Open Source & The NHS
The NHS as a whole doesn’t seem to use any open source, nor does it look like any will be coming (unless the likes of Java get GPL’ed)
However at work we have started to look into Open Source.
We currently have an every-growing Cati Install. Cacti is a great bit of software – at its most basic it creates graphs from SNMP data. It makes it very easy to add new hosts and created and managed display them. This is a good thing in our network – we are currently monitoring 116 devices with it, and this is growing every week as I get around to adding more devices.
With a number of addons (see http://cactiusers.org/) Cacti can also do a lot more. Currently the system:
1) Graphs various data from servers, switches, UPS’s and everything else we feel like monitoring with SNMP
2) With a few Perl scripts it even monitors various data from the likes of Exchange, ISS and Citrix (Using nsclient which can pull data available in WMI to Linux)
3) Monitor servers for restarts (via checking uptime). Emails us when every a server restarts
4) Threshold Monitoring – the system can email use when ever a value has gone bellow or above a value for a certain amount of times (mainly used to warn about UPS usage and disk space)
5) Reporting – Can build reports from the rrd files to find out top talkers etc
We are adding more and more features to the system all the time. Its very helpful to have a system which sits there and monitors everything we throw at it so we don’t have to keep a close eye on things.
The next open source system was are looking at using is good old Squid. We are getting a number of 100mb net connections at various sites and we need to replace of aging ISA boxes. Given that we have loads of old hardware available we’re going down the squid box. If we find ones is performing slowly just build another one to help out. Currently in testing and working out what rule and routing needs setting up still.
May 30, 2006
· 
robert · 
Comments Closed
Posted in: Networking, Software, Thumbs Up
