Mikrotik
I’ll be the first to admit, that I’m not much of a network guy. Granted, I understand the concepts and can follow along well enough. Its just that without having the Cisco gear at my disposal to play with, it makes it kinda difficult at best (now I have GNS3 which fixes that problem though). Well a few years ago my friend turned me onto Mikrotik’s and honestly, I haven’t looked back since. Its just amazing what you can do with these cheap little routers with a few clicks of the mouse (its got an awesome GUI). This site currently runs behind one, as does my house and my dad’s. One of the recent features in the last year has been Layer7 packet inspection (scanning the actual contents of the packet). What this entails is I am able to create regex rules, and apply these to different firewall and mangle rules and have that rule only match if the data in the packet matches the regex. As you ponder all the possibilities, you can see how useful this can be. I take full advantage of this, and several other features, to ensure the integrity and speed of the site. As examples, I will show you a bit of what I currently do.
March 30, 2009
· 
Jimmy · 
4 Comments
Posted in: Mikrotik
Webseer
So the new website monitoring plugin has a name, Webseer. Granted this certainly isn’t set in stone, and may change on a whim once it is done (Google shows me that Webseer is currently the same name as a image search engine). I just thought it was catchy and had a nice ring to it.
The plugin is definitely taking shape quickly. It has a configuration interface, it can check your sites for you, and alert when they come up and down. I’m already using it in our production environment and am pleased with the results. Below is a small screen shot of the interface. It currently shows a bit of information, but there is much more that it records.
March 23, 2009
· Jimmy · 6 Comments
Posted in: Plugins
Website Monitoring
One of the things I currently do is monitor my websites to ensure they are up. Using a simple script and template, I pull down the page and regex it for a specific string. If I find a match, I assume the page is working. No match, site must be down or returning an error.
This is all well and good, but what I really want is something more complex. In particular I monitor these sites from multiple different datacenters spread across the country, but when the site goes down I receive multiple alerts (1 from each), and each one continuously emails me (1 from each). Sometimes I have just one “node” tell me its down, so this lets me know its not a web site issue, but an ISP issue at that site. I would rather not get this false positive either.
February 25, 2009
· Jimmy · One Comment
Posted in: Plugins
The future of Thold
I have eluded in several places about the future features that will be available in thold. But the information is spread all over the place, so I will take the time now to list out changes, and a brief description of the changes. Some of these are slated for the next major release, some slightly further down the road. Please take note that “sponsored” feature requests make it into production a lot quicker than everything else. Most of the features added into v0.4 were actually sponsored by a third party.
February 25, 2009
· Jimmy · 5 Comments
Posted in: Plugins