How to Monitor Websites and Web Services Live for Free from PC
Yes you can Monitor Websites and Web Services Live for Free from PC Using Nagios. Nagios is a host and service monitoring tool designed to inform network problems. When problems are encountered, the Nagios daemon can send notifications out to you in a variety of different ways (email, instant message, etc.). Current status information, historical logs, and reports can all be accessed via a web browser too.
Features of Nagios include Monitoring of network services like SMTP, POP3, HTTP, IMAP, PING, FTP, etc. This features also can be used to monitor your websites which are hosted in third party hosting servers, that’s especially from home/office PC itself!!
Setting up Nagios for your domains:
1) Installation process
You can use following commands to install components needed.
- Installing Apache/httpd and Nagios under Fedroa Core/Cent OS Linux
# yum install httpd
# chkconfig httpd on
# /etc/init.d/httpd start
# yum install nagios nagios-plugins nagios-plugins-all
- Debian, Ubuntu Linux httpd/Apache and Nagios installation
# apt-get install apache2
# /etc/init.d/apache2 start
# apt-get install nagios-text nagios-plugins nagios-images
or
# apt-get install nagios2 nagios-plugins nagios-images
- If you don’t have yum/apt. Install stable apache/nagios by downloading from following sites
Apache:- http://httpd.apache.org/
Nagios:- http://www.nagios.org/download/#stable
Now we done with Installation next….
2) Configuring Nagios:
- Add a custom directory for your *.cfg files
# mkdir /etc/nagios2/mysite
- Edit /etc/nagios2/nagios.cfg and edit the following path
Default path cfg_dir=/etc/nagios2/conf.d to
cfg_dir=/etc/nagios2/mysite
- Create your own configuration files inside the defined directory that is In /etc/nagios2/mysite; add the following files.
- contacts.cfg: Defines the people who will receive the alerts in case of a problem.
Here you need to change e-mail ID and Pager ID.
define contact{
contact_name Admin
alias Administrator Name
service_notification_period 24×7
host_notification_period 24×7
service_notification_options w,u,c,r
host_notification_options d,u,r
service_notification_commands notify-by-email,notify-by-pager
host_notification_commands host-notify-by-email,host-notify-by-epager
email admin@yourdomain.com
pager 11111111@pager.yourdomain.com
}
define contactgroup{
contactgroup_name admins
alias Nagios Administrators
members Admin # contact_name should be added here
}
- host.cfg: Defines the url’s that will be monitored.
##You can add as many as url’s need like bellow
define host{
host_name jithesh.com
alias Jithesh
address www.jithesh.com
use generic-host
}
define host{
host_name jithonline.com
alias JithOnline
address www.jithonline.com
use generic-host
}
#### Hostgroup_name ###
define hostgroup {
hostgroup_name all
alias All Servers
members *
}
# A list of your servers
define hostgroup {
hostgroup_name servers
alias Servers
members jithesh.com, jithonline.com #Add all host_name here
}
- services.cfg: Defines the services that will be monitored for each URL.
## Hostgroups services ##
define service {
hostgroup_name servers
service_description HTTP
check_command check_http
use generic-service
notification_interval 0
}
define service {
hostgroup_name servers
service_description PING
check_command check_ping!100.0,20%!500.0,60%
use generic-service
notification_interval 0
}
define service {
hostgroup_name servers
service_description FTP
check_command check_ftp
use generic-service
notification_interval 0
}
define service {
hostgroup_name servers
service_description POP
check_command check_pop
use generic-service
notification_interval 0
}
define service {
hostgroup_name servers
service_description IMAP
check_command check_imap
use generic-service
notification_interval 0
}
define service {
hostgroup_name servers
service_description SMTP
check_command check_smtp
use generic-service
notification_interval 0
}
- templates.cfg: Defines some templates like the generic url, generic service and a lot of others custom templates.
In the default installation you will find files named generic-host_nagios2.cfg, generic-service_nagios2.cfg and there might be others. Just with copy and paste them into /etc/nagios2/mysite directory it will work OK. Anyway, I prefer to put the definitions on each of them into a single file called templates.cfg, but that’s a personal preference.
- timeperiods.cfg: Defines time periods which are valid for checks, notifications, etc.
The default configuration file is OK, so just copy and paste it from /etc/nagios2/conf.d/timeperiods_nagios2.cfg to /etc/nagios2/mysite/timeperiods.cfg.
So we have done with all configuration stuffs.
3) Restart the Nagios service:
# /etc/init.d/nagios2 restart
If there is any configuration error Nagios will tell you where it is when you attempt to restart the service.
4) Monitor your URLs
By opening Nagios in browser
http://<nagios_server_host>/nagios2
user name:-nagiosadmin
passwd:-<set passwd> Most of the case root passwd itself
If you still having problems, don’t hesitate to post comment.
ConnectingForCare.com Intel’s First Online Community
Intel Corporation unveiled ConnectingForCare.com and ConnectingForCare.co.uk for United Kingdom, the first online community of its kind for family caregivers, nurses, social workers and others to share information and provide emotional support, filling a void in today’s healthcare system.
ConnectingForCare.com provides various ways for caregivers to find information and interact with one another.
- A page called My Connections where caregivers can create a personal profile and join a variety of networks based on their specific needs and interests. Users can directly connect with other caregivers within their networks to share stories, tips and support.
- Forums and message boards where caregivers can discuss issues or concerns and pose questions to the community, linking caregivers to each other in an active dialogue 24 hours a day.
- Information centers on a range of chronic diseases and conditions where caregivers can search for information and connect on health-specific topics. Within these centers, users can add comments and link to the latest research and resources on caring for individuals with specific conditions, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes, COPD and heart failure.
- A section called Spotlight on Caregivers where patients, loved ones and fellow caregivers can share their stories and publicly honor caregivers who have touched their lives.
Google will be Nokia’s competitor in Online Mapping
Nokia is taking on the world with the latest addition to their online social website Ovi.com. Nokia revealed an early version of their new Map software on Ovi.com.
The demo is impressive. Unlike most web-based mapping applications, the screen refreshes rapidly, enabling you to pan, tilt, and spin your view of the map while the screen refreshes almost instantaneously. zoomed around a yellow-and-blue map of San Francisco with an aerial abandon that felt like flying over the city, in comparison with Google Maps’ pokey dirigible. Nokia gets that speed by using vector-based maps and doing the redrawing computation on the user’s computer, rather than the servers.
Demo Video here
The company is planning on publishing an API for developers to create various applications that will allow this software to interact with other software on the PC or mobile phone.
Edit Publish and Download Pictures for Free with Google Tool
Yes Edit, Publish and Download Picture for Free with Google’s Picas. The Picasa 2.7 is packed up with features like web album upload and download, localization in many languages, folder hierarchy views, better RAW support and more. Google contributed to Wine’s development, by contracting with CodeWeavers to improve Wine to run Picasa 2.2 in a proper way. Google also asked some interns to work on some areas of Wine, such as widl, msi, riched20, etc.
You can download and upload images from and respectively to Picasa Web Albums, in a simple and easy manner and you can distribute your Picasa Web Album URL to your friends too. When you want to share some photos, let’s say you took on a trip, you can post them online by using the new “Web Album” button. The albums can be downloaded directly into Picasa by using Firefox. The photo edits you do can be saved to disk, and you can revert to the original file, in case you do something wrong.
You can work with RAW files from cameras like Canon 30D, Nikon D200, with Adobe DNG files and much more. The photo import from a camera to Picasa is much faster now. Larger thumbnails, better caption editing, ability to configure the row of buttons, a special “Starred Photos” album are only a few of the new features and improvements of Picasa 2.7.
Picasa really shines when it comes to organizing pictures, with improved search capabilities and a time-line slide-show function for beautifully displaying your photo collection. It also automatically resizes your photos for e-mailing. You get several options for storage and sharing. You can burn albums to DVD or CD, print pictures at home
The Picasa package is made up of the Picasa application, Wine and the web page rendering engine Gecko. If you want to use Picasa, you must have the following Requirements
For Linux:
- To download from Picasa Web Albums, you will need a Mozilla-based browser.
- Intel 386-compatible CPU
- glibc 2.3 or greater
- a Linux kernel >= 2.6.13 (this is necessary only if you want to be notified of file changes; if you have a newer kernel and HAL - Hardware Abstraction Layer - the new media you insert is automatically detected).
- Linux kernel >= 2.6.13, HAL >= 0.56, libgphoto2 and gnome-volume-manager or equivalent are required for camera detection and integration.
- Recent version of GNOME or KDE.
Download Picasa 2 for Linux right now from Here….
Installing Picasa :
If you’re using a recent version of Linux, you should be able to pick “Open With Default Application” or double-click on the downloaded .rpm file to install.
If that doesn’t work, open a terminal window and install with a command like
$ sudo rpm -Uvh /path to rpm file/picasa-2.7.3736-15.i386.rpm
or
$ su
# rpm -Uvh /path to rpm file/picasa-2.7.3736-15.i386.rpm
# exit
After installation Start Picasa by looking in your Linux distribution’s Graphics menu. If you can’t find it there, give the command
# /usr/bin/picasa
in a terminal window.
For Windows:
- PC with 300MHz Pentium® processor and MMX® technology.
- 64 MB RAM (128MB Recommended)
- 50 MB available hard disk space (100MB recommended)
- 800 × 600 pixels, 16 bit colour monitor.
- Microsoft® Windows 2000, or Microsoft® Windows XP.*
- Microsoft® Internet Explorer 5.01 or better (6.0 recommended). If at any time you get an “unable to authenticate” error, you should upgrade to IE 6.0.
- Microsoft® DirectX 7.0 or higher (8.1 ships with XP, 9.0b recommended).
Download Picasa 2 for Windows right now from Here….
Double-click on the downloaded .exe file to install then run it form program files.
Now you can use the application for editing the images and publish it to Picasa Web Albums. Also you can download images which ever you missed or deleted from you PC from Picasa Web Albums. Remember its also an absolute free service from Grate Google.
