HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials - Monitoring

How To Configure The AIDE (Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment) File Integrity Scanner For Your Website

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 19:28:42 +0200

How To Configure The AIDE (Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment) File Integrity Scanner For Your Website

A file integrity scanner is something you need to have. Imagine a hacker placing a backdoor on your web site, or changing your order form to email him a copy of everyone's credit card while leaving it appear to be functionally normally. By setting up daily reporting, this notifies you within, at most, 24 hours of when any file was changed, added, or removed. It also helps establish an audit trail in the event your site is compromised. These instructions are designed for an end user, where you don't need to have root access, to implement and assumes your server has the aide binary installed. Most hosts will have this installed already, or will install it for you upon request.

Flexnet License Monitoring With rrdtool

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 18:05:05 +0200

Flexnet License Monitoring With rrdtool

Some of you may know the commercial Flexnet Licencing Application (©Macrovision). It's a client-server based solution for managing the usage of socalled Flexnet-enabled applications. You can hold licenses of more than one product on one license-server. As you typically have to buy licenses and licenses can be expensive it would be nice to have a monitoring solution, to see the utilization of the precious licenses, wether they are underutilized (so money is wasted) or are always fully utilized (so that you can suspect that sometimes people can not do their work, or only delayed) which is also a waste of resources. As far as I know there are commercial applications for performing such reports, but again you have to spent money. Why not build a simple system yourself, which shows the actual and past usage in an "MRTG style"?

Apache And MySQL Monitoring With Bijk On Debian Lenny

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 16:24:22 +0200

Apache And MySQL Monitoring With Bijk On Debian Lenny

This tutorial describes how you can monitor your server with the tool Bijk. Bijk creates online 30 graphs about load, CPU, memory, traffic, Apache, NginX, PostreSQL and others with alerts. Bijk can be used on Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, RedHat and Gentoo. In this article I will explain how to install Bijk on Debian.

Postfix Monitoring With Mailgraph And pflogsumm On Debian Lenny

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 17:25:20 +0200

Postfix Monitoring With Mailgraph And pflogsumm On Debian Lenny

This article describes how you can monitor your Postfix mailserver with the tools Mailgraph and pflogsumm. Mailgraph creates daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly graphs of sent, received, bounced, and rejected emails and also of spam and viruses, if SpamAssassin and ClamAV are integrated into Postfix (e.g. using amavisd-new). These graphs can be accessed with a browser, whereas pflogsumm ("Postfix Log Entry Summarizer") can be used to send reports of Postfix activity per email.

Server Monitoring With munin And monit On Mandriva 2010.0

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 17:15:27 +0200

Server Monitoring With munin And monit On Mandriva 2010.0

In this article I will describe how you can monitor your Mandriva 2010.0 server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected. The combination of the two gives you full monitoring: graphics that lets you recognize current or upcoming problems (like "We need a bigger server soon, our load average is increasing rapidly."), and a watchdog that ensures the availability of the monitored services.

Wireshark Remote Capturing

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:55:38 +0100

Wireshark Remote Capturing

This short tutorial is without screenshots but a slightly more advanced usecase of Wireshark, namely doing the capture on one box and visualize the captured data in realtime on another box.

Server Monitoring With munin And monit On Debian Lenny

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:20:18 +0100

Server Monitoring With munin And monit On Debian Lenny

In this article I will describe how you can monitor your Debian Lenny server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected. The combination of the two gives you full monitoring: graphics that lets you recognize current or upcoming problems (like "We need a bigger server soon, our load average is increasing rapidly."), and a watchdog that ensures the availability of the monitored services.

Network Analysis With Wireshark On Ubuntu 9.10

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:34:40 +0100

Network Analysis With Wireshark On Ubuntu 9.10

Wireshark is a network protocol analyzer (or "packet sniffer") that can be used for network analysis, troubleshooting, software development, education, etc. This guide shows how to install and use it on an Ubuntu 9.10 desktop to analyze the traffic on the local network card.

Trafficanalysis Using Debian Lenny

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:09:47 +0100

Trafficanalysis Using Debian Lenny

By using my Network Monitoring Appliance we noticed a link in MRTG always under heavy load. On this link a lot of different traffic aggregates, so we decided to analyze of what quantities of protocols and therefore applications the cumulative traffic consists.

Network Monitoring Appliance

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:15:38 +0200

Network Monitoring Appliance

My ambition was to implement a small (better tiny) appliance for monitoring network health and network resources, short and longtime trends, running under VMware Server or VMware ESX. So I had an eye upon all components which are implemented on the system, to be as leightweight as possible. This was also the reason why no SQL DBMS based software was used. The appliance is based on Ubuntu Jeos LTS (8.04.3 at the time of this writing). Almost all used components are from the related repositories. This tutorial shows how the appliance was implemented.

Monitoring Multiple Log Files At A Time With MultiTail On Debian Lenny

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 19:44:57 +0200

Monitoring Multiple Log Files At A Time With MultiTail On Debian Lenny

MultiTail lets you view one or multiple files like the original tail program. The difference is that it creates multiple windows on your console (with ncurses). It can also monitor wildcards: if another file matching the wildcard has a more recent modification date, it will automatically switch to that file. That way you can, for example, monitor a complete directory of files. Merging of two or even more log files is possible.

Monitoring Network Latency With Smokeping (Ubuntu 9.04)

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:16:27 +0200

Monitoring Network Latency With Smokeping (Ubuntu 9.04)

This guide shows how to install and configure Smokeping on Ubuntu 9.04 to monitor network latency. From the Smokeping web site: "SmokePing is a deluxe latency measurement tool. It can measure, store and display latency, latency distribution and packet loss. SmokePing uses RRDtool to maintain a longterm data-store and to draw pretty graphs, giving up to the minute information on the state of each network connection."

Deny Or Allow Countries With Apache .htaccess

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:23:48 +0100

Deny Or Allow Countries With Apache .htaccess

The following script is using blogama.org IP geolocation API to automatically generate Apache .htaccess file to deny or allow specific countries. You can put this script under crontab and the .htaccess rules will be automatically updated. Also, it can update multiple .htaccess files.

Simple Bash Script To Monitor Your Webserver Remotely On Different Ports

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 11:12:23 +0100

Simple Bash Script To Monitor Your Webserver Remotely On Different Ports

Simple bash script to monitor a webserver on different ports (here smtp, dns, http & https but it can be customized); I'm sure there are over 100 available programs doing this but I wanted something with small memory usage. Also, I only wanted to be notified once, notifications are received by SMS on my cell. With the software I was using before, I was getting notified every minute until I could reach a computer and fix the problem or stop monitoring which was quite annoying.

Server Monitoring With munin And monit On CentOS 5.2

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 18:08:46 +0100

Server Monitoring With munin And monit On CentOS 5.2

In this article I will describe how you can monitor your CentOS 5.2 server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected. The combination of the two gives you full monitoring: graphics that lets you recognize current or upcoming problems (like "We need a bigger server soon, our load average is increasing rapidly."), and a watchdog that ensures the availability of the monitored services.