Lee Newton

So I didn’t get a lot of chance to blog during the whole affair, and the week after as we cleaned everything up. Was pretty strung out by the end However it feels great to be up and running smoothly in our new home, Serverbeach. There’s been a hiccup or two, but mostly painless.

The path is set now for our migration to wpMU, and I’m spending most of the admin portion of my day fleshing out cacti and nagios. Why oh why didn’t I make the leap to cacti from mrtg sooner? I think I’m falling in love with this product. Nagios lacks a certain flare, but it’s functional and dependable, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it’s capable of.

More to come!

So all our new b5media servers are about to be handed off to me so I can start work on turning them into a super fast, merciless thresher of incoming requests. Standing up  this sort of server arrangement is a first for me, since I inherited the one b5media uses now. This is at once daunting and highly exhilarating. 40 servers, where to start?

Well the first thing I know I want to do is secure the machines to a reasonable level. This means removing any unnecessary packages, making sure only required services are running on each of the servers. I’ve chosen to run Centos 5 on these machines, as I have the most experience in RedHat variants.

To that end, here’s a link to the Secure Centos project. It’s still a work in progress, and you’ll want to double check their suggestions and not follow blindly, but it’s a great place to start for ideas and methods for securing a new server in an unmanaged environment.

Well, off I go to survey my new domain, more to come!

What to do? I’ve been playing with the open source version of hyperic for a while now. While I still revert to MRTG for an immediate view of what’s going on with my key servers, I do like the hyperic interface. Unfortunately, their pricing structure doesn’t exactly scale very well, and you need the enterprise version if you plan on doing anything other than passive monitoring.

The b5media infrastructure upgrade will see us leaving a managed DC, and entering the world of DIY big time. Time to explore functional open source solutions. Nagios and OpenNMS are my front runners right now. I’ll be test driving Nagios over the next couple of days, see if it can fulfill all our requirements for hardware and service monitoring. OpenNMS looks to be more geared to >1 support staff, and may be the way to go a little bit further down the road.

The great b5media infrastructure upgrade is finally underway! This may be a good time for me to start doing some technical blogging, then again I may not get the chance. I expect to be working very long hours for the next little while, but it’s going to be fun and challenging experience, not to mention a long over due chance to put my own stamp on the b5media network. Since joining the team last October, I’ve endeavored to assimilate the differences between administering individual *NIX servers operating out of shoe closets in 300+ retail locations, to administering 300+ forward facing blogs in a network that’s at the forefront of what it does.

The change in environment has been both terrifying and exhilarating… the internet is a wild place compared to cell phone stores and pharmacies. Given my experiences at b5media to date, I’m very excited to be setting out on this next phase of growth. A chance to fix the mistakes and growing pains of the past, and define an infrastructure which will scale successfully as b5media continues to soar.

So we shot a new b5 promo video for our profile on standout jobs today… it takes me 10 tries to arrive at a voicemail greeting I actually like, so I’m fully expecting my part in the video to be truly horrible. Luckily I’ll be editing it so it’s time to work my magic

I’ve been working more or less without break since the start of work on Tuesday. I’m exhausted but my mind won’t shut off so here I am brushing the dust off my blog and finally making my first post! Still don’t know what it is I mean to do with this blog, but since I’m new to the whole social media crowd, I figured it’d be a good way to journal my discoveries in that arena, and provide vent space for anything I can dream up a category for. Right now I’m day-dreaming of electric sheep so I think that’s a good sign to go recharge and become human again.

Cheers,

Lee