My ISP (Adam Internet) supplies an XML usage page, which uses Basic authentication.  You sign up on their admin page for a token, and you then use those credentials (username:token) as the creds when fetching the usage page, and you get back a whole bunch of XML.  There’s various smartphone tools to use that data.  What I wanted was a Nagios check, and also for perfdata to go into pnp4nagios from that based on my Internet usage.

As discussed, I recently setup Nagios for monitoring on my home network.  On my main PC, I use HWiNFO64 for keeping track of CPU temperatures and fan speeds.  I wanted a way to get HWiNFO data into Nagios, and also into Cacti for graphing performance data (in particular, temperatures).

The dmesg log on CentOS frequently is missing timestamps.  While it can probably be added, what I wanted to do was add a mark to dmesg every few hours so I’d know how the passage of time went with it.  This can be done with a simple cron job in /etc/cron.d, like this;

I’ve been spending way too much time today engaging in epic battle with Avidemux (a good tool, although I’m pretty angry at it right now) trying to get it to convert videos into a specific format, from the command line.  Anyway, I finally figured it out.

Over this weekend I’ve been setting up Nagios on my Microserver.  Specifically, I want to have alerting when/if the Microserver reaches critical conditions such as RAID device failure, over temperature, on UPS, stuff like that.