I love Nagios and I love Raspberry Pi’s. With my growing smart home and other projects, it only makes sense to monitor it all. To do that I use a Rapsberry Pi to run Nagios for low-cost reliable monitoring. I had Nagios running on a Virtual Machine but freeing up those resources and putting an old Pi to use is perfect. After you have Raspbian installed, update it using Then reboot the Pi so we have a fresh start. Once logged back in run During the installation it will prompt you for a password you want to use on the website. Enter it here, confirm it in the 2nd screen and remember it for later. The installation will continue to [Read More…]
Using Nagios to monitor your power outlets
I’m a huge fan of Nagios. I’ve installed it at work and it provides us simple up/down information, as well as detailed service information. Being able to customize the level of monitoring detail has been a huge benefit. Nagios doesn’t just stop at the workplace — I run it at home too. I’m monitoring my weather station, Raspberry Pis, SmartThings hub, IoT WiFi devices, my small lab Asterisk PBX and websites I’ve created for businesses, family and friends. It’s important to me that I run a healthy environment — whether it’s in my house or not. I had a situation recently where the GFCI outlet that my air conditioner’s condensate pump was plugged into had popped it’s breaker and turned [Read More…]
Setup a Raspberry Pi Kiosk with Chromium
I’ve setup my Raspberry Pi 3 to be a digital signage kiosk. I’ve installed the Adafruit 3.5″ PiTFT Plus touch screen, and am using it to show my weather station data in real time. This is done by having the Raspberry Pi auto log in and run Chromium to open a webpage. I’ve shared how I’ve setup a full digital signage system using Ubuntu and Chromium for Kiosk mode. This post will repeat a lot of the same in that article, but tailor it to the Raspberry Pi. Here’s how I did it: Setup Raspbian The first step is to get Raspbian Jesse installed, perform sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade and if you have the Adafruit 3.5″ touchscreen installed, run through their [Read More…]
Setup a Kiosk with Ubuntu and Chromium
Recently I’ve had the need to setup 2 kiosk stations to display an array of data on a digital signage screen which has no keyboard or mouse attached to it. The idea in this post is to explain how I did it. I installed Ubuntu with the Unity desktop, set some auto-login tasks and run Chromium in kiosk mode. Then using xdotool to cycle through the Chrome tabs at a set interval. Lastly, the unclutter package will remove the mouse cursor from the screen, giving a clean automated look. I also show how I’ve set this up for a Raspberry Pi. It’s mostly the same, but a few things are different. Check it out if you have a Raspberry Pi [Read More…]
Using grep on live active log files
I had a need recently to where I needed to grep an Apache httpd log file to see if a certain web subfolder was accessed. I wanted to grep the access log file which has historical and live data coming into it, and found this to be a great solution. Sharing it here in case it helps someone in the future! In this example, dd87946d06c23e was the name of the folder I was looking to see was accessed. tail -f -n 5000 /var/log/httpd/access_log | grep –line-buffered dd87946d06c23e
The purpose of this site is for me to share my DIY technical experiences as a place to document them publicly. Hopefully somewhere along the way they are helpful for you.