Lunatic Platitudes

Have you ever wanted a quick and easy way to light up pretty graphs of various things running on your local machine? Do you have a network of linux systems and want to have a better and easier way to graph things like load? Do you have a mythtv server and want to graph the number of free encoders you have? How about watching for interface errors?

Here’s where I get to tell you about something I didn’t know existed that I know you’ll love right away. In ubuntu, just ‘apt-get install munin munin-node’. Check /etc/munin/munin.conf and /etc/munin/munin-node.conf. I changed the simple host tree section to describe my mythtv box is all I changed. I didn’t even change the IP address from 127.0.0.1. Then I found a mythtv script for munin here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=758908. That script has comments at the top of it which tell you how to make it work. Just remember to ‘/etc/init.d/munin-node restart’ after making changes.

You can then telnet to port 4949 on your localhost or munin master server and type “list” without the quotes and hit enter. This tells you what all checks you have available. Check some of them out with a “fetch mythtv_status_encoder” or something such as that. If you see statistics back, graphs should be a buildin’. Then just make sure your webserver knows how to let you browse to the directory structure where munin writes it’s reports.

It’s really cool and simple. Dirt ass easy, as they say.

EDIT:

I wanted to add munin-node to my solaris 10 box. This machine is a redundant Squid proxy for my home, and it runs dns. Both of these require so little maintenance, I have long ago forgotten how to do much of anything on this machine in Solaris. Mama Google brought this to my attention, and it was actually done in about 9.5 minutes… http://lorands.com/2008/03/install-munin-on-solaris-10-in-11-minutes/

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