A curses interface for checkmk. I named it Checkmk Commander, but Check Commander is easier to say.

I use Checkmk daily. A few common tasks are acknowledging, downtiming and reinventorizing hosts and services. In the web UI this takes lots of clicks and time. So I wrote this client to optimize my workflow.

Example workflow in web UI:

• A new service has been detected on host1, thus I have to reinventorize it.
• Click on host name.
• Click WATO
• Click services
• Click “fix all missing/vanished”, wait.
• Click “1 change”
• Click “Activate affected”, wait.

The same in Check Commander:

Some of my checkmk plugins, Webchecks, Blacklist and SQL Dump. Easy deployments.

# Blacklist

If you have a server which is sending mail, drop this check in place. It will check the host it’s running from against a bunch of blacklists. No configuration needed.

checkmk-blacklist:

# Webchecks

Easy and expansive check of web services. It will:

• Follow redirects
• Check (configurable) status code
• If ssl, check cert and chain. Check remaining time.
• Configurable string check.
• If URL contains dev, stage or such, complain if the site isn’t robots-blocked. Else, complain if the site is robots-blocked.
• Find URLs to check from apache or nginx config.

checkmk-webchecks:

Argos is a free GNOME version of BitBar. Both lets you run any script to create an icon in the panel (or Mac OS X Menu Bar). You can see lots of plugins here: BitBar plugins.

This screenshot shows the hosts file, opened from the argos extension. The extension is shown as a notebook icon with the number of unknown entries.

It complains on forgotten entries in your /etc/hosts file. See Argos-hosts for more info.

Modern buildings have advanced HVAC systems, but they keep the data for themselves. Let’s fight that. =)

I got access to an X Aircontrol from Trox Technik, ZoneMaster HVAC system. It has a web server, so I started playing to see what data could be extracted.

I ended up with this script xaircontrol, which can send data to Grafana via Collectd.

We’ve used it to make some sweet floorplans.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

Reducing energy usage is hard if you can’t see it. Here’s a cheap way to graph home or office energy usage.

By reading data from the energy meter, one can get super accurate, real-time usage data.

I’ve used:

• A smart home controller, Home Assistant
• A graphing system, Grafana
• A micro controller, esp8266, ~$5
• An LDR sensor, $1

You need some familiarity with all of the above to set this up.