I wrote a basic SNMP and MRTG tutorial for Windows and Linux on my wiki last night, just to collate most of what I’d picked up in the last few months, so go feast yourselves.

Also, I found myself repeatedly referring to a site called Linux Home Networking, which was written by a guy who decided to stop paying for hosting and do it at home instead, so I thought I should share the link with you. The site assumes you have experience with Linux but are a novice sysadmin and covers the basics from networking and interface management, to Apache web hosting, DNS, mail, MySQL, NFS, Samba, NTP, quotas, software RAID, LVM, centralised logins, centralised syslogging, kernel tuning and network monitoring and management with Squid, SNMP, IP Tables, and VPNs.

It’s quite a read for the novice Linux sysadmin or people wanting to set up home servers. It is also available as a paid for PDF and was expanded upon for the book The Linux Quick Fix Notebook. The best thing about the material is that it’s fast to read, much unlike the O’Reilly books on Samba and DNS, where you read 4 chapters on protocol descriptions and background before you touch anything (they still have their place though). It’s a great getting started and as a quick reference manual. No, I’m not on commission. I recommended it to one of my colleagues and I recommend it to you if you’re a budding Linux sysadmin.

While I’m here I’d also like to pimp Howto Forge, a site which publishes constantly new and updated howtos for almost any server or system application, though primarily focused on server stuff for the novice. I keep it in my RSS reader and look at anything I think I might have to do in the future. Again, great for beginning a new learning curve or for one off projects.

But read my SNMP howto first.

Apologies to those who won’t care in the slightest…

Despite being far from green-fingered, I have an enormous garden. Due to not being very keen in the garden it is frequently hugely overgrown on the top-half which is thankfully hidden from view from the house by several large trees. The bottom half however is a source of pain. It’s visible and that means I have to do something to keep it in some kind of condition, which due to working full-time and hating gardening, is rare.

So yesterday, for the second time this year, we set about belatedly trying to mow and strim room to sunbathe and generally enjoy the oversized garden. My parents came round with an extra lawnmower and strimmer and about 4 hours later we had a garden again.

We discovered a few interesting things about our garden in between. The first was that we share it with numerous frogs, toads and newts, a number of whom I had to carefully avoid or guide away from danger. We also share it with a small bees nest, which unfortunately I accidentally mowed through as it was hidden in the grass. It seems that came as as much of a shock to the bees as it did to me and I had to spend the rest of the afternoon avoiding 2 or 3 irritated bees who had been out of the nest at the time and were looking for their home. My bad.

The other thing, and this is still amusing me, is that we have a mole. And he lives in a hole. In my garden. So now I keep hearing this daft voice in the back of my head singing “I am a mole and I live in a hole” and it frequently leaks out of my lips, accompanied by mental images of a singing cartoon mole and the Jasper Carrot stand up routine.

The lower end of the garden, until yesterday covered by a large trampoline and mounds of long grass, is covered by mole hills, which my mother proceeded to flatten with a shovel and tell me that we will have to get rid of it or it will destroy the whole lawn. My reaction was that I don’t really mind sharing my lawn, as we both need somewhere to live and it didn’t deserve to die just so my hardly bowling green standard lawn could look nice.

After being flattened, it looks like a mud patch and despite being slightly amused about having a mole (especially as the count of the number of molehills was mistaken for for the number of moles, “15 moles?”), I thought nothing more about it apart from planning to tell everyone that I had a mole.

This morning I awoke to see around 6 new, quite large mole hills and a couple of near-surface passageways. So, now I have to decide what to do with my mole and I’d like your opinion, the dafter the better, but perhaps with some useful ideas.

So, with the fact in mind that I have little time to invest in doing it, I ask you the following question:

Do I kill the critter, have the pesky varmint scared away somehow, or just leave it munching worms and laugh at its molehills?