install – James Batchelor

Manually install net-snmpd on Gentoo

Recently we’ve moved from an aged Opsview instance to Zabbix for our system health monitoring, which in turn facilitated moving data collector agents from Nagios to snmp.

Many of our PBX’s were deployed from the vendors ISO and so run atop of Gentoo, and it has a couple of issues:

We’ve been told not to “emerge” anything by the vendor, as the base OS on the image is not maintained.
Portage (Gentoo’s package manager) has fallen out of date, meaning even if emerge is attempted, it’ll fail as all repository links are broke.

If faced with the same issue, this is how to install net-snmpd from source, add it a startup service and be able to monitor via snmp…

My FTTP Journey

Unexpectedly and to much excitement, my home internet is now provided via FTTP.

For background, I was previously in a FTTC environment getting average speeds due to my distance from the cab, however good enough to assumably be overlooked for the next phase of the Openreach Ultrafast rollout. Not that I’m complaining, 2020 is the year my speed gets a much-needed boost.

2020 also turns out to be the inaugural international work from home year, so had the opportunity to have a front seat view from my home office on the activity and timeline that brought FTTP home.

I’d like to share my observations and timeline as an example of what you can expect should you get the inkling of fibre coming to your street soon.

Before we get started, as my expectations rose, I found this post by Andy’s World invaluable for identifying activity and helping me confirm that FTTP was on its way.

Installing WordPress on Windows Server

It’s simple, instead of the process of installing PHP, MySQL, assigning permissions and all the debugging that many of us have gone through, Microsoft has come up with WPI, or Web Platform Installer.

wpi1 — WPI makes installing WordPress easy.

Amongst other web applications, WordPress is the most popular and it makes the install on Windows as simple as a few clicks.

So far I’ve tried it on Server 2003 R2 and Server 2012 R2, both with instant success.

It’s available at: http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx

Update: James-Batchelor.com

This website has received yet another update, and now I am happy with it.

The biggest change was to change the blogging software to WordPress. Although my previous software (BlogEngine.net) was built on ASP.Net and SQL Server, my current choice of language and database that I am most familiar with, I felt that BE was way to bloated and it felt unrefined for my needs.

So I went with WordPress, it seems most blogs I read use this and they look slick, to I wanted a piece of the action. This meant installing PHP and MySQL on IIS, something I really did not want to do due to the resource hog on my server, but I bit the bullet and ordered more RAM for the server.

So far, so good!