Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Catching up
From: <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>
To: <sean@conman.org>
Subject: Indolence…
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 01:11:38 -0500Mark says you're falling down on the job. (No posts since last Tuesday??) Actually, that's not how he put it, but I felt compelled to sanitize, since I don't know you.
Yes, things have been quiet since last Tuesday. I blame it on control panels (and no, I'm not bothering to link to the umptzillion posts I've made on control panels this time). But just as things were their darkest, Smirk pulled me temporarily off that project and onto more important things, like configuring a router for the DSL service we'll be offering (and the best part—I'll be getting free Internet service again! Unlimited static IP addresses! The ability to fix routing problems! The ability to control my own reverse DNS! Woot!).
Since I got MRTG playing nicely, I went ahead and installed Cacti, a type of “next generation” version of MRTG and a lot nicer to work with. Yes, the interface is a bit klunky, but I can understand why it's klunky the way it's klunky (you define your device and the type of monitoring you want. You then select the actual items you want to monitor and the type of graphs you want to generate (you can generate multiple types of graphs from the same data source). Then you create the graphs, and add them to the viewing tree) but it sure beats MRTG (where you hand generate the configuration file, then hand generate a page with links to the various graphs, unless you like looking at a raw directory dump in your web browser). Hopefully, the reports Cacti generates are good enough for Smirk to use and we can retire MRTG.
And to make matters better, I no longer have to install Web-CP. Granted, it's a different one I have to install, but the new one (still haven't come up with a pseudonym for it) seems more reasonable than Web-CP.
In other news, my friend Bill Lefler send me the link to his blog, so now Mark has another programmer's blog he can read while waiting for me to update mine.
