Warren Argus

Linux Engineer

Improved Speedtest-CLI

Posted on 2019-05-31 by wargus

I’ve recently changed ISPs and wanted to see how my speeds compared to those reported by my ISP. However the speedtest utility on Linux only tests one server at a time. While it is possible to specify a server, and get a list of local servers to test, I would rather automate the process. And I did!

I’ve made a speedtest wrapper in Python 3 and added it to my private gitea repository: https://gitea.warbel.net/wargus/improved-speedtest

By default the program will search for all servers matching a specified string, then test each one of them one after the other.

Useful Zabbix Templates

Posted on 2017-09-10 by wargus

I’ve recently turned my attention to improving my monitoring solution: Zabbix. Zabbix has the ability to probe much more than just network information through the use of scripts and templates. I’ve recently installed three such templates:

Zabbix-Apt: https://github.com/theranger/zabbix-apt Zabbix Apt will alert me when packages on my servers are in need of updating.
Zabbix-SpeedTest: https://github.com/pschmitt/zabbix-speedtest. The speedtest addon will periodically check the speed of my internet connection. Something that has become something of a hot-button topic recently as advertised speeds of NBN plans do not seem to meet expectations.
Zabbix-Mdadm: https://github.com/krom/zabbix_template_md. This template will monitor my raid arrays on my hypervisors.

The installation instructions for each were straightforward. Only Speedtest needed additional tweaking to work, specifically, speedtest-cli needed to be installed.