Slackware 12.2

Yes as you can imagine from the post's title Slackware 12.2 has been released. Have a look at the release notes for more info

Gnome 2.24 on Slackware 12.1

Currently downloading GSlacky 2.24, then I'll have a look at the new Gnome 2.24.

Nagiosgraph extra mappings for NSClient++ and NetBackup

In order to get more out of our Nagios, I installed nagiosgraph to create graphs of our service states. The only problem was it didn't generate graphics for the NSC++ client data. So I had to create some mapping for that data, so here's the mapping

# Service type: CPU LOAD
#   output: CPU Load 2% (5 min average) 3% (15 min average) 2% (59 min average)
/output:.*CPU Load ([.0-9]+)% \([^\)]+\) ([.0-9]+)% \([^\)]+\) ([.0-9]+)%/
and push @s, [ load,
              [ avg1min,  GAUGE, $1 ],
              [ avg5min,  GAUGE, $2 ],
              [ avg15min, GAUGE, $3 ] ];

# Service type: single disk CHECK_NT command
# output:e:\ - total: 557.75 Gb - used: 405.85 Gb (73%) - free 151.89 Gb (27%) | 'e:\ Used Space'=405.85Gb;278.87;501.97;0.00;557.75
# perfdata:'l:\ Used Space'=1.38Gb;8.00;9.00;0.00;10.00
# Perfdata order => Used space; warning free; Critical free; unknown; total space
/perfdata:'([^ ]+) Used Space'=(\d+\.\d+).*(\d+\.\d+);(\d+\.\d+);(\d+\.\d+);(\d+\.\d+)/
and push @s, [ diskuse,
              [ bytesused, GAUGE,$2 ],
              [ bytesmax, GAUGE, $6 ],
              [ pctfree, GAUGE, $5 ] ];


# Service type: Scartch tapes
# output Scratch count WARNING : available scratch tapes 2 less then 3
/output:Scratch count \w+ : available scratch tapes (\d+).*/
and push @s, [ scratch,
               [ count, GAUGE, $1] ];

Nagios Plug-In for Veritas Netbackup Scartch Pool check

To monitor the tapes in our library wich is a t a remote data center, we had a script running wich each morning mails us a report with the tapes count for each "Volume Pool" in our netbackup infrastructure. But as you may know sysadmins like to make their life easier so I wanted to be informed by our Nagios monitoring system when our Scratch pool was reaching certain tape counts so we could take action accordingly wihtout having to look to those mails each morning. So I came up with this little script.

#!/bin/bash

WARN_COUNT=$1
CRIT_COUNT=$2


SCRATCH_TMP=`/usr/openv/volmgr/bin/vmquery -b -pn Scratch_pool | wc -l`
SCRATCH_COUNT=$[$SCRATCH_TMP - 3]


if [ $SCRATCH_COUNT -lt $WARN_COUNT ];then
        if [ $SCRATCH_COUNT -lt $CRIT_COUNT ];then
                echo "Scratch count CRITICAL : availbale scratch tapes $SCRATCH_COUNT less then $CRIT_COUNT|scratch=$SCRATCH_COUNT;$WARN_COUNT;$CRIT_COUNT"
                exit 2
        else
                echo "Scratch count WARNING : available scratch tapes $SCRATCH_COUNT less then $WARN_COUNT|scratch=$SCRATCH_COUNT;$WARN_COUNT;$CRIT_COUNT"
                exit 1
        fi
else
        echo "Scratch count OK : available scratch tapes $SCRATCH_COUNT|scratch=$SCRATCH_COUNT;$WARN_COUNT;$CRIT_COUNT"
        exit 0
fi
exit 3

Now our nice nagios installation will warn me when I need to do something , so I just need to wait for a mail to take action, instead of having to remember each morning to look at those mails. find the "Scratch pool" look at the tape count.

VM-Ware VM uptime check

Trying to know which VM was active on a VM-Ware server (Free edition) I first opened to VM-Ware console and connected to the VM-Server and then checked every VM one by one to see if they were up.
But since the VM-server is running on a CentOS I decided to create me a small shell script to ask VM-Server to provide me the details by just issuing a simple command. Here's the source of this script for the those interested.

#!/bin/bash

NEEDED_VM=$1
VMWARECMD="/usr/bin/vmware-cmd"

  VM_CONFIG=`$VMWARECMD -l 2> /dev/null | sed -e "s/ /#/g"` # Get all registered Vitual machines configuration files

    if [ "$VM_CONFIG" != "" ];then

        for TMPCONFIG in $VM_CONFIG ; do
            CONFIG=`echo $TMPCONFIG | sed -e "s/#/ /g"`
            VM_STATE=`/usr/bin/vmware-cmd "$CONFIG" getstate 2> /dev/null | cut -d \  -f 3` #Get VM state
            VM_UPTIME=`/usr/bin/vmware-cmd "$CONFIG" getuptime 2> /dev/null | cut -d \  -f 3` #Get VM uptime in seconds
            UP_HOURS=`perl -e "print ( (($VM_UPTIME-($VM_UPTIME%3600))/3600).' h '.((($VM_UPTIME%3600)-(($VM_UPTIME%3600)%60))/60).' m '.($VM_UPTIME%60) . ' s')" ` #Convert uptime into a string H:m:s
            VM_NAME=`/usr/bin/vmware-cmd "$CONFIG" getconfig displayName 2> /dev/null | grep "displayName" | cut -d = -f 2` #Get the VM name from its configuration file


            echo -n "VM $VM_NAME is $VM_STATE "
            if [ "$VM_STATE" == "on" ]; then
                echo -n "for $UP_HOURS"
            fi
            echo ""

        done
    fi

The output is like this:

VM  Zenoss is off
VM  ZCS ZIMBRA DEMO is off
VM  CUSTER is on for 194 h 19 m 25 s

Light is comming

If you're a regular reader of my blog you'll be aware I entered in a dark period in my life about 2 months ago. Well since then I made some changes in my life as I wrote in previous posts, which helped me to keep my head up and going on. But now I can say that the darkness is starting to fade away steadily leaving space for heavenly light, and that light was brought to me by that splendid person I met. Somehow we seem to compliment eachother , just with our looks we seem to understand what the other is thinking. She makes my weekends fly by and makes me feel ... well I don't have words to describe how I feel ... Some times I'd like to possess the power to stop time to have these weekends last forever. But unfortunatelly that's something out of my reach, I can only hope weeks go by in seconds so that I can enjoy another weekend.I consider myself a fortunate guy for having found such a splendid person. I wish this will continue .....

M$ Vista & Wifi Part II

As I wrote in my previous post I have a strange behaviour of Vista with my Wifi, well seemed I found a work around, to have it connected. I need to open the utility program delivered with my Wifi card (Realtek RTL8185) and Disable the wifi card and reenable it and as by magic it connects wihtout a hassle. It's a bit of a nessy workaround but it makes my Wifi work, so I'm happy with it.

Wifi & Vista

Oh yes I failed the penguin, I'm running vista, shame on me. But I have no choice if I want to maintain the warranty on this machine, at least I will in the first moths of it's life then the penguin power will prevail. Event though I'm starting to consider to accelerate the process as this M$ Vista is behaving not extremely as it should. It seems it connects to the wireless network when it feels like it, like for example yesterday it jusdt refused to connect to the wireless network then today it felt like connecting wihtout a hassle. I forgive it as I have severeal wireless network on the same channel in my neighbourhoog but it's starting to be very anoying. Ok I must admit it's graphically nicer then XP but as for the usability it's far from perfect it's even worse if you're used to XP. First thing M$ seems to have fun in moving configuration tools arounf the place and to hide them where possible. Olso if it's possible make thing cryptic so peopèle keep out of the place. Give very generic error messages , and try to solve it in an automated way to then tell the user you failed fixing the problem without giving further information. Now I realy understand why vista is having trouble breaking thruogh without a forced move from M$.

Fantastic weekend

And another week has passed since my last posting. However this weekend ended the week in a fantastic way as the title says. Let's start from the end to get to the best. The weekend ended with a nice barbeque at a friends house in the mountains on a nice sunny day, with the peacfull suroundings of the mountains, followed by a little trip to a small local canion where I made some fotos that I definetly will put onto my flicker page. But this is nothing compared to what happened to me on saturday. Even though I'm generally quiet open with my postings I will keep this one a bit vague as I consider this a more private matter but I can give an overview. What happened is that I met someone, and revealed to be much diffrent than what she appeared. In the end I had a fantastic saturday wich lasted for several hours well in fact "several" is a bit of an understatement. I'm not going to pull out details eventhough nothing specials happened except for a lot of words flowing through the air, which is very strange as I'm not the person you would except to talk a lot, but for some reason I was far more talkative then what I normally am.

Next step into the wind

Since I finished the basic windsurfing course and I'm able to have fun windsurfing. I just need one extra thing and that's Kitesurfing. Seems realy cool and fun , but i definitely need to take some lessons to start kiting so that's next on my calendar a nice course of Kitesurfing. And than fun guaranteed at the see or lake. Another thing that's itching me is doing skydiving, I bounced upon a place where you can learn skydiving, for the moment i think I'll just make a tandem jump to see how that skydiving thingy is . Seems fun and lot of adrenaline :)

Fun with Ex-Colleauges UPDATED

I add this post a bit late since it's refered to thursday and right now is saturday. I must say I've had great time thursday meeting my ex colleauges and also 2 new colleagues. Unfortunattley I missed to see some of them cause I arrived a bit late at the appointment. I was comming from Mestre(VE) that day and only arrived at 21:00 at Milano Centrale and had to go whole the way to hame to get my car and then to the place "surabaya", so at the end I manged to get there at about 22:00, and we stayed there till around 01:00. The only downside of course for all of us was that we had to go to work that day. But then again I just had a great time, hope we do that again. And here are some photos ;)

Let the wind blow

Another weekend has passed by this time I went to Colico for a windsurfing course at "Son Of A Beach". The full course are 4 days This weekend I did the first, next weekend I'll take the 2nd & 3th if all goes as planned.
For the change I made some pictures of the environment there. You can find them on my Flickr page. We had only one problem on sunday, the wind stopped blowing at about 12:00 and thus WIND-surfing was a bit difficult :D

Happy SysadminDay

To all Sysadmins out there.

HAPPY SYSADMINDAY !!!!

do I hear "What the heck is sysadminday ?!" well for you who don't know about "sysadminday" have a look here .

Turin 20 July 2008

This weekend I made a one-day trip to Turin, armed with my brand new Canon EOS 450D. I visited an exposition of cinese art and also made visit to the Egyptian museum, Parco del Valentino, and much more, I had to interupt my trip due to bad weather, fortunately bad weather came only around the evening but to early to make some "Turin by Night" shots how pitty.
I published the pictures online here , the pictures here are scaled (15%) for a quicker view if you'd like to have the original size foto you can contact me. I just created myself an account at flickr.com
so I can share and organize my pictures for all of you to see.

Are you there ?

Hey here's some more of me, with pictures !

Light & Discoveries !

Once again I'm here to talk about what happened, well 3 weeks have passed since that awfull message i received . And support i received from the few people I know have given me courage. Even though in the background there's still that feeling, wich slowly fades (very slowly to intend). But now I'm looking at a positive site like in Monty python's "Life of Brian" my moto right now is "Always look at the bright side of life !". Being single again has it's advantages, like you cn do whatever comes to your mind, you don't have to think about your other part since there's none. So I can use this opportunity to start activities I didn't do like starting to learn Kitesurfing, Snowboarding in winter, other activities I couldn't share. I've set a goal for myself creating new friends to share weekends and more, so I'm not so loneley those 2 days a week. Because being alone is what makes all this so difficult. But hey I'm only 28 , .... eeurrr 29 this year darn... So I still have time to do a lot of things. Anyway I'll keep my blog updated with my progress to the light. I'd like to thank all of you for your support.


Stay tuned for updates , Damn this blog starts to resemble a SOAP ( like in television SOAP) not not the SOAP about which we IT'ers speak.

Time of darkness

Well hthis is a time of darkness as the title says. Yes, because after 7 years my girlfriend and I broke up. Seems like people are right about "The 7th is the most critical year", guess I took a "Critical Hit" right into my state of mind here. Even though I'm a bit down now, life goes on because in the end we still see each other, as friends. Even after 7 years something remains. So there is some spark of light in this darkness and some time soon the darkness will fade and new light will appear and shine brightly.

Installing Apache Tomcat 5.5.x on Windows 2003 x64

I had to install Apache Tomcat 5.5.26 on a Windows 2003 x64 Server. Installation went without any error signaled by the setup programs. Until I tried to statr the tomcat Service, it Just refused to start, and in Tomcat's logfiles I found this:

[2008-05-23 11:23:45] [402  prunsrv.c] [error]
The system cannot find the file specified.
[2008-05-23 11:23:45] [1246 prunsrv.c] [error]
Load configuration failed

Googling around I came across this article giving me the solution to the problem, eventhough the article talks about recompiling the "tomcat5.exe" program on the host. This because the Tomcat package contains a 32bit version of these programs wich ahve trouble to run on a 64bit system. Since I didn't had compiling tools available on the system I googled around a bit more and found a 64bit compiled version of this file in Apache's SVN server here the 2 executables found there are from the Tomcat 6.x series and are thus named tomcat6.exe & tomcat6w.exe
So I renamed the tomcat6.exe & tomcat6w.exe to tomcat5.exe & tomcat5w.exe , then placed them in the "/bin" folder of my Tomcat installation.

Afterwards I tried to restart the service and all came up.

Fun with iSCSI

Yesterday I heard about openfiler "Openfiler consolidates several open source technologies on the Linux 2.6 kernel base to deliver a comprehensive storage management solution that meets the needs of enterprise applications, users and administrators." (from openfiler website).
I always wanted to play with iSCSI but didn't have any appliance to play with it but with openfiler i just needed another PC. But then since I had just one PC I came up with the following idea.
Install VMWare-server 1.0.5 on my laptop (Dell Vostro 1500) running Slackware 12.0 installed openfiler on the VMWare (VM image available on openfiler's website), and also cerated a M$ windows XP VM. Then installed iSCSI initiators on my Slackware 12.0 using the open-iSCSI project and on the win XP i installed Microsofts iSCSI intiator. Then mounted iSCSI targets from openfiler on Slackware and XP, made several I/O operations.
In my tests I olso tried to expand a published iSCSI disc. However this was not possible through the web-UI but was able to expand the disk via the commandline interface by using the "lvextend" command as openfiler uses LVM for it's disk management. But I had to restart the iSCSI service to have the change visible to the iSCSI initiators.

Updating Frenzy

Today I found the Linux kernel 2.6.25 was released so I promptly downloaded the source and compiled me a fresh kernel. So since I was already updating my kernel and had to recompile the NVidia Driver to have X working, I also decided to update to the latest NVidia Driver. At that point I was taken by an update frenzy and downloaded the latest GSlacky and had my gnome desktop updated. So now I have a nice updated system running, here's an overview of the new version numbers I'm running.

* Kernel went to 2.6.25
* NVidia driver went to 169.12
* Gnome was updated to 2.22

All updates went quiet smoothly expect the NVidia driver because of the newly kernel which lead to an error during the kernel module compilation. But this was solved by applying a patch to the NVidia installation package. I found the patch in a forum by doing some googeling.

So now I'm waiting for the new Gnome release to use the evolution mail client to access my work's mailbox since our mail is managed by M$ Exchange 2007. And currently evolution only supports till Exchange 2003.

Search your data with Splunk

While I was gathering information about plugins for Nagios, I found out about splunk. Put in short splunk will accept any data you put into it and you'll be able to isearch and report on the data. Splunk does provide a way to customize how it index your data. As an example I took the os-monitoring bundle available on the splunkbase.com website, what it does is feed output from vmstat,lsof,netstat and other commands into splunk at that point you can search for system status data and generate reports (the bundle is shipped with several reports alredy created).

Splunk comes in a free and commercial version. The diffrences can be found here, shortly the commercial version has some interesting features like access control and distributed indexing.
One possible probelm of the free version is that it's limited to index 500Mb of data a day.

Kittens @ war

Doing some shopping for dinner last night at the supermarket i found a book entitled something like "kitten vs kitten" it collected several photo's of kittens and the result of the people voting the cutest kitten. Reading the introduction of the book I found out these photo's were taken from the site KittenWar! . So I decided to have a look and maybe enter my kittens into the contest !

Spread the penguin

Spread the penguin and Get Linux

2007: Microsoft in Review

Stumbled accross this article reviewing M$ activities in 2007

Excerpt:
"It’s no small secret. I hate Microsoft. I think they are the most vile and corrupt corporation in the tech industry. Their monopoly hampers innovation and they favor litigation, corruption and marketing tricks to maintain their position over simply creating great products. I have read and heard many people claim Microsoft is changing, improving, and the evil Microsoft of the pass is fading; I strongly disagree with this view, and it takes no more then a cursory look through Microsoft’s actions in 2007 to see why:"

read more in the article

Veritas NetBackup Backup Windows

Ever tried to manage Veritas NetBackup with about 35 Policies with both full and incremental schedules having only 1 tape drive in your library ? The first problem I ran into was the various backup windows set on the policies. Since I was unable to find some easy overview of all configured backupwindows inside the Veritas Netbackup GUI, I created a small Perl script to generate me a report off all configured active schedules inside netbackup. If you're interested you can find the source of the script here

Mycity.com

I stumbled accros this funny site, and created my lovely little city :

http://hartcity.myminicity.com/

Nagios 3-RC1 in a jail

I configrued a Nagios 3-RC1 in a jail on a FreeBSD 6.3. At first the nagios daemon spawned a second process and then wouldn't exit, had to kill it with a kill -9. Eventhough it hanged the web interface displayed the data but service & host checks remained in a pending state.
After some googling i found a thread in the nagios mailing list for a similar problem. I created a file "/etc/libmap.conf" and added.

[/usr/local/bin/nagios]
libpthread.so.2 libthr.so.2
libpthread.so libthr.so

This made the nagios start and execute the service checks. However due to being in a jail nagios could not do some checks like pinging, due to the jail limitation. Adding thefollowing line in sysctl.conf

security.jail.allow_raw_sockets=1

Will allow ping to function inside a jail.

Changes

After 4 years I changed job and now work as a sysadmin for another company. It was time to change since there was no chance of improvement or new opportunities. In short the working environment was bad,it seemed like people were "praised" for doing nothing. Bringing improvement was not noticed.