Ninja cat is sneaky.  What more needs to be said.

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There are two types of Linux Administrator; those that have discovered monit and those that have not.   monit is a daemon that sits in the background keeping an eye on everything that’s running on your server and reporting back to you if things crash.  Not only that, it can produce a pretty (more functional than pretty) status screen for you to view, with lots of reassuring green text for everything that is running:

Monit in action

Once you’ve set it up by either reading the manual or by reading a couple of the tutorials online it requires very little maintenance.  Be careful if you are running apache2 as it needs a slightly different setup.  If a process fails or restarts monit will email you.

But the real power of monit is that not only does it report if a service fails, it can take action to correct the problem, and it can even take action before the problem causes a crash.   It can monitor CPU and Memory usage of a service so if they are using too much, or a process has crashed using 100% CPU it can be automatically restarted.  It will of course restart crashed services.

The best thing about monit is it saves having to write a set of shell scripts to keep an eye on each individual service, saving you significant time in administration.

If you just can’t get enough of monitoring you server Its close relative munit which is extremely easy to setup on Debian is good for long term monitoring as it produces some very pretty historical graphs, even up to a year back.  You have no excuse for not realising your hard disk will run out of space in 2 months time.  But you might forget to check so monit can be set to send you an email when you are approaching 95%.

Munit Graph Example

We employ both monit and munit on our web servers to ensure maximum uptime.

No Comments »Tags: admin, linux, monit, munit
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I guess making a post like “Delivering your promises” is just asking for something to go wrong.  Karma is a funny thing.

Apologies to everyone who had trouble contacting us in the past week, unfortunately our junk mail filters decided to store all of the blocked mails in a folder and not send them on.  It has cost us several sales, as we have not been receiving sales emails. All requests for refunds have been processed in full.   We’ve decided wading though tonnes of spam is better than losing potentially important sales and support emails from customers, so we have turned junk email filtering off on all of our email addresses.

Thanks for the image we borrowed from Epic Failures of 2007

Epic Fail

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One thing that webhosting as a whole seems to have difficulties with is delivering it promises.  A great plan is floated up front my many webhosts,  only after they have signed up and suddenly they find out that they can’t use the disk space how they want.  Another very common situation is having CPU limits or Memory limits on the site which prevent you ever using the space and bandwidth you have bought.   Personally I think this kind of thing is giving web hosting a bad name, the internet is filled with stories of web hosting “scammers”.

Anyway I guess the point I’m making is web hosts should start selling more honestly, there will be a backlash to the current situation.  Many web hosting sites already will not let you advertise “Unlimited” plans as of course nothing is unlimited…

On a more cheery note, check this:

1 Comment »Tags: flame, Random, webhosting
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