·:[ Jason On A Shtick ]:·
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Remember the good ol’ days when your stock installation of RedHat Linux (back when it was free, mind you, before the days of Fedora) included Webalizer?  Right out of the box, you could see some fancy graphs of your web site traffic.

These days, you need to throw a lot more analytics at your log files and AWStats delivers.  Most Linux distros have a packaged version of AWStats now, but I’ve been using it since it was a wee little tarball on SourceForge.  It can process log files of varying types including www, ftp and mail.  It spits out a really nice looking page of statistics organized into sections such as hour/day/month breakdowns, referrers, navigation stats and so on.

Here is a screenshot (click for larger version) but the AWStats SourceForge page links to a live demo that is much more interesting.

A fairly simple configuration file allows you to set up options on how to process your logs and includes niceties like log file format definition and host aliases to track.  There are several useful plugins for AWStats including UserInfo to show information about the authenticated users that are viewing your site and GeoIP which charts hits to your site by country based on IP addresses.  It even comes with a JavaScript file that you can include in your site pages to gather additional statistics on browser clients, a la other analytics services such as Google Analytics.

Bottom line: in a fairly short time, you can produce some really useful statistical information about the traffic to your sites with AWStats.

Digital signage is a hot topic in higher education and elsewhere.  Information is king and the more ways you can put it in front of more eyes, the better.  Of course, there’s all kinds of signage options from expensive to free… but you know which way I lean!

Concerto is free, open source digital signage software.  It is a web based solution with a web interface for configuring your displays and content.  The final product is simply a specialized web page designed to be displayed in a full screen browser.  Here’s a shot of the web interface where you upload image content and an example of what you can produce with it (click for larger versions):

Concerto is a pretty slick system with lots of features.  Management of content is designed around the idea of feeds, where you assign feeds to each area of the screen.  You can set up groups of users and give permissions to control particular feeds.  One feature that I especially like is being able to designate an emergency feed.  Any content placed in this special feed overrides all others, essentially taking over the display to broadcast an emergency alert.

Concerto comes with several attractive screen layouts – ours above is based on one of the default ones with the colors changed.  You can design your own background and provide an XML file to define the coordinates where the content should appear, but the documentation for doing so is thin.

Concerto has a live CD “player” that you can configure to boot and launch a signage display.  Their discussion forum is very active, though hosted on Google Groups which I find to be a feature-poor discussion medium in comparison to Yahoo Groups and others.

Like any other open source alternative, Concerto does require a little elbow grease and is not without a few issues.  Here’s some tips that might help if you choose to pursue it:

• An RSS feed is a great resource to include in your signage display – our campus news rolls on the right side of the screen you see above.  However, the web interface currently offers no way to set up an RSS feed as content for your displays.  Instead, you have to manually poke some information into the database.  Look in the discussion forums for instructions on how to do this or let me know if you need some help.
• The Live CD is great as long as you have video hardware that matches its drivers.  But, don’t get caught up in having to use the CD.  You can simply point a web browser at Concerto and get the display, and you may not even need HDMI to drive a TV monitor.  Many newer monitors have a VGA input that can handle a full 1080 lines of input to maximize your display.  So, there are many options for driving your signage displays from old PCs to thin clients.
• Likewise, you don’t have to use TV monitors to show good looking digital signage.  A vanilla PC monitor can do the trick and may even be preferred for a smaller venue.
• Make sure you shop for commercial grade monitors if you plan to run your signage displays all day long.  You may wear out your off the shelf TVs pretty quickly.

On a side note, it is getting more and more difficult to come up with witty puns for the titles of my posts…

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Here’s a later update… we roll an RSS weather feed from rssweather.com in the ticker section, and we now use a feed of shortened versions of our news articles on the right side.  Some articles are long, so the shortened version fits the signage format better and has a static prompt at the bottom to “visit our news website for more”.  Below, we created a mobile version of our signage installation for use in our athletics facility so that it can be moved into the lobby during ballgames and events.

If you do any sort of network administration, then you have surely heard of Nagios.  It has been around for a long time, having gone by the name of NetSaint years ago and it now offers a commercial version with more bells and whistles.  Nagios is our first line of defense for alerting us to problems on the network.

Where Cacti is a more complex tool for graphing traffic patterns, Nagios simply sends e-mails when something is down.  But, don’t let me sell Nagios as being too simple.  It can be configured to monitor during specific time periods per device and you can create different groups of people to be alerted for different items.  Nagios understands dependencies so it won’t alert you about every switch in a building being down when it knows that they are connected via the main switch for that building – you’ll only receive an alert about that main switch.  Nagios plugins allow you to monitor many different services such as POP, IMAP, SMTP and HTTP as well as disk space, CPU load and other metrics on remote machines (the latter examples via ssh or a Windows service).  It keeps some overall alert history and uptime statistics, as well.

Here is a host list view in the Nagios console… (click for larger version):

…and an event log view (click for larger version):

The key to utilizing Nagios effectively is in crafting its configuration files.  While there are a few tools out there such as NConf to help you generate config files, you may be better off just writing them on your own.  Once you get a few under your belt, you can easily copy and paste or even write your own scripts to maintain them.  The online documentation has some decent examples to get you started, or your old pal Jason can send you some of his.

Many IT shops use both Cacti and Nagios for “double barrel” network monitoring.  While Cacti can indeed provide some basic down/up notifications for network devices, the granularity of configuration available in Nagios offers some good features for front line alerting.  There are other monitoring tools out there such as Zenoss that try to combine the features of these two stalwarts, but the jury is still out for me on how they stack up.

As a network administrator, I find that one of the most difficult and interesting questions to answer is What’s happening on the network right now? An open source tool called Cacti helps us answer that question.  Cacti has become one of our favorite open source products and is an indispensable tool for network monitoring.

In a nutshell, Cacti collects data using SNMP queries and other means, then stores that data and generates graphs of it using RRDtool.  Feed it some network device IP addresses, associate those addresses with device templates that determine the types of queries to run against them, and off you go. Here is an example graph of the switch port that is connected to our primary ISP link (click for larger version):

From this graph, we can easily get an idea of the traffic flow across the link both very recently and the trends over time. RRDtool is the data analysis muscle behind Cacti.  Cacti polls devices for data at a set interval, then RRDtool can employ both interpolation and consolidation of the data to generate the graph analysis.  So, it is important to understand that what you are seeing in a graph may deal in averages, min/max, etc.

Like any good open source tool, Cacti can be extended with plugins.  There are several useful plugins for Cacti such as MacTrack to watch for particular MAC addresses as Cacti polls your network devices and Threshold to alert you when a data point goes beyond a limit that you might care about.  Our absolute favorite plugin is Network Weathermap, which allows you to create an overview of your data in map form. Here is an example of our campus network map (click for larger version):

You can easily see how useful this map might be in answering that original question.  I wrote some script glue to save copies of this map as Cacti regenerates it at each polling interval, giving us a “history page” with links to saved map images. With this history, we can go back and look at the map for any five minute interval over the last week.

Getting Cacti configured and running with plugins and customizations is no trivial task.  There is a very active Cacti discussion forum on their site and lots of good documentation, plus your old pal Jason that can hopefully answer a question or two.

It occurs to me as I look back over the years of my blogs that I’ve done a lot more ranting and raving than informing.  While I love to tell stories and share recipes, one of my original goals of having a blog was to describe good bits of techie knowledge, especially about stuff that is free.  So, I have created a new category called Free and Open in hopes of getting my blogging juices flowing again.

To get started, I am simply going to list some of the great open source and free software that we use in my IT shop every day.  Sometimes I am amazed at all of the really solid software that is available out there for nothing but the cost of some elbow grease and (hopefully) your donation to the cause in either money or sweat equity.   Here goes!

First, the heavy duty server and infrastructure stuff…

• CentOS Linux operating system
• VMware ESXi vSphere hypervisor
• Trilead VMX VM Explorer
• Zimbra e-mail and collaboration suite
• Moodle course management system
• Mailman mailing list manager
• Nagios network infrastructure monitoring tool
• Cacti network graphing solution
• OCS Inventory NG inventory system
• Gallery photo album organizer
• Concerto digital signage software
• Cisco Network Assistant network management tool

Then, the more ubiquitous end-user stuff…

• Ubuntu Linux operating system
• Shrew Soft VPN client
• CDBurnerXP CD/DVD burning software
• WinSCP SCP/FTP client
• Paint.NET digital photo editing software
• PDFCreator Windows PDF printer
• Notepad++ editor
• PuTTY telnet/ssh client
• Firefox web browser

I’m sure that I am missing some good ones but now that I’ve started thinking about some of these items, especially the ones that we’ve put some real effort into, I hope that my brain will start generating some wisdom to share…