So we bought these beautiful 50inch lcd flat panels and found out that the pc’s we were going to use were going to be unable to drive the screens with enough resolution.  While we could have upgraded the video cards and done a bunch of different things, I decided to just get a macmini that I could use for other things, but to also had the ability to drive the output for our NMS.

So here is what we have:

1.      Solarwinds

2.      Macmini

3.      DVI cable

 

Our solution is pretty simple and takes advantage of the base system and then a bunch of freeware aps.

1.      We loaded the macmini up and did a default configuration, I then cleaned up the machine and removed a bunch of stuff not needed.  However I did turn on remote management so that I can connect form both my macbook, but also from a vnc session running on anything.

2.      Loaded firefox

3.      After loading firefox I then installed the following two extensions, Permatabs and Tab Slideshow.  Both are really cool and work no matter whether you have firefox running on a pc or mac.

4.      I set the tab slideshow extension to cycle every 15 seconds.

5.      I setup all of the permatabs for the pages I wanted to monitor.  Luckily Solarwinds allows me to embed the username and password to a read only account into the browser url.

6.      I then configured firefox to start up upon boot.

7.      Also because firefox has a memory leak and because solarwinds sometimes causes things to crash I decided to set the macmini up to shut itself down and then restart every night.  This takes care of the memory consumption and also resolves any issues with solarwinds timing out.

8.      I then found a way to turn off the keyboard setup assistant.  This was useful due to the reboots every night.

$ cd /System/Library/CoreServices

$ sudo mv KeyboardSetupAssistant.app/ KeyboardSetupAssistant-OFF.app 

9.      I also turned off the bluetooth setup assistant so that I wouldn’t have to see that message after every reboot.

 

Continued Maintenance

Normally I have to check periodically and make sure that patches for firefox and also for the mac os are installed and the system is rebooted after that.