November 2011 – Rainbow Chard

Update (6-Feb-2012): I am reliably informed that the next major release of SANsymphony-V (9.0) will include direct SNMP support, making this nasty procedure unnecessary. Hooray 🙂

It seems that every time I install a new product for production, I have to find new and amusing ways to monitor everything to make sure I’m alerted in case of untowardness. My monitoring solution has Nagios at its core, so I want every alarm and fault condition to appear in the same place.

I’m in the early stages of implementing SANsymphony-V, which—despite its clumsy name—is a rather clever way of presenting replicated storage to a vSphere cluster. It presents iSCSI LUNs to hosts while looking after all the replication and mirroring nastiness itself, hiding the physical storage from the rest of the infrastructure. I might write more about it when I’ve finished the implementation, but for now let’s look at monitoring.

There is a group of people in the UK who believe that, by submitting a document to the government, they can detach themselves from society and thereby avoid all statutory responsibilities. They are predominantly male, intelligent, articulate, and for some reason seem to live in the south-west of England. They call themselves ‘sovereign citizens’ or ‘freemen on the land’, and seem to be a small offshoot from a much larger US-based movement (of which more on the excellent Quatloos! forum). I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of them: despite the number of videos on YouTube, they seem to boil down to a few relatively high-profile individuals. In this article I’ll just refer to them as ‘sovereigns’—you know, as if that actually means something—and try to explain why they really, really get my goat.

An assortment of indigestible things

Month: November 2011

Monitoring SANsymphony-V with Nagios

‘Sovereign’ citizens in the UK: a study in nonsense