Pulp Free: Status

I’ve made a quick update for the Cacti software to version 0.87a today. A few new features that I’m excited to start playing around with are the plugins now available and the ability to have transparency in graphs…

More of my co-workers have been perusing by 6,000+ graphs which got me wondering what all was new a great in the world of Cacti… Obviously a lot of fun things to play with! And yes – eventually I’ll get those Linksys scripts of mine posted for you to use…

I came across a few more ideas mostly by accident on how to track bandwidth from my router. One of the issues I’ve had with my home network is that while I can monitor devices (such as my PowerConnet 2716 & Linksys router) – I don’t get visibility into my virtual devices or devices being secondary routers (like in my Media Lounge). They all come lumped together. Wel – now I’m a little bit closer to seeing what’s going on by using IPTables on my Tomato-based Linksys. With a few more scripts added and some more templates – I’m now able to see Internet usage for any of the devices on my network.

This is probably the best I’m going to get for a while – as I’m not going to be able to monitor those devices on my LAN unless they all tie back to a port on my router.

I suppose I do need to start getting some of these scripts available at some time…

Enjoy!

_dave

After a false start, I was able to get status.pulpfree.org back on my home servers for now. I mostly spent the additional time since I wanted to get my PowerConnect and Tomato graphs back up and running. (Yes – I know, what’s the big deal with my graphing fascination!)

For Sam who posted a comment back in April – I updated my scripts for pulling stats from Tomato for use in Cacti as well as creating some templates to use the RRD files created in PowerConnect. I’ll be posting some of those hacks in a few days… I just need to clean up my graphs to all show bits/sec instead of my goofy “make per 5 minutes” that are messing up the actual presentation.
Enjoy!

With the recent ice storms and power outages we’ve been having in Saint Louis, a little flaw in my remote Linksys status script threw a pretty big wrench into my Cacti monitoring. The WGET that I use to fetch the status file from my home server doesn’t work with timeouts (who knows why… just never has…) So since my network connection to the Internet has also been down – the available connections start piling up on my hosting server and eventually all of the Web sites stop work. Nice, huh?

So until I get my scripts changed around to account for this problem, there won’t be any updates on the Linksys router or the Washboard server. I’ll get it up eventually! I’m hoping to actually keep the Web sites running more than I need to see the zero percent utilization of my routers!

I spent a few minutes switching my Linksys WRT54GS router back to Tomato firmware last night after not really getting much more out of DD-WRT. Well, I actually switched back to DD in order to work on getting some metrics out of it (since it supports SNMP) but never got around to actually hooking up Cacti to it. And I missed some of the real-time metrics built into Tomato…

However, I still wanted to get some metrics into Cacti so I resorted to writing a few more scripts to do in manually (since Tomato does not have SNMP support). Now I get the best of both worlds! I’m only trending network, CPU and memory so it’s not like it’s I’ve invented anti-gravity or anything… But I’m happy with it!