From using a new power cord to buying a plug adapter kit, there are a lot of choices. In fact, each day there are more choices to choose from as manufacturers are realizing that our world is increasingly wired and dependent on electricity to power our portable electronic gadgets. You can power with a cord, an adapter, a surge protector, or even solar panels, but the question remains, which one will work the best for your situation. Only you can know for sure. Of course, the more knowledge you have, the better the decision you can make.

Finding the right portable travel adapter can be a massive challenge. A smart solution will be something that will allow you to bring power to all of your personal electronic devices and at the same time provide you with the functionality and adaptability to prevent problems from happening with changes in voltage or current. The essential electronics you carry with you when you travel have a variety of needs and it’s important to realize that not all plug adapters are a one stop solution to your problems. When you are looking to power your important personal electronics be sure that you pay attention! These may be toys, but in fact, for most people, the electronics they travel with are much more than fun gadgets, they are essential to their work and to enjoying their time while away from home.

This article should provide you with a solid starting point in terms of how to maintain the quality of lifestyle you desire without leaving your electronic devices at home. While there are many different sources which offer you a ‘one stop shopping’ selection, you should be careful of anything that sounds perfect since in the world of electronics (as everywhere else) if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!

The clever traveler wants to know all the options before they begin the process of making the sales decision. Power plug adapters are a great place to start. For most casual travelers, these simple devices will be ideal. Those who are planning to be in more than one electronics area, should consider a power adapter kit since they often deliver protection from power surges, power spikes, and allow you to change the tips depending on what country you happen to be traveling in. The huge benefit here is that you can avoid power problems such as damaging your important and delicate electronics or ruining your favorite gadget with an unexpected third world power surge.

Universal adapter kits are a great idea but be certain that they provide you with surge protection because the delicate motherboards and circuitry of today’s devices can be completely destroyed with one powerful surge of electricity. If that happens you can say goodbye to all of your data!

Power fluctuations are common in Eastern Europe, Africa, South America, and Asia. In fact, they happen in Western Europe and North America too but not on such a regular basis. The latest generation of power converters will not only protect you from surges but also automatically detect and adapt to the 110V or 220V settings.

Since the plugs in all countries are not the same, it’s important to make sure you have the UK, Europe, Italy, and North America tip kits. Different countries have different plugs and different voltages. Be sure to do your homework before you plug into a strange plug. Protect yourself! If you don’t have the right tip, you will not be able to plug in!

Another adapter that many travelers find handy is a USB plug in. This allows you to charge or power your device through the USB port of any computer. While this won’t work for all electronics, it certainly provides a decent solution for those who want to power their smartphone, MP3 player, PDA, or other ultra portable devices.

One of the latest additions to the market of charging your electronics on the go is the solar panel or the portable solar charger. Because of recent advances in the technology which produces solar cells, they can now be made flexible and this means that solar panels can be installed on every day travel items such as backpacks or rolled up into easy to carry bundles. While the idea of carrying your own power source might sound absurd to many people, in fact, it is a practical and easy solution. Since most portable items these days work on batteries and simply need to be charged, you can use the solar cells to charge your devices from just about anywhere! And in this case, you can buy the solar charger with a plug that is designed for your personal device, voltage, and current.

If you think you will have to be going to very sunny places to use the solar charger, think again. The solar chargers actually work on light, not only sunlight, so if you are going into a place where there is no light, you are out of luck (sorry spelunkers!) but if there is light whether it is natural or artificial, you can use the portable solar cells to power and charge your devices.

So, as you can see, the options are ever increasing in terms of ways in which you can power your portable devices. The most important thing is that you don’t need to worry about whether you can power your device in a foreign country. Of course you can!

But for those who only need to monitor a few devices, configuring Nagios to do so is actually quite simple. In this article I am going to show you a few configurations to handle and then how to add devices and checks for your installation.

Post-install configurations and plugins

Before you get busy setting up devices for Nagios to monitor, you should first install some extra plugins for the system. Open up Synaptic, search for “nagios” (no quotes), mark nagios-plugins-extra for installation, and click Apply to install. Once that is done you will already have more functionality with Nagios.

Now let’s take care of a couple of configurations. The first is in the /etc/nagios3/conf.d directory. The file is called contacts_nagios2.cfg. In this file you will configure who is to receive the email alerts. The line to set this configuration is:

email    root@localhost

You will want to change that email address. That is it for this configuration file. Now in order for Nagios to be able to send out alerts via email, the machine housing Nagios has to be able to send those alerts out. You can check that by using the mail command like so:

mail email@address -s TEST

Where email@address is an actual address you can use for testing.

Once you enter that line, hit Enter and then type some random text. When you’re done typing hit <Ctrl>d and then Enter. The mail should send away. If not you will have to troubleshoot your mail server (beyond the scope of this tutorial).

Add a device

Figure 1

Now for the good stuff. We are going to add a device to Nagios. The device we will add is a Windows XP desktop to monitor. Within the /etc/nagios3/conf.d directory you will see a number of .cfg files. These are the files Nagios uses to dictate what is see and how it acts upon what it see. For every device you want to use, I find it best to add a .cfg file. So let’s create the file /etc/nagios3/conf.d/windows_xp.cfg. The contents of this fill will look like what you see in Figure 1.

As you can see there are a few directives here. The directives are as follows:

• check_command – The command used to check the status of the device.
• max_check_attempts – How many times will Nagios retry the status check.
• check_period – How often are the checks made.
• process_perf_data – Enable the processing of performance data.
• retain_nonstatus_information – Enable the retention of non-status information across reboots.
• notification_interval – How often are notifications sent to inform the administrator this host is not okay.
• notification_period – How often are notifications sent out.
• notification_options – The options shown are w – send notifications on “warning” state, u – send notifications on “unknown” state, and “r” – send notifications when a service stops flapping (when a service changes frequently).

NOTE: Depending upon the version of Nagios you have installed the notification_options will be different. Some instances will not accept the “w” option. If you get an error, exchange “w” with “d” (for down).

As you can see there are configuration options that will be specific to your devices and networking topology (host_name and address are examples). Once you have created this file save it and restart Nagios with the command sudo /etc/init.d/nagios3 restart command. Now take a look at your Nagios page and you will see the new device you just added.

Final thoughts

Someday someone will come up with an automated way to detect devices in Nagios. Until then we are relegated to adding them using this means. Does that mean you should shy away from Nagios? Not at all. Nagios is a powerful tool ready to help network administrators keep tabs on their network devices.

The matter is even getting more pressing if the supply is limited, say a limited edition of a computer game or a super duper price for a product that usually costs a lot more. That’s like putting more pressure on the consumer and it usually works.

I’m sometimes hard pressed to stop myself from buying a device after reading about it on the Internet. I came up with a system that is beating impulse buying fair and square and it will definitely save you some money.

It’s actually a pretty easy system. If I see or read about something that I want I think about it for a second. Do I really need the device right now? The answer would be yes in the case of a crashed hard drive but no for a gamin system or computer game.

Every item where I come to the conclusion that I do not need it right away lands on my 90-days list. I add the date and the name of the product on that list. I check back after 90 days and see if I still want to buy that product. If I do I buy it but more often than not I don’t care anymore. Let me give you an example where this worked perfectly.

You might remember that I wanted to buy a SSD (Solid State Drives) for my new computer. SSDs were expensive and rare at that time and most could not really live up to the promise. I put that SSD drive on my 90 days list and ordered one just a few days ago because I still wanted one. Those 90 days however saw some great product releases of reliable and fast SSD drives and I was able to grab one of the fastest for a third of the price that I would have paid back then. As I said, it works pretty well and more often than not it saves you money.

Ladies, this works extremely well for non-tech related products like shoes, perfumes, clothes or books.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\UsbStor

The value START determines if USB drives are disabled or not, if the value is set to 4 USB drives are disabled, if it is set to 3 they are enabled.

source: intelliadmin