Terrence runs Linux servers for a regional school district. He covers open-source monitoring tools and syslog, and tries every command he prints on a spare box first.
Raspberry Pi, N100 mini PC or a used office desktop: pick your first always-on box by RAM, storage, idle watts, noise, network ports and software support.
Continue reading A home lab server: choosing the first box (Pi, mini PC or a used workstation) ›
Which SNMP port listens where, which way the packets flow, and the exact iptables, nftables, ufw and firewalld rules for polling and traps.
Continue reading SNMP ports 161 and 162: firewall rules that let polling and traps through ›
Counters, five-minute graphs and red dots: how SNMP, MRTG, RRDtool, Nagios, Cacti, Zabbix, LibreNMS and Prometheus shaped the monitors we run today.
Continue reading From MRTG to Prometheus: a short history of open-source network management ›
Network Monitoring, SNMP & Protocols
One rsyslog server, one folder per device, logs you can grep at 2 a.m. Formats, severities, device settings, rotation and clocks for a small network.
Continue reading Syslog for small networks: collect, rotate and actually read your logs ›
Four open-source monitors, four ideas of what a measurement is. How Nagios, Zabbix, LibreNMS and Prometheus store data, where each hurts, and who each suits.
Continue reading Nagios, Zabbix, LibreNMS, Prometheus: choosing an open-source monitor ›
