Laurent Davoust, 123RF.com

Sys Admin On the Go

Remote Control

Article from ADMIN 00/2010

By Juliet Kemp

Keep track of your job when you're not in the office.

As a sysadmin, you don't want to be chained to your desk – it's great to be able to work from home once in a while, or to be able to head off to conferences. But neither do you want the machines you're responsible for to be left unsupervised. Even if you don't mind always being physically in your office during the daytime, there's always the possibility of out-of-hours issues – or what if you're fixing something else at the other end of the building when one of your main servers starts having issues?

In this article, I look at ways to free you from your office by setting up mobile alerts to let you know when something goes wrong, the software you can use with a smartphone to fix it, and other options you have to control your machines from a distance.

Monitoring and Alerts

Several software options will let you keep an eye on your servers and send alerts when something goes wrong. If you set up your monitoring software to send email and you have a smartphone or a similar email-equipped device, you can be warned about problems even when you're not in the office.

Here, I'll do a quick rundown on how to set up email alerts on two of the most popular open source Linux system monitors: Nagios and Hobbit. (I'll assume you already have a working monitoring setup, in that covering the basics of either Nagios or Hobbit is outside the scope of this article.)

Nagios

First, set up an admins contact group in the contacts_nagios2.cfg file. Defining your admin contacts here means that you can simply refer to the admin group elsewhere in your config files. Then, if someone leaves the group, you only have to change the information in a single place. Make sure that a user with your email address is included in this group.

Second, decide which services you want to receive email from. The simplest

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