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.

OS - I’m using Ubuntu 8.04.1 server edition - install as usual. At the task select add LAMP, mail server and  ssh server.

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

uncomment all the deb lines.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install htop build-essential ntop phpmyadmin

Now, since Xymon is only available in the “karmic” repositories, we’ll do this:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

add the next line at the bottom:

deb http://cz.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu karmic main universe

and

sudo apt-get update

then we install Xymon:

sudo apt-get install xymon

with all the dependencies. Afterwords we comment out the “karmic” repository again:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

comment out the added line and:

sudo apt-get update

Next we’re going to adjust the Xymon to the environment.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/conf.d/hobbit

and replace all the

localhost ::1/128

with

all

or specific networks if you wanna restrict the access to it.
Now you can enter http://IPofTheServer/hobbit/ to check that it’s working. If it doesn’t:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

or make sure it’s started:

sudo /etc/init.d/hobbit restart

Let’s continue.