This could be a good idea ...

My heads buzzing with an idea I had at work yesterday. OK - so your web server goes down - that don't impress you much. Your server monitor says "hey i'm down, it's 2AM come into work and fix it" you have a choice -

1. Come into work
2. Stay in bed / club /pub

I know I'd prefer "2" but it's not always pratical - especially if you have to meet uptime targets, or even if your paid to do that.

The point i'm trying to get at is, that if the server has informed me that the server is down, and needs my immediate attention - why can't it inform another peripheral device that it is their turn to take over for a short while.

The best, but rather expensive solution is to have two of every server. So if webserver "A" goes down webserver "B" takes over. As I say - expensive - but it will give you those 100% uptime figures you dream of.

Another solution could be have a single server as a backup for all your servers, so if one goes "pop" you can rebuild the server with a new OS. But this is time consuming and inpratical for a short period of time.

But if you had a quicker way of doing this (installing the OS), it would be perfect - AH - but we have - in the realm of live linux distributions - such as Knoppix. I've recently been playing with knoppix and i've found it to be a great learning aid for fairly new Linux users (me) and its great for fixing the old FAT file system based Windows distro's.

After being suitably impressed I have decided to buy a book on the subject with the thought of making a "live linux distribution backup" of a server - and therefore change the face of a backup disaster and recovery proceedure - as their will be a live CD that can be plugged straight in to take over a server.

My vision is: If a server goes down, your server monitor informs another system which boots your live distribution with a copy of your database / webserver / mailserver etc...

Brain dump ...

What services do you monitor? A service to help you choose what to monitor - based on what you have installed - and then recommends how to do it / software how to monitor it.

This could be something you run on the client - or on the monitoring server? based on RPM's - or defualt windows packages?

You may be able to do this on-line?

The above probably makes little sense - but it is afterall a brain dump!

What a week!

For those of you who don't know in the last week I have become an Uncle and written off a car. All in a weeks work! So project research has taken a back burner.

Nothing to report ...

My strengths and weaknesses

Probably not the most interesting of posts, but after reading the first couple of chapters in "Success in Your Project: A Guide to Student System Development Projects - by Philip Weaver" I have discovered I don't really know what my strengths and weaknesses are. One suggestion in the book is to write these down - a rather obvious but informative process, and this is what i'm spending my lunchtime at work doing;

My Strengths
A strength to me, but not to others

1. Networks - Design and implementation
2. Databases - Design, implemation and usage
3. Linux - esp RHES
4. Windows - esp XP and 2000 (2003 too)
5. Apache configuration
6. Java programming
7. MySQL
   

My Weaknesses
Maybe cruel to say they are weaknesses, but would come under the realm of "would like to improve"

1. PHP and other "server side" web technologies (JSP, ASP ...)
   
2. HTML - back in the day I was the daddy - but things have gone too far ahead of me
3. Perl - too powerful to ignore
4. Documentation skills
5. Time planning skills - i'm a good keeper of time, but often fail to plan my time effectively!
   

My project will neither focus on my strengths or my weaknesses, it will use technolgies and skills from both areas ...

I've had an idea

Today has been really productive! Not only did I score the winning goal in Football, I found out how a server had been hacked (by myself), I managed to save my girlfriends data off her "less than healthy" hard disk, I've started my handover for when I leave my placement in September, I had the forms come through for the part time job I going to undertake when I'm back at uni, all my books have finally come from Amazon and I have come up with an idea for my project. Though if I am to be honest, it has come from the culmination of research and reading over the last couple of days.

My idea; it came from some metrics my team had published last week. They used a couple of pieces of software, one in particular - ntop provoked alot of thought. It seems quite simple all traffic that hits our router not only gets sent to the destination host, it also is pushed to the ntop server. The product will then give you live metrics, aswell as relevant stats and figures regarding network usage. I'm not so sure whether a utility such as tcpdump is used for this, but it gave me this idea.

I could make the infrastructure for a system to monitor network usage, and come to a conclusion and priortise the servers for disaster recovery (depending on several factors - such as dependancies, usage of the server etc...) Maybe another "famous" crackpot idea? but i could use a virtual server environment to test this? I'll put it to the massess ...

I've learnt alot over the last couple of days. I've had my first hands-on experience with some Sun kit, (cheers Jim) I think it was a V240 server. I learnt a bit about Solaris, and about how good their 17" CRT's are (out of my price range.) I've also learned a bit more about different failovers for different servers. For example top end Sun machine's have no single point of failure (When set in RAID 1) and anything that can fail, can be replaced whilst the server is running. That's something you certainly do not get with Dell - but they are a whole lot cheaper, and - listen to this - it's cheaper to buy a Dell machine than it is to build your own!

I have also learnt about Software RAID and ye olde versions of Linux (RedHat 8) I run RH9 at home, use RHES at work, and really like Fedora! I suppose all this exposure will be good for my final year - although there seems to be no explicit Unix and Linux modules.

One thing I was suprised at today was the ease in which I server could blow another server completly off the network - with no warning! It all happened about 3.30 today. I was sitting in on another server build but this time it was Windows 2003. My colleague gave the server a supposidly free ip address to it. The server took the IP address no problem- no arguments nothing. But as I paid more attention I realised that it was the same ip address as a server running RHES. We ran to its console (We didn't really we just chose it from a list on the KVM) and sure enough this server had just relinquished its ip address - no questions asked!

I suppose there is a need out there to be able to monitor this activity to be able to prevent hostile "in house" threats. Perhaps it was the domain's doing? Thinking that this Windows box is far more important than this Linux one? Does anyone know any product out there to stop this from happening?

On another note, I have a summer WWW related project, which will hopefully get me up to speed with technologies I wish to use for my project. My partner in crime for this is Peter Trickey - my house mate from last year, and my house mate for next year, and Aston Villa buddy!

The 2.4GHz Teddy ...

Freaky, some entrepreneur obviously watched "Meet the Parents" strange - but very funny, but following extensive google research I have found the dream baby monitor that will put my ideas to shame, oh and no microwaves - but a very very very scary teddy!
I suppose I never really thought about a camera, and surveilance, but after all isn't that a literal meaning of monitoring, i.e "24 hour CCTV monitoring." It gives me a whole new idea, but i'll let you know tomorrow!

The Vacuum's talking to me...

Maybe all that mobile phone exposure is bad for you, and, thanks to Ade pointing it out, strapping a bluetooth enabled mobile phone to a babies head is probably not the best thing for human rights - at the end of the day the baby has no choice in the matter, plus I haven't got the resources to fight greenpeace - but I don't think that idea (RE: Bluetooth Babies) is that "dead."

No wacky ideas today then Rich? No, other than my parent's vacuum is talking to me - both my Mum and Dad both agreed it sounded like it! Damn Saga FM - way too much talking! I suppose there's not much you can monitor about a vacuum, other than saying "I'm way too full" but thats what the funny smell means - or if your really posh, like me, you can get a vacuum that has "no bags, and cyclones" plus a handy see-through plastic bit where you can "monitor" its level of fullness!

Anyway, and too the point Sentinel, its a word I've come across before in the realm of safety, security and more recently monitoring and I've never known what it meant. The first point of call, unwisely, was the urban dictionary quote:

Sentinel

1. The robotic, Mutant hunting villians from Marvel's legendary X-Men universe

"The Sentinels were created by Dr. Bolivar Trask to capture and destroy all mutants ..."

More wisely came dictionary.com;

Sentinel
sen·ti·neled, or sen·ti·nelled sen·ti·nel·ing, or sen·ti·nel·ling sen·ti·nels or sen·ti·nels

1. To watch over as a guard.
2. To provide with a guard.
3. To post as a guard.

[French sentinelle, from Italian sentinella, probably from Old Italian sentina, vigilance, from sentire, to watch, from Latin sentre, to feel. See sent- in Indo-European Roots.]

I don't really know which definition is accurate for its relation to "server monitoring", although both can be adapted. Perhaps a good name for my project, or an even better name for the vacuum? I'll suppose I'll have a think about it!