Why do I hate Nagios?

You either love or hate Nagios, there are no intermediate opinions when you use this application. I am definitely uncomfortable with Nagios. While I'm not a radical SCOM guy, because I like other free (as in freedom) monitoring systems: Zabbix, Sensu even PandoraFMS, I really hate Nagios.
And if you want there are a lot of very good SaaS alternatives too, such as New Relic, Datadog, Monits, etc.

Nagios reminds me of the good old times, when we only had a few machines in our data centers and three or four services and they were easy to manage and monitor.  Do you remember big brother monitoring software? It was quite popular 15 years ago and it was very simple because our projects were very simple comparing with our projects nowadays.

Recipe: How to know when was the last update in Linux

Today we are going to write about the difference between the two main package managers. Last week we were setting up some systems to be ready for ISO 27000 audit and we needed to know when the last updates were installed in  Linux servers. We have two types of Linux distributions in the company, Debian and CentOS, we think that CentOS is more enterprise friendly, especially the package manager (yum) is more enterprise friendly than dpkg and here is an example.

In CentOS you need to execute the command yum history to get a report of the last software installed in the machine. In Debian on the other hand, you need to execute something like this, date -d @$(stat -c %Y /var/cache/apt/) and it just return the last day when apt-get installed a package, it looks more tricky and it is not a function of dpkg.

This kind of details, like update history, are very important to us because they are very annoying in day by day operation, so we strongly recommend CentOS instead of Debian for enterprise systems.