[kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Munin and Monitoring

[Paul Nijjar]

The pressure is building. Feverish and lethargic, chilled and achy, the
infected masses are nonetheless clawing at your office door. They howl
and moan about forgotten passwords and e-mail issues, but at the first
sign of mercy they'll overwhelm you, befouling your keyboard with
germy unsanitized hands; coughing in your face instead of into their
tattered sleeves. 

Despite the doors barricaded with chairs and retired 50lb server cases,
despite the USB cables strung across the windows
to jolt intruders with 4.75 volts of juice, despite your
drawer loaded with hand sanitizer and placebo pills, your heart sinks.
Are your webservers being slashdotted? Are your e-mail servers
buckling under the I/O? As you eye your coworkers, wondering who will
be the first to complain of a ticklish throat, you wish there was a
quick graphical way to assess the vitals of machines of your network. 

Fortunately, there are such tools, and this month Khalid
Baheyeldin will tell us all about them. He will demonstrate 
statistics tools like Munin, debugging and profiling tools, status tools
tools for gathering statistics. He uses these tools to profile and monitor 
LAMP servers that process hundreds of thousands of website hits a day, but
they can be helpful for establishing baselines and identifying bottlenecks
on a single machine. 

It's only a matter of time. Eventually the doors will buckle and your
immune system will fall.  With proper monitoring tools, maybe you'll
have the strength to stay home and get better instead of lurching into
work "to make sure the servers are okay". Assuming you're not a member
of the infected throng already, join us at 7pm for another one of
Khalid's engaging and informative presentations. 

This month's FLOSS Fund nominee is memtest86+
(http://www.memtest.org), an open-source memory tester that has
diagnosed many, many, many mysterious problems caused by faulty RAM.
If you would like to express your appreciation for this project, you
can donate at the meeting or contact me so that I can get you in touch
with the Secretive Cabal. 

Speaking of the shambling hordes, there's a little website known as
whitehouse.gov which relaunched, running Drupal: 
http://buytaert.net/whitehouse-gov-using-drupal

The meeting will be held at the new usual location, the beautifully
wood-panelled Heuther Hotel, which only superficially resembles the
pub in _Shaun of the Dead_ . 

Heuther Hotel Boardroom (3rd floor) 
59 King Street North
(Corner of Princess and King)
Waterloo, Ontario 

Maps, photos and parking information is on the KWLUG website. 

- Paul (Is my throat feeling ticklish?)