A comprehensive guide to learning Cacti and using it to implement performance measurement and reporting within a Network Operations Center About This Book A complete Cacti book that focuses on the basics as well as the advanced concepts you need to know for implementing a Network Operations Center A step-by-step Beginner's Guide with detailed instructions on how to create and implement custom plugins Written by Thomas Urban – creator of the "Cereus" and "NMID" plugins for Cacti known as Phalek in the Cacti forum Who This Book Is For If you are a network operator and want to use Cacti for implementing performance measurement for trending, troubleshooting, and reporting purposes, then this book is for you. You only need to know the basics of network management and SNMP. What You Will Learn Setting up Cacti on Linux and Windows systems Extending the core functionality by using the plugin architecture Building your own custom plugins Creating your own custom data input method to retrieve data from your systems Using SNMP, SSH, and WMI to retrieve remote performance data Designing and create enterprise-class reports with the reporting plugins Implementing threshold-based alerting using the Thold plugin Automating common administrative tasks utilizing the command-line interface and the automate functionality Migrating Cacti to new servers Building a multi remote-poller environment In Detail Cacti is a performance measurement tool that provides easy methods and functions for gathering and graphing system data. You can use Cacti to develop a robust event management system that can alert on just about anything you would like it to. But to do that, you need to gain a solid understanding of the basics of Cacti, its plugin architecture, and automation concepts. Cacti Beginner's Guide will introduce you to the wide variety of features of Cacti and will guide you on how to use them for maximum effectiveness. Advanced topics such as the plugin architecture and Cacti automation using the command-line interface will help you build a professional performance measurement system. Designed as a beginner's guide, the book starts off with the basics of installing and using Cacti, and also covers the advanced topics that will show you how to customize and extend the core Cacti functionalities. The book offers essential tutorials for creating advanced graphs and using plugins to create enterprise-class reports to show your customers and colleagues. From data templates to input methods and plugin installation to creating your own customized plugins, this book provides you with a rich selection of step-by-step instructions to reach your goals. It covers all you need to know to implement professional performance measurement techniques with Cacti and ways to fully customize Cacti to fit your needs. You will also learn how to migrate Cacti to new servers. Lastly you will also be introduced to the latest feature of building a scalable remote poller environment. By the end of the book, you will be able to implement and extend Cacti to monitor, display, and report the performance of your network exactly the way you want. Style and approach Written for beginners to Cacti, this book contains step-by-step instructions and hands-on tutorials for network operators to learn how to implement and use the core Cacti functions.
Grow joy in your home with Deborah L. Martin's Your Houseplant’s First Year, featuring illustrations by artist Yu Kito Lee! Being a good plant parent doesn’t mean lavishing your plant with artisanal water, the shiniest pots, or the fanciest fertilizers. It’s about consistent, loving care. No matter whether you choose to bring home an easy-growing peace lily or a strong-willed fiddle-leaf fig, the friendly, expert advice packed inside these pages will help you give your plant everything it needs to thrive. -Discover the care that’s best for your own special sprout -Troubleshoot problems and help your plant achieve its full potential -Expand your plant family with simple propagation tips -Record special moments—from your plant’s arrival in your home to milestones in growth Get ready to enjoy a natural, healing bond; new confidence in your plant-parenting abilities; and pride in every achievement your sprout reaches. Your Houseplant’s First Year will be your trusted guide as you grow together!
Start pulling the strings of your IT infrastructure effectively with Puppet – learn how to configure, customize and manage your systems more intelligently in an enterprise deployment. About This Book Step-by-step instructions to jump start your Puppet deployment and automate your IT configurations Design, implement, and deploy Puppet in your infrastructure and tackle everyday IT infrastructure challenges Gain expert understanding of Puppet's latest and most advanced features Who This Book Is For If you're an experienced IT professional and a new Puppet user, this course will provide you with all you need to know to go from installation to advanced automation. What You Will Learn Write and employ individual Puppet manifests Understand how Puppet implements system abstraction Use Puppet to manage network, cloud, and virtualization devices Manage and test the Puppet code workflow Tweak, hack, and adapt the Puppet extension points Use exported resources to orchestrate change between machines Debug a puppetserver using Java techniques In Detail Puppet is a configuration management tool that allows you to automate all your IT configurations, giving you control. It was written for and by system administrators to manage large numbers of systems efficiently and prevent configuration drifts. Puppet gives you control of what you do to each node, when you do it, and how you do it.This Learning Path will take you from the basics of Puppet to extending it and then mastering it. We will start off with a primer on Puppet, its installation and get a sneak peek under its hood. We will then move on to designing and deploying your Puppet architecture, learning best practices for writing reusable and maintainable code, and executing, testing, and deploying Puppet across your systems. Finally, we will deal with problems of scale and exceptions in your code, automate workflows, and support multiple developers working simultaneously.This course is based on the following books: Puppet 4 Essentials - Second Edition Extending Puppet - Second Edition Mastering Puppet - Second Edition Style and approach This learning path follows a practical approach, starting from the basic commands to advanced aspects. Through a series of examples you will learn the most important skills essential to manage your IT infrastructure effectively.
Acquire skills to manage your IT infrastructure effectively with Puppet About This Book Breeze through Puppet 4's key features and performance improvements to bring real advantage to your IT infrastructure Discover Puppet best practices to help you avoid common mistakes and pitfalls Blitz through easy-to-follow examples to get to grips with Puppet and succeed with everyday IT automation Who This Book Is For If you're an experienced IT professional and a new Puppet user, this book will provide you with all you need to know to go from installation to advanced automation in no time at all. Get a rapid introduction to the essential topics and then tackle Puppet for advanced automation. What You Will Learn Write and employ individual Puppet manifests Understand how Puppet implements system abstraction Deploy the Puppet master and agents Leverage and extend Facter to summarize your systems Create modular and reusable Puppet code Extend your code base with publicly available Puppet modules Use the modern features of Puppet 4 Separate logic from data using Hiera In Detail Puppet is a configuration management tool that allows you to automate all your IT configurations, giving you control over what you do to each Puppet Agent in a network, and when and how you do it. In this age of digital delivery and ubiquitous Internet presence, it's becoming increasingly important to implement scalable and portable solutions, not only in terms of software, but also the systems that run it. The free Ruby-based tool Puppet has established itself as the most successful solution to manage any IT infrastructure. Ranging from local development environments through complex data center setups to scalable cloud implementations, Puppet allows you to handle them all with a unified approach. Puppet 4 Essentials, Second Edition gets you started rapidly and intuitively as you'll put Puppet's tools to work right away. It will also highlight the changes associated with performance improvements as well as the new language features in Puppet 4. We'll start with a quick introduction to Puppet to get you managing your IT systems quickly. You will then learn about the Puppet Agent that comes with an all-in-one (AIO) package and can run on multiple systems. Next, we'll show you the Puppet Server for high-performance communication and passenger packages. As you progress through the book, the innovative structure and approach of Puppet will be explained with powerful use cases. The difficulties that are inherent to a complex and powerful tool will no longer be a problem for you as you discover Puppet's fascinating intricacies. By the end of the book, you will not only know how to use Puppet, but also its companion tools Facter and Hiera, and will be able to leverage the flexibility and expressive power implemented by their tool chain. Style and approach This quick learning guide for Puppet follows a practical approach, starting with some basic commands that you can use from the shell right away. It comprises a series of examples that will get you familiar with the most important aspects of Puppet in a flash.
A Guide to managing servers and automation About This Book Breeze through Puppet's key features and performance improvements to bring real advantages to your IT infrastructure Discover Puppet best practices to help you avoid common mistakes and pitfalls Examples to help you get to grips with Puppet and succeed with everyday IT automation Who This Book Is For This book targets experienced IT professionals and new Puppet uses, who will learn all they need to know to go from installation to advanced automation. Get a rapid introduction to the essential topics and learn how to build best practices for advanced automation with Puppet. What You Will Learn Understand declarative configuration management Make use of GIT-based deployment workflows Extend Factor with secure elements Create modular and reusable Puppet code Extend your code base with publicly available Puppet modules Separate logic from data by using Hiera Understand and develop Puppet Roles and Profiles In Detail Puppet is a configuration management tool that allows you to automate all your IT configurations, giving you control over what you do to each Puppet Agent in a network, and when and how you do it. In this age of digital delivery and ubiquitous Internet presence, it's becoming increasingly important to implement scaleable and portable solutions, not only in terms of software, but also the system that runs it. This book gets you started quickly with Puppet and its tools in the right way. It highlights improvements in Puppet and provides solutions for upgrading. It starts with a quick introduction to Puppet in order to quickly get your IT automation platform in place. Then you learn about the Puppet Agent and its installation and configuration along with Puppet Server and its scaling options. The book adopts an innovative structure and approach, and Puppet is explained with flexible use cases that empower you to manage complex infrastructures easily. Finally, the book will take readers through Puppet and its companion tools such as Facter, Hiera, and R10k and how to make use of tool chains. Style and approach This book aims to impart all the knowledge required to tap into not only the basics of Puppet, but also its core. The basic ideas and principles of Puppet-based designs are explored and explained. Sophisticated tools are presented to enable you to use Puppet efficiently and productively.
Now in its 23rd year, Llewellyn's Herbal Almanac provides a wealth of practical ideas on growing, using, and benefiting from nature's most dynamic plants. With gardening resources, hands-on projects ideas, and dozens of helpful tips and techniques, this guide is packed with information for enthusiasts of all skill levels. Discover a wealth of innovative herbal ideas that span gardening, cooking, crafts, health, beauty, history, and lore. This year's edition also includes profiles for red clover, hydrangea, yerba mate, and marjoram. Herbs are an important part of a life dedicated to wellness in mind, body, and spirit. Whether you are interested in seasonal herbs for self-care, vegan recipes, kitchen cosmetics, or creating an alpine rock garden, this wonderful almanac has something to delight your herbal practice.
New York magazine was born in 1968 after a run as an insert of the New York Herald Tribune and quickly made a place for itself as the trusted resource for readers across the country. With award-winning writing and photography covering everything from politics and food to theater and fashion, the magazine's consistent mission has been to reflect back to its audience the energy and excitement of the city itself, while celebrating New York as both a place and an idea.
A remarkable collection of short fiction from one of our greatest SF authors, including two brand new short stories. This collection contains stories set in the universe of the bestselling duology PROXIMA and ULTIMA, which expand on the characters and worlds of that series. There are also a selection of alternate histories and possible futures, echoing Baxter's work with Terry Pratchett on the LONG EARTH series. Confirms Stephen Baxter's place as one of the greatest practitioners of the SF short story.
'A remarkable book . . . It's a powerful testament to the healing balm of gardening and the resilience of the human spirit in the direst of circumstances.' Financial Times 'Not a happy book and yet it's magically heartening. It makes a gardener question his or her values.' The Times 'This extraordinary book...warm and engaging...like a photograph magicked to life.' Spectator 'Snow has spent ten years as a photographer and filmmaker covering unrest . . . Throughout that time she has sought comfort in green oases and come to understand "how vital gardens are 'against a horrid wilderness' of war". . . There can be few counter-narratives as enchanting and sad as those Snow recounts in War Gardens.' Times Literary Supplement 'For all these victims of war, their gardens are places in which to breathe, providing moments of calm, hope and optimism in a fragile life of horror and uncertainty. For many, it helps them to grieve. Books seldom bring a lump to my throat, but this one did.' Spectator 'What makes War Gardens the most illuminating garden book to be published this year, is the realisation that people's gardens are the antidotes to the horrors of their surroundings.' Country Life A journey through the most unlikely of gardens: the oases of peace people create in the midst of war In this millennium, we have become war weary. From Afghanistan to Iraq, from Ukraine to South Sudan and Syria, from Kashmir to the West Bank, conflict is as contagious and poisonous as Japanese knotweed. Living through it are people just like us with ordinary jobs, ordinary pressures and ordinary lives. Against a new landscape of horror and violence it is up to them to maintain a modicum of normality and colour. For some, gardening is the way to achieve this. Working in the world's most dangerous war zones, freelance war correspondent and photographer Lally Snow has often chanced across a very moving sight, a testimony to the triumph of the human spirit in adversity, a celebration of hope and beauty: a war garden. In Kabul, the royal gardens are tended by a centenarian gardener, though the king is long gone; in Camp Bastion, bored soldiers improvise tiny gardens to give themselves a moment's peace; on both sides of the dividing line in Jerusalem families tend groves of olives and raise beautiful plants from the unforgiving, disputed landscape; in Ukraine, families tend their gardens in the middle of a surreal, frozen war. War Gardens is a surprising, tragic and beautiful journey through the darkest places of the modern world, revealing the ways people make time and space for themselves and for nature even in the middle of destruction. Illustrated with Lally Snow's own award-winning photography, this is a book to treasure.
This beautifully designed book tells the 100-year story behind Ontario's beloved Sheridan Nurseries from its creation by Howard and Lorrie Dunington-Grubb to its overwhelming success today. This is a chronicle of history, natural inspiration, and a love of gardening.
Say goodbye to water-guzzling lawns and create beautiful, landscape designs Low-Water Landscaping For Dummies will teach you to preserve one of our most critical natural resources while simultaneously maximizing your curb appeal. Ditch wasteful, inefficient irrigation methods like sprinkler systems and learn how to embrace designs that save water. This book guides you through different styles of landscaping, introduces you to uniquely drought-tolerant plants, and provides solutions for even the trickiest terrains. You can break the cycle of constant watering, without sacrificing the relaxing atmosphere and aesthetic appeal of your outdoor space. Learn how it’s possible to have vibrant, unique, gorgeous landscapes that incorporate grasses, perennials, shrubs, trees, groundcovers, and succulents without wasting hundreds of gallons of water each day. Packed with useful tips, achievable plans, and easy-to-understand instructions, Low-Water Landscaping For Dummies is the only resource eco-conscious gardeners need to design, plant, and enjoy the landscape of their dreams. Design a landscape that fits your space and budget Discover beautiful, drought-tolerant plants Get regional tips to ensure success Troubleshoot common gardening problems If you want to protect the environment, save money on water bills, and learn more about drought-tolerant plants, this is the friendly Dummies guide for you.
