Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers   project integrator

A few years ago I built a small rackmount unit for the IT Services department of my (then) employer, and published how I did it plus the associated software to link it up to the Nagios monitoring software. I keep getting mails from people who used the publication to build their own system, or to improve it.

What surprised me most is that several people succeeded in pushing the software outside design limits, so that I morally was forced to extend the design. Fortunately, it never went beyond adding a character to a Perl regular expression... yet.

The first extension was made about two years ago, when somebody connected more than ten sensors to the unit and ran out of switch options. This simply meant adding an optional second figure to the matching expression, so that the software now goes to 100 sensors. That should do, for a while.

A few days ago, somebody requested an extension for negative temperatures. Rats, never tested these... and again, it was solved by adding just a minus sign to the regexp.

I am convinced that many more people also made modifications to the software, but never told me. That is no problem, of course, but it would be nice to have an idea what goes on with things I developed in the past. So in case you made a mod and would like to talk about it, please do!

The complete article is here: Monitor temperatures with Linux, Nagios, and DS1820.