One of the other recent errors I noticed in my LogWatch reports, other than the spam spike, was a weird error with cron reporting the grandchild had exited with a non-zero exit code. When I first saw it, it coincided with the spike in spam, so I had assumed it was logwatch timing out within cron whilst processing the log file. Now the spam level has died down, I noticed the error persisted…

My personal server doesn’t receive much email, and only hosts a few domains, as well as running as backup mail server for the SquirrelMail.org. It usually processes about 6500 emails on a daily basis, of that 4000 or so of that is rejected by RBL. After the Squeeze update, the amount of email rocketed to 230000, with 229000 rejected by RBL matches…

Earlier today, I caught a message by @ninjasys on Twitter asking for help looking for ways to catch PHP errors on a website.

Has anyone scraped a webpage for PHP errors using Nagios? PHP errors are displayed before HTML content :( #nagios #sysadmin — Ninjasys

In the past, I’ve used webinject to do page validation, but after making a couple of suggestions, @ninjasys came back with a more detailed explanation as to what they were really after. They’re limited on what can be installed, and were having issues with disk space problems. So they couldn’t install snmp, nor were they able to use NRPE to do agent lookups. Follow the jump to see a few of the ideas I’ve come up with.

I’ve been pushing for getting a proper utility to handle remote installations for a while, and being a Microsoft shop, we’re looking at Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM). However there are a number of hold-ups on that project, so we’re currently using Lumension’s PatchLink¹.

Recently Google announced they were adding enhanced security to their lineup for your Google account. While I think this is a great feature, it’s still flawed by the same reasons traditional security is flawed; The end user.

In most situations, you can spend a lot of time, planning for the worst possible outcome in the event of an outage. It’s usually the silly little things that end up getting you…

Last week I walked into the office greeted with an email telling me “the virtual machines are down”. This is most concerning, not sure how it went unnoticed by our monitoring software that multiple VM machines went offline, and nor did we get any notification from the other department that uses these machines that any of the night jobs had failed. So I set about figuring out what was going on…

When doing a SQL cluster install, there is a rule for network binding order that causes a warning from time to time. This is really easy to fix, and is a good practice for cluster services to reduce the chance of network latency whilst services try and figure out where they need to go for certain services.

This week has been rather busy, finishing off the deployment of a bunch of SQL clusters for a major project the entire company is working on. Yesterday I spent the entire day fighting an install of a single instance of SQL with all kinds of errors¹. But this one is a quick post on an easy error we stumbled upon this morning…

Every now and again I get issues with the MSI installer service complaining that a previous install is pending a reboot, even after a reboot. I’ve seen this issue crop up on Exchange updates, Visual Studio updates, and more recently on a Trend Micro Office Scan upgrade. This causes some hair pulling most of the time, but I stumbled across the secret key that controls this feature…