I use Nagios to monitor my small network, so I wanted to add my ReadyNAS NV+ to the setup and chose to do so with SNMP. The ReadyNAS supports SNMP, but you must enable it in FrontView.
Download READYNAS-MIB.txt and drop it into /usr/share/snmp/mibs/ (or wherever you keep your MIBS).
After enabling SNMP on your NAS, and assigning a community name (e.g. public) to the service, test it. In the following example, I walk down the READYNAS MIB (if you omit the OID, you see all the variables the ReadyNAS makes available):
snmpwalk <del>m ALL -v 2c -c public ip</del>address .1.3.6.1.4.1.4526
READYNAS-MIB::nasMgrSoftwareVersion.0 = STRING: "4.01c1-p1"
READYNAS-MIB::diskNumber.1 = INTEGER: 1
READYNAS-MIB::diskNumber.2 = INTEGER: 2
READYNAS-MIB::diskNumber.3 = INTEGER: 3
READYNAS-MIB::diskNumber.4 = INTEGER: 4
READYNAS-MIB::diskChannel.1 = INTEGER: 1
READYNAS-MIB::diskChannel.2 = INTEGER: 2
READYNAS-MIB::diskChannel.3 = INTEGER: 3
READYNAS-MIB::diskChannel.4 = INTEGER: 4
READYNAS-MIB::diskModel.1 = STRING: " Seagate ST3500630NS 465 GB"
READYNAS-MIB::diskModel.2 = STRING: " Seagate ST3500630NS 465 GB"
...
...
There are two values I'm mostly interested in: the state of the volume and the NAS' temperature, so I created appropriate services in Nagios, and added a check command to those using the check_snmp plugin. For example, to monitor the device's temperature, I use:
check_snmp <del>H ip -C public -P 2c -o READYNAS</del>MIB::temperatureValue.1
-w 20:35 -c 15:40
If you run that on your machine's command line, it prints out something similar to this:
SNMP OK - 26 | READYNAS-MIB::temperatureValue.1=26
This check will warn you when the reported temperature is below 20 or above 35, and it will set a critical result for Nagios, when it is below 15 or above 40C.
I recommend you have a look at the other SNMP OIDs the device has to offer: there are lots of goodies there!
A number of good ideas have been submitted for my whatmon add-on to Mozilla's Firefox browser or the Thunderbird e-mail client, and some kind folk even donated code snippets, so I've released a new version 3.0.1. I've incremented the major version number to show that the add-on also works with the upcoming version 3 of Firefox.
As soon as Firefox 3 is released, I'll have to again bump the module's version; Mozilla expects of its developers to give it a maxVersion of 3.0pre, which I've done, before the browser is finally released.
Enjoy now or wait until it pops up on Mozilla's add-ons site.
My whatmon extension or add-on for Mozilla's Firefox and Thunderbird has had a small update.
If you prefer to download it from the official Mozilla addons site you'll have to wait until it has been processed off the queue, but you can already get the current version chez moi.
Enjoy.
A year has past since we completed the mail servers in the Far East. Due to issues with IMAP over slow connections, we were forced to deploy small mail servers loaded with Exim, Dovecot and OpenLDAP installed on them.
The systems have performed flawlessly, and the data provisioning via LDAP sync replication was the right thing to do. What remains an issue are the lousy connectivity to some of the locations. We have a bit of trouble when connections break that the sync-replication doesn't reconnect. In those cases, we remotely restart the LDAP server.
Support remains a bit difficult of course, but we have the excellent Mantis as a buffer between us.
Early this year, we had quake-related trouble, but that was solved when the broken underwater cable was repaired.
One major advantage of our system is that we carefully monitor it and always know what is going on.
My whatmon add-on for Firefox and Thunderbird has seen a small update to version 2.0.4. As per a good suggestion in one of the comments, I've added icons to the status bar which more clearly indicate success, warning or error respectively.
Thankfully, the commenter also directly gave me a code snippet (thanks for that), so the only real work was to create the images, and as everybody can see, I am no graphics artist. 
Download and enjoy or wait until the extension shows up on the Mozilla Add-ons site.
Our Nagios installation constantly reports that it cannot reach the Far East mail servers. According to this report, the earth quake in Taiwan damaged a sea cable, resulting in millions of users in Taiwan, China and Singapore having connectivity issues.
On the bright side, the disruption of communication lines has reduced the volume of spam I get…
A comment on my whatmon extension to Firefox and Thunderbird:
Phenomenal
This rocks my world- I can keep an eye on anything I need to at a glance
Go ahead and try it.
Ever since implementing delta syncrepl replication on OpenLDAP version 2.3.20, I've had very sporadic (two to be precise) cases of slapd freezing up and stopping. Upon attempting to restart slapd, the accesslog database cannot be recovered automatically which effectively means that the LDAP server doesn't start up.
Only after removing all files pertaining to the accesslog backend does slapd start.
Hoping to solve the problem with a newer software version, I upgraded to the latest release version of OpenLDAP: 2.3.28.
Initially all was fine and dandy: I configured and installed the software, started up the slapd server and lay back to relax. Unfortunately slapd crashed last night without any apparent reason (no log entries), so I'm a little worried.
Good that Nagios is holding watch for me.
Update: I have downgraded to 2.3.27.
