Going to have a few new writeups soon. I'm working on a VMWare appliance based on Ubuntu Desktop 8.04LTS that includes the following:
Nagios
NTOP
SmokePing
Cacti
Where applicable they're running off MySQL and of course the HTTP server is Apache2 with PHP and Perl. I've actually got everything up and running. The VM is 1GB download. If you're intested send an email to mcse@techpro.ms. Everything is free license so that means no Splunk or Nessus for now but I have put in some apps like Wireshark. I still want to get MRTG up and running for SNMP monitoring, specifically graphable OIDs like througput on an interface. Nagios is great for uptime and stuff like that but MRTG is better for things you can graph.
At this point you may be asking yourself, why waste the time doing this? Well, my answer is that I wanted a virtual machine that I could drop into a network that would allow me to start monitoring with a minimum of hassle. Why Linux? Because it's free and robust.
I'm also going to post up some tricks for VMWare Player. There are some obscure things regarding VMWare Player that are useful to know like that VMWare Tools comes with VMWare Player. All you have to do is mount the ISO and install it. There will also be a few things regarding file locations to make modification of network settings easier.
So in conclusion, I'll be doing writeups on the following:
How to use snmpwalk to find OIDs on a Windows 2K3 Server.
How to use snmpwalk to find OIDs on a Cisco switch.
How to use GetIf to find OIDs on a Windows 2K3 Server.
How to use GetIf to find OIDs on a Cisco switch.
DHCP and NAT setting for VM Player, where they're located and how to modify them.