Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? Monitoring your monitoring system

The group I’m in here at a major telecommunications provider has a nice little setup of HP’s OpenView and Remedy’s Action Request System. OpenView listens for and seeks out problems with various internal and customer-owned systems. When something serious occurs, it uses some 3rd party integration software (RemedySPI) to create a trouble ticket in Remedy. … [Read more…]

Unix command line utility program conventions

Sometimes a vendor supplies a command-line utility for performing some function that we want to use from within our scripts and programs.

There are some unwritten (at least as far as I can find) rules about how to write one of these utilities so it can be used properly.

Some vendors get this right. Others, not so much…

Third party software installation woes

Let’s say you wanted to run two completely separate instances of Apache’s web server. (I.e. not just multiple virtual hosts listening on different ports, but actual separate httpd processes.) All you’d have to do is create a new httpd.conf (in a separate directory, or with a different name in the same directory as the current … [Read more…]