Zabbix is an excellent system monitoring package. It does everything from basic availability checking to detailed system resource analysis. It is capable of graphing the variables pulled from the system, and alerting admins if there is a problem or something needed for attention.

Once you have the Zabbix server set up, you need to install the client on any systems you want to monitor. Windows systems have a precompiled binary to install. On linux, unix or freebsd systems you’ll need to compile binaries. If you have a range of systems that are homogeneous, you can port the binary to those or also compile it with static dependencies. Below are steps to compile, configure and install the zabbix client:

Steps to install a Zabbix Client

1. Download zabbix source code from www.zabbix.com; decompress with ‘tar zxvf’ and cd to directory
2. Configure the make program: ./configure –enable-agent
3. Compile and install the program: make install
4. Add zabbix group and user: groupadd zabbix; adduser -g zabbix -s /sbin/nologin -M -p RANDOMPASS zabbix
5. Create log file: touch /var/log/zabbix_agentd.log; chown zabbix.zabbix /var/log/zabbix_agentd.log
6. Copy init script to /etc/init.d. Scripts are located in ./misc/init.d/ and your distro directory.
7. Make sure bin directory in init script is where Zabbix actually compiled to.
8. chmod 755 /etc/init.d/zabbix_agentd
9. chkconfig zabbix_agentd on
10. Copy agent config script to /etc/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.conf. Current one is:

    # This is config file for zabbix_agentd
    # To get more information about ZABBIX, go http://www.zabbix.com
    
    # This is the ip and port of the main zabbix server
    Server=10.0.0.1
    ServerPort=10051
    Hostname=AGENTHOSTNAME
    ListenPort=10050
    # ListenIP=10.0.0.2
    StartAgents=5
    DisableActive=1
    DebugLevel=1
    PidFile=/var/tmp/zabbix_agentd.pid
    # LogFile=/var/log/zabbix_agentd.log
    LogFileSize=1
    Timeout=10

11. Start the zabbix service: service zabbix_agentd start
12. Open firewall for zabbix port (10050) if necessary.
13. Log into Zabbix on the server, Add server to hosts – use correct templates and groups depending on what type of server it is.
14. Add monitoring and notification as appropriate.
15. Consider if all necessary services are being monitored; test that detection of down services and notifications work properly.

I recently got stuck while trying to install Headless Virtualbox on a Centos 5.2 server per the directions at Howtoforge here. The RPM failed with the error that it couldn’t find the kernel source. I thought I had already installed kernel-devel, and confirmed that I did. The instructions were to define the KERN_DIR variable like so:

$ export KERN_DIR=/usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-92.1.22.el5-i686/
$ /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup
Stopping VirtualBox kernel module [  OK  ]
Removing old VirtualBox netflt kernel module [  OK  ]
Removing old VirtualBox kernel module [  OK  ]
Recompiling VirtualBox kernel module [  OK  ]
Starting VirtualBox kernel module [FAILED]
(modprobe vboxdrv failed. Please use 'dmesg' to find out why)

dmesg shows this:

vboxdrv: disagrees about version of symbol struct_module

Interesting!

After several missteps, it turns out there is a separate development rpm for the PAE kernel:

$ yum install kernel-PAE-devel

After that installs, we are good:

$ export KERN_DIR=/usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-92.1.22.el5-PAE-i686/
$ /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup
Stopping VirtualBox kernel module [  OK  ]
Removing old VirtualBox netflt kernel module [  OK  ]
Removing old VirtualBox kernel module [  OK  ]
Recompiling VirtualBox kernel module [  OK  ]
Starting VirtualBox kernel module [  OK  ]

Golden.

If you receive this error while opening Excel or other Microsoft Office programs, it is usually caused by an Adobe PDF addon that is having problems. According to Microsoft, this can happen if:

1. The Microsoft Office Startup folder or the Microsoft Excel Startup folder contains either or both of the following Adobe Acrobat PDFMaker add-in template files:
Pdfmaker.dot
Pdfmaker.xla
AND
2. Norton AntiVirus software is installed.

To fix it, delete the files from the startup Office folder. There are a few locations it might be, in my case it was in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\XLSTART. See this Microsoft KB Article on fixing the error.

Updated on 8/26/2008 with corrected information!

Window’s simple shutdown command works well, but has some major drawbacks. The major one is that it will only schedule a reboot up to 10 minutes into the future (600 seconds). Linux’s shutdown command makes this easy, just issue the command ’shutdown -r +60′ for example to reboot an hour in the future.

No such luck in Windows, you need to download a separate program to do this. It is a sysinternals program, you might remember sysinternals from such utilies like FileMon and ProcessMonitor.

The program we use for this is called PsTools and more specifically the file psshutdown.exe.

[Download PsTools here]

Place psshutdown.exe into a directory for future use, for this example we will use c:\tools\.

Easiest Method:

Type the following command into the command prompt:
c:\tools\psshutdown.exe -r -f -c -t 02:00 /accepteula

PSshutdown will respond with:

PsShutdown v2.52 - Shutdown, logoff and power manage local and remote systems
Copyright (C) 1999-2006 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

Local system is scheduled to reboot in 15:08:00.

If all goes will, Windows will reboot at 2:00am, or your specified time. This command will start a system service with the psstools scheduling program, PSSDNSVC.EXE.

Alternate Method:

Then open a command prompt and type the following command:

at 2:00am c:\tools\psshutdown.exe -r -f -c -t 10 /accepteula

This will result in:

Added a new job with ID = 1

You can verify this task has been added by looking at the Scheduled Tasks – the job name will be At1 if you haven’t scheduled any other tasks via the command line.

For some reason, Firefox started to display a blinking cursor, like web pages I have been viewing were editable. Thinking that some errant plugin was causing this behavior, I manically disabled a few I had recently installed. However that didn’t fix the problem.

Good ole Google to the rescue.

Firefox has a ‘feature’ that lets you select text with more visual feedback. I guess the little one must have been hitting keys and turned this on.

Turning it off is easy! Press F7 to turn off caret browsing.

Alternatively, type “about:config” in the URL area, then filter for “caret“. Change accessibility.browsewithcaret to “false”.