Things move a-pace

Well, here I am back from vacation! It was an awesome time. Short and undeniably sweet. The only really sour part of the trip was the travel back home. Due to storms in Philly last Sunday we pretty much spent four hours in the plane just waiting. We did head back to the gate after the first couple of hours to take on some more fuel and also to let some of the passengers who needed to make new transfers get off. Many of the other took the opportunity to nip out of the plane to get food for the next set of additional hours waiting we were sure would follow. Again, despite all of that, it was tolerable. The pilot on that flight managed expectations admirably and even got the passengers on side with his commitment to us that he would get us home that day.

The vacation was composed of a Disney Cruise on the Wonder to Nassau and to Castaway Cay (Disney’s private island). We left Philly on Wednesday and spent the night in the Orlando Airport Hilton then took a bus ride the next day to the cruise terminal at Port Canaveral. A lot of wonderful new experiences for the girls and us. This was Becca’s first airplane flight and a first time cruising for all of us. I know that this single experience pretty much sold us all on the idea for future vacations in this mould.

So far the return to work has been peaceful. Nothing too outrageous happening and just more continuing work on the migration from Big Brother and Nagios to Zenoss. The biggest pain in the butt so far is getting all of the Solaris boxes configured with net-snmp. We’ve got some really old installs with a lot of very odd configuration and file system layouts that are frustrating. I am trying to avoid having to setup a compile machine so I am relying on binaries from sunfreeware.com but that also leads to a lot of missing dependencies. Also, I think I managed to figure out how to prevent the other admins from being spammed by the zenactions daemon. I set an additional filter on their Alerting Rules to limit the messages they get to only relevant systems. I still think that this was somekind of config or setup bug since the behavior is inconsistent. Some devices and services were sending pages to anyone while others were not. I don’t suppose that the default notification state would be that if no one is specified in the Admin properties for the device or class that it would just send to all users right? Now I am contemplating the upgrade to version 2.2.3 but I think I’ll wait a bit before I do that. I have a lot of other stuff coming up that needs attention as well.

I’ll try to post a bit more on the saga of the upgrade as I get a chance.