My wife and I have been using (and collecting) computers for years, and we’ve shared this interest very effectively with our children. Now I am the victim of my own success: my household now has four physical computers, one of them dual boot. All are on a single internal Local Area Network (LAN) with five real users plus sundry administrative ones on each. Some of the computers are also running services. I also have two computers sitting in a box, which will probably be added to this mess soon, plus my wife plans to get a laptop. Like it or not, I now manage a network bigger than many small businesses! But I can’t afford to pay a system administrator, and the tedium of “network plumbing” is my least favorite part of computer technology. Surely, there must be a way to automate this mess?

Enter Zenoss…

Zenoss is extremely configurable, so it can probably be set up to tell you just about anything you want to know about the computers you are monitoring. I’m just going to go through some of the things I personally was most interested in for my LAN computers, and then for my web server.

The hardest part of the learning curve for me, was learning about SNMP, the “Simple Network Management Protocol”. Zenoss, like most network monitoring services relies heavily on this technology, which apparently dates back to the late 1980s, even though I’d never heard of it.

Zenoss is pretty new, and there is no ready-made Debian package of it (or wasn’t at the time of this writing, anyway), so installation will have to be from source. Given that Zenoss is a Python/Zope program, though, this won’t be exceptionally hard, so long as all of the dependencies are taken care of.