Sebastian Nohn

Weblog

(Ab)using twitter for Nagios IM/SMS notification

Two months after signing up for Twitter, I still haven't found a real use for it. I don't see any sense in telling everyone, what I'm doing right now, and it doesn't make sense as some kind of asynchronous multi-user chat as long as it doesn't support channels/rooms. So looking for something useful (well more or less) I tried to abuse their JSON interface for Nagios notification. It is dead simple, much simpler than implementing standard IM or SMS notifications in Nagios and it even seems to comply with Twitter's TOS:

define command {
        command_name    notify-by-twitter
        command_line    /usr/bin/curl --basic --user "user:password" --data-ascii "status=[Nagios] $NOTIFICATIONTYPE$ $HOSTALIAS$/$SERVICEDESC$ is $SERVICESTATE$" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json
}

define command {
        command_name    host-notify-by-twitter
        command_line    /usr/bin/curl --basic --user "user:password" --data-ascii "status=[Nagios] $HOSTSTATE$ alert for $HOSTNAME$" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json
}

Posted Jun 01, 2008
Tagged as: Hack, Nagios, Twitter

Ligatus DirectAds is live

With DirectAds, we launched our self service tool some days ago. In short, Ligatus is a performance marketing network (this means, you pay per performance i.e. clicks or leads, basically like Google Adwords, just better), delivering around 3 bn. ad impressions per month. So if you like to advertise in Germany, sign up, we're looking forward to your feedback!

Posted Apr 02, 2008
Tagged as: Work

MySQL & Skoll DCQA

On GTAC 2006 (which was called LTAC in those days), I met Adam Porter, professor at UMD and heard his talk about his project Skoll. Skoll is a system for continuously assuring the quality of software under different configurations while intelligently choosing which to run and thus basically saving time. Amazing stuff!

During that time, MySQL was looking for an easy way to integrate more people from their community into their QA process and started the MySQL Build Farm Initiative. Adam was searching for open source projects to demonstrate his technology on. So I brought them together.

This year's GTAC, UMD and MySQL launched the first beta of that project. Anyone running some UNIX-Flavour can and is encouraged to participate by running the Skoll community client. Now that the conference is over for some weeks, the first results are available.

tree map for a particular test

Posted Nov 01, 2007
Tagged as: Build Farm, GTAC, MySQL, Skoll, Software Quality

GTAC 2007

This year's Google Testing Automation Conference ended last Saturday. The people and talks were even more interesting that on last year's conference. Thanks to Allen, Amy and Susan for organizing such a great event!

The talks are online:

As well some official pictures (and unofficial ones on various photo storage sites), other attendees feedback, some links in the backlog.

A lot more stuff may be online. If you are curious: The official tag is gtac.

GTAC 2008 will take place in Hyderabad, India Seattle and I'm looking forward to it!

Posted Sep 01, 2007
Tagged as: Conference, GTAC, Software Quality

My photos are unavailable to Youhoo!

Flickr is one of the few web sites, I'm was paying for. However, my Pro Account expires 2nd July, 2007, and I'm not going to renew it. Flickr once was a cool web site, then it got bought by Yahoo, then it got slow and now it patronises me. It may not be Flickr's fault, that Germany is close to Singapore, Hong Kong or Korea when it comes to freedom of information and censorship, but I'm not going to pay for being restrained.

There are dozens of alternatives like Zooomr, Photobucket or the german Fotocommunity. There are also dozens of applications out there to host your images on your own server, so I'm not only not renewing my Flickr Pro account but cancelinged my Flickr/Yahoo! account. The only open question to me is, where my peers may most likely hang around. If your open question is how to get you photos out of Flickr, you may try Flickrdown.

You may comment here, where you are going to hang around in the future.

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Posted Jun 13, 2007
Tagged as: Censorship, Flickr, Germany, thinkflickrthink

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