Yes you can nest.

IT Guy
Jan 12, 2010

You people drink like you don't want to live!

Dilbert As gently caress posted:

The trial mode does not have a limit, and you can "upgrade" your esxi to reset the timer. 5.5 also drops this limit.


If you run the 60 day trial you you most likely have 5.5 as an upgrade before then



Awesome, thanks.

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug

Sounder posted:

Got a quick storage question.
I've got a spare HP Microserver that I want to set up as a NAS box for iSCSI. I have a mix of platter disks and SSD's that I want to throw in it, but I'm not sure how well the linux/BSD-based NAS distros handle mixed storage.

How well-supported is tiered storage in FreeNAS, NAS4free, and the like?

FreeNas works well, You may want to look into Nexenta.

Count Thrashula
Jun 1, 2003

Peak Performance.

Buglord
BEHOLD MY POWER

IT Guy
Jan 12, 2010

You people drink like you don't want to live!

QPZIL posted:

BEHOLD MY POWER



We have a couple of those still in production.

Count Thrashula
Jun 1, 2003

Peak Performance.

Buglord

IT Guy posted:

We have a couple of those still in production.

Now I'm sad.

IT Guy
Jan 12, 2010

You people drink like you don't want to live!

QPZIL posted:

Now I'm sad.

My bad, it's actually an 1850, not an 850. It's still a giant piece of poop though.

three
Aug 9, 2007

i fantasize about ndamukong suh licking my doodoo hole
Been using my Mac Mini upgraded to 16GB of RAM for awhile now with VMware Fusion hosting ESXi, and it's been pretty great. I'm getting to the point where I need more RAM for VMs (vCenter, 3x Citrix VMs, Active Directory, Linux VM, VMware View, etc) so I finally bit the bullet and bought a dedicated machine that I'll pair up with my Mini.

SHUTTLE SH67H3 PC Barebone System
Intel Core i5-3470 Quad-Core Processor 3.2 GHz 4 Core LGA 1155 - BX80637I53470
Crucial 16GB RAM (2x8GB)

Got it all on Amazon. Signed up for Amazon Prime trial and I wanted to get the Amazon Rewards card for awhile, so I got that and got $50 off. Grand total: $500.82 + free shipping.

In the future, I'll probably add the Intel PRO/1000 Pt Dual Port Server Adapter mentioned in this blog, as well as an SSD for vFlash Read Caching goodness.

I also considered the Shuttle XH61V, and an i3 since it'd be a lot cheaper but I wanted vPro/VT-d and capability to increase to 32GB if needed. This lab build is pretty sweet, but I can't justify buying three units even if it would allow bare metal testing of VSAN.

three fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Sep 21, 2013

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug
Nice post three I may look into that.

IT Guy
Jan 12, 2010

You people drink like you don't want to live!
Thanks for that post, three. I'm considering those Shuttles now.

So is it generally recommended to go for a two host system rather than one big beefy host?

Count Thrashula
Jun 1, 2003

Peak Performance.

Buglord

Erkenntnis posted:

Both the ASA amd IP Phone are what I'm interesting in getting set up - how'd you do it?

ASA

The ASA was fairly straightforward after I figured out a couple little quirks. The first step is to make sure you have the latest version of GNS3 (0.8.5 as of this post). The latest version makes it a LOT easier to configure an ASA/PIX/whatever.

First, you're going to need the ASA 8.4(2) kernel and init files. Those you can get from Cisco or get off of your home ASA - I'll leave that part for you to figure out. But you'll have two files, "asa842-initrd.gz" and "asa842-vmlinuz".

Open GNS3, and go to Edit -> Preferences. On the "Qemu" tab, first hit "Test Settings" and make sure you get the green go-ahead that everything is working. If not, you may have to download Qemu or whatever, but I believe everything is pre-installed in the Windows version.

Next, go to the ASA tab. This is where the latest version of GNS3 shines. There will be a "preconfiguration" option. ASA 8.4(2) should be selected, so just hit "apply," and that will fill in all the values for you. Leave all the defaults.

ONE LITTLE TWEAK - I don't know if this is necessary, but currently the "Qemu Options" should look like the following:
-vga none -icount auto -hdachs 980,16,32
Change it to the following:
-vnc none -vga none -m 1024 -icount auto -hdachs 980,16,32
That way, it'll run headless (i.e. you won't see the Qemu emulation window), and you can just console to it. I had some issues when I wasn't using these options.

Now, hit "save", hit "okay", and close out of that window. Drag an ASA onto your topology, right click it, click start. Right click it, click console. If all went as planned, you should see it booting up.

It's not a perfect solution. If you want to connect any cables, you have to stop the emulation to do that. And sometimes it won't boot up, I'll have to stop and start it a couple times to get it to go. But, generally speaking, it's the best way to emulate an ASA.

I'll write up an IP phone thing soon. Hope this helps!

Stealthgerbil
Dec 16, 2004


What cisco routers and switches are cheap but not super out of date?

Count Thrashula
Jun 1, 2003

Peak Performance.

Buglord

Stealthgerbil posted:

What cisco routers and switches are cheap but not super out of date?

Routers: 2610, 1721, 1841 ($20, $16, and $100 used on Amazon)
Switches: 2950, 3550 ($20 and around $100 usually)

For starting out, I'd recommend just sticking with 2610s and 2950s. A couple of each of those should be plenty for the CCNA. going further than that, you'll probably want specialized gear (i.e. for Security or Voice), or 3550s for Layer 3 switching (i.e. for the CCNP)

three
Aug 9, 2007

i fantasize about ndamukong suh licking my doodoo hole

IT Guy posted:

Thanks for that post, three. I'm considering those Shuttles now.

So is it generally recommended to go for a two host system rather than one big beefy host?

Multiple hosts would be closer to real world testing, I suppose. I plan to virtualize ESXi on top of 1 beefy host for economic purposes. All of the stuff I want to put to test in a lab will work fine in a virtualized host environment (VSAN, VFRC, VMDirectPath, etc.).

Agrikk
Oct 17, 2003

Take care with that! We have not fully ascertained its function, and the ticking is accelerating.

IT Guy posted:

So is it generally recommended to go for a two host system rather than one big beefy host?

Two hosts allow you to do things like failover clustering and other nifty things. If you can afford the extra power, go with multiple hosts instead of a single beefy guy.

three
Aug 9, 2007

i fantasize about ndamukong suh licking my doodoo hole

Agrikk posted:

Two hosts allow you to do things like failover clustering and other nifty things. If you can afford the extra power, go with multiple hosts instead of a single beefy guy.


You can do failover clustering with one host while virtualizing the hypervisors.

Agrikk
Oct 17, 2003

Take care with that! We have not fully ascertained its function, and the ticking is accelerating.

three posted:

You can do failover clustering with one host while virtualizing the hypervisors.

Yes, that is possible. IMO, though, I'd rather have the two boxes.

Comradephate
Feb 28, 2009

College Slice
All in one host also has the upside of allowing you to do shared storage by way of freenas over the virtual network without having to spend the coin on an actual network that's fast enough to share out disk to multiple iscsi targets with several guest OSes on each.

Just raid 10 some 1TB drives, present them all to the NAS VM, break out however many LUNs you need and present those to the 2nd level hypervisors.

Agrikk
Oct 17, 2003

Take care with that! We have not fully ascertained its function, and the ticking is accelerating.
For all of you C6100 havers and lovers out there, I found a thread quite by accident on Servethehome.com called Taming the C6100 where a brave soul attempts to reduce its noise.

Skimming through the article goes deep into fan replacement, rewiring and modding to drop the noise by 20db (from 70db to 50db). Apparently it's still loud enough to hear through the walls of your home but not the shriek it normally is. YMMV.

IT Guy
Jan 12, 2010

You people drink like you don't want to live!

Comradephate posted:

without having to spend the coin on an actual network that's fast enough to share out disk to multiple iscsi targets with several guest OSes on each.

Can you elaborate on this?

I assumed a 1 Gig-E network with jumbo frames was fast enough and then using MPIO was a bonus. Do you need anything else? (I'm talking 3 hosts with about 15 guests + iSCSI SAN)

10 Gig-E and fiber channel are more for extreme enterprise/data center I thought.

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Agrikk
Oct 17, 2003

Take care with that! We have not fully ascertained its function, and the ticking is accelerating.

IT Guy posted:

Can you elaborate on this?

I assumed a 1 Gig-E network with jumbo frames was fast enough and then using MPIO was a bonus. Do you need anything else? (I'm talking 3 hosts with about 15 guests + iSCSI SAN)

10 Gig-E and fiber channel are more for extreme enterprise/data center I thought.

With a SAN with any decent amount of IOPS, it becomes fairly easy to saturate a single gigE link with a dozen guests and several moderate sized databases. MPIO alleviates that somewhat, but a virtual network that stays on the hypervisor will always outperform traffic that has to pass through a nic of any kind since the virtual network exists purely in ram.

Someone correct me, but I think a virtual network operates at 10gb speeds?

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