Install Open Source VMware Tools on Red Hat Enterprise/CentOS/Scientific Linux 6

VMware now makes a repository available for us to install the VMware tools for a variety of Linux distributions including Red Hat, Scientific, CentOS, and Ubuntu.  In this example I will install VMware tools on a Red Hat Enterprise/CentOS/Scientific Linux 6 guest running on a VMware ESXi 4.1 host.
First import the VMware repository GPG signing public keys:
# rpm --import http://packages.vmware.com/tools/keys/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-DSA-KEY.pub
# rpm --import http://packages.vmware.com/tools/keys/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-RSA-KEY.pub
Now add the VMware repository.  If you’d like you can use the “echo” command below or simply create the file and its contents are listed below it.  There are other packages available in the repository for other Linux distros, architectures, and ESX host versions.  Again I am using the Red Hat Enterprise 6/VMware ESXi 4.1 version.

Monitoring Windows Server 2008 R2 with SNMP and Cacti - part2

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Configure Cacti Server
Now we need to configure our Cacti server.  Type http://YourCactiServer/cacti/ into your web browser and login.

On the left side under the Management section click Devices.

Monitoring Windows Server 2008 R2 with SNMP and Cacti - part1

So you have a new Windows Server 2008 R2 installed and now you’d like to start gathering statistics about how it’s performing.  The SNMP protocol is a great way to get started.  In this tutorial I will install the SNMP agent service on a Windows server and configure it to allow queries from a SNMP based management server.  On the management server I will use a tool named Cacti that can collect this SNMP information and generate graphs from it in a fairly easy way.  I will assume that you have a server with Cacti already set up.  If not, details on how to set up an instance of Cacti on a CentOS Linux server can be found

Configure NFS Server v3 and v4 on Scientific Linux 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6

Recently the latest version of Scientific Linux 6 was released. Scientific Linux is a distribution which uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its upstream and aims to be compatible with binaries compiled for Red Hat Enterprise. I am really impressed with the quality of this distro and the timeliness with which updates and security fixes are distributed. Thanks to all the developers and testers on the Scientific Linux team! Now let’s move on to configuring an NFS server on RHEL/Scientific Linux.
In my environment I will be using VMware ESXi 4.1 and Ubuntu 10.10 as NFS clients. ESXi 4.1 supports a maximum of NFS v3 so that version will need to remain activated. Fortunately it appears as though out of the box the NFS server on RHEL/Scientific Linux has support for NFS v3 and v4. Ubuntu 10.10 will by default use the NFSv4 protocol.

Set Up Rsyslog and LogAnalyzer on CentOS Linux 5.5 for Centralized Logging - part3

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Configuring Rsyslog for Remote Logging
Now we’ll configure our rsyslog server to allow acceptance of syslog messages from other network devices.  First we need to configure the firewall to allow inbound traffic on port 514.  In this example I will add two rules to allow traffic via TCP and UDP.  Syslog by default only allows for message transmission through UDP but rsyslog adds TCP for more reliable message transmission.  Add these rules to “/etc/sysconfig/iptables”:

-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -p udp -m udp --dport 514 -j ACCEPT
-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 514 -j ACCEPT
Now restart the iptables firewall:

# service iptables restart
We need to add code to allow rsyslog to accept messages from remote syslog hosts.  Basically we’ll specify to accept messages via TCP and UDP from the localhost and hosts on the 192.168.1.0 subnet.  Add these lines near the top of the “/etc/rsyslog.conf” file above the code that we added previously related to MySQL.

$AllowedSender UDP, 127.0.0.1, 192.168.1.0/24
$AllowedSender TCP, 127.0.0.1, 192.168.1.0/24
At one point there was a bug in rsyslog which prevented the above lines from working and syslog messages were accepted from all senders.  This appears to be corrected now.  Another possibility to limit accepted senders is to place limits through the port 514 rule sets that we defined earlier in the iptables firewall configuration file.

Set Up Rsyslog and LogAnalyzer on CentOS Linux 5.5 for Centralized Logging - part2

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Now some additional configuration of LogAnalyzer is required in the web browser.  Point your browser out to your server and the LogAnalyzer subdirectory, in my case it is http://web1/loganalyzer.

In the middle under Critical Error click “here” in the “Click here to Install” line.