Tonnerre Lombard
FFII’s coordinator for Switzerland
New «OSS Jam» with a lecture from my part
On May 7th of 2009, a new OSS Jam is going to take place at the Google Zurich office. While this seems like nothing unusual as OSS Jams tend to take place about once per month, it is slightly special for me, as I’m going to give a small lecture there.
Monitoring Systems lecture
The topic is going to be monitoring systems, as the most popular monitoring system Nagios recently added a PHP dependency for its web interface. Since a monitoring server is supposed to be a hardened setup as it needs to work reliably rather than sending out SPAM into the wide world, this means that for everyone at least half a bit into security related matters, Nagios just turned into a no-go.
The Hobbit Monitor provides a nice alternative to Nagios, but while its notification system is way more configurable, its plain text checks are easy to define and while it performs a great lot better than Nagios, unfortunately it lacks some features which might be necessary for larger setups. Also, better performance doesn’t mean good performance — with a few thousand hosts, the Hobbit Monitor also puts a rather large load on the monitoring server.
Finally, as always, the conclusion tends towards a Kästnerian «Do it yourself». Thus, I’m introducing a new monitoring system I’m going to develop in the closer future, entirely in C with a nice templating system, and decent performance.
Binary patches
As I’m currently implementing a binary patch management system for the NetBSD Foundation, I’m also going to talk a bit about requirements of binary patch systems and how my system meets them. Since I only have a working prototype with basic functionality so far, people are also welcome to join this effort.