Hi,

Over the years working in IT I came to a conclusion every admin comes to - you have to have a server that does all the things that sometimes you underestimate the importance of.  Those would be logging, monitoring, documenting, analyzing. If you’re not new to this field - you’ll sure know what I’m talking about, but if you are - this may very well be the guide to your future professional happiness:)

Anyway, there are tons, and I mean tons of software willing to do those tasks, so 9 out of 10 people will jump and say they use a better one. But the ones I’m gonna discuss here are the ones that worked for me for some specific reason, or maybe even without one;)

So what are we building? We’re gonna build a monitoring server that uses Xymon(ex-Hobbit) software, Syslog-ng logging, Ntop network traffic probe, Plone documentation server and Splunk log analyzer.  I also plan to add the Observer for SNMP or otherwise integrate SNMP into Xymon. But that’s later. Just FYI I built this server to serve my own needs about 2 years ago, starting only with Hobbit and adding all the other software according to the needs, but as the new versions of software and OS were released I decided to rebuild the whole thing instead of upgrading. This time I documented the whole thing too. So let’s get to it.
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