Awhile back I got interested in Groundwork and downloaded two virtual machines, one from Tony Su and one from Ginaluca. The one from Tony Su was a little hard for me to setup initially so I downloaded a second one made by Gianluca. Gianluca’s virtual machine, baywatchos, appealed to me because it used Centos rather than SUSE, he had pre-installed Webmin, and he had prepared it as a virtual machine. For some reason Tony prepared his machine as a virtual disk so I had to read some more of VMware manual to get it to work.
I ran baywatchos for about a week. It was primarily a training exercise for me so I could become familiar with Groundwork and Nagios. I really don’t need a network monitor for my small network but I was curious what the network monitor would tell me about my network. Everything looked fine but for a reason I have not figured out I never was able to get Groundwork status and reports to update with the information I could see in Nagios. That was when I decided to go back to Tony Su’s version and see if it worked there.
Having already setup a nominally working Groundwork/Nagios system on batwatchos it was easy to move the configuration over to the SUSE version. Groundwork status and reports finally worked as expected.
My next task was getting email alerts. This was complicated by the lack of a nice email interface like Thunderbird. I wanted to see if the emails were being generated and sent. I ended up relearning Mailx to verify the mail configuration but I still wanted a GUI mail interface. I also wanted to install VMware tools. New software intuitive was not as intuitive as YUM and was further complicated by the fact that I needed the cd-roms to install new software. This is changed in SUSE 10.1 I think. I also needed the gcc compiler to install VMware tools. This is first Linux/Unix installation that did not install the compiler by default. After messing around for too long with possible shortcut methods, I downloaded the cd-roms for the gcc installation and Thunderbird installation from the Mozilla site. I did find some rpms on the SUSE site for for Thunderbird and Firefox they did not like the library versions in SUSE 10.
So everything is working. I am getting alerts when my websites get slow or we have network congestion. I learned way too much about YaST. In fact my frustrations with SUSE almost motivated me to try my hand at installing Open SUSE 10.1. Fortunately I walked away from the edge of the cliff. I still slightly interested in emailing daily reports as a support option but I have to brush up on my Perl LWP debugging to get it to work.