Cloudatcost, the canadian cheap & flat cloud VPS provider (partner of @Fibernetics ships a backdoor user (“wikus”) with shell and password set on their Debian 8 x86_64 images.

I wrote down some notes about configuring Nagios to check the health status of a few VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1.0 servers. First of all, install the required packages on the Nagios server:

NagVis (http://www.nagvis.org/) is a visualization addon for Nagios/Icinga that permits to visualize the monitored information as objects placed on maps.  I decided to use mk-livestatus (see: http://mathias-kettner.com) as backend because it is reported to offer better performances than ndo.

So you’ve setup your company secured internal Debian APT repository server by allowing apt operations only via SSH with prior public key exchange. Great.

Latest Debian major release, Wheezy, ships by default with Ruby Sinatra 1.3.2 and you know what? Foreman will not play well with it! As an example, I couldn’t provision new hosts (a generic error code 400 was thrown, plus lot of ruby complaints on the foreman-proxy log).

Install PostgreSQL on Debian using APT: # aptitude install postgresql postgresql-client [ after install service is already started and scheduled for automatic start on reboot] Install PostgreSQL on CentOS using YUM: # yum install postgresql-server postgresql