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.

Lotus Notes 8 on SLackware 12

Today I successfully managed to install IBM Lotus Notes 8 onto my Slackware 12 workstation. To be able to install Lotus Notes I installed GnomeSlacky wich is a project for porting Gnome in a non intrusive way into Slackware. I needed this since Lotus Notes Depends on some of the Gnome project libraries. The installation went quit good apart from the final step wich hang the first time. However after looking at the installation logs I found out that the last step tries to start e local webserver on port 80, since I had Apache running on my workstation the setup could not complete and halted. Thus I stopped my Apache and relaunched the setup, this time all went ok. I started Lotus by typing "/opt/ibm/lotus/notes/notes" into the command line, ( I need to create a shortcut on my desktop or menu for this) and I received the common lotus notes configuration wizard as you get on a windows machine. Once finished you have a nice working Lotus Notes 8 running on Linux.

Linux Clusters

On friday I had talk about Linux Clustering in a Red Hat environment. I've never been in touch with a Linux Cluster. In the past I read something about HA-clusters using "hearthbeat" but there my experience with clusters stop. So wondering about this Clustering I looked up some info on the Red Hat site and where found they have a Cluster Suite in the Red Hat Enterprise 5. Which uses Global Filesystem (GFS) , GFS provides shared filesystem. However "GFS differs from distributed file systems (such as AFS, Coda, or InterMezzo) because it allows all nodes to have direct concurrent access to the same shared block storage" (From Wikipedia ) . Then There's the Cluster suite. There's so much to read about this so I'll just put in some links here that'll take you to the stuff ;)

Red Hat Cluster Suite : Configuring and Managing a Cluster

Red Hat GFS 6.1 : Administrator's Guide

Breaking the silence

It has been some time since i wrote an entry.
But anyhow I wrote already some code for that Java project I have. I've put together what I call a distributed event handler. Well basically you have a Java class EventDispatcher which reads which reads a configuration file (now XML) from which it knows who can handle the various events. In case the the handler is on a remote host it'll open a network connection and write the event object to the network connection. The EventHandler on the other side will handle the received event and reply if needed. I tested this first version and it works even though it is not optimized. I'll try to have the code hosted somewhere and publish link on this blog.

Personal java project

I decided to finally start with a big programming project to increase my Java knowledge. The Idea is to create a web based game like Travian. But in such a wat that it is very flexyble that almost every aspect of the game can be changed with minimal code changes, or better with some kind of plug-in mechanism. As this project is just started it's still an idea. I'll have to start with the analysis and the design phase.

We'll see where I'll get in the future.

Internal Helpdesk fun

Today I received a very funny message in my mailbox from a user complaining about a problem :
"La mia memoria virtuale e' strapiena,me ne scarichi un po' per favore?Ciao"
Translated in english this would be "My virtual memory is full, can you please free some ? Bye "
That's just terrific :)

FreeBSD

I Decided to give FreeBSD a real try, so I removed the windows harddrive from my laptop computer (I now use that as backup drive) an put in a brand new harddisk (it was a gift from friends) and installed FreeBSD 6.0 First week it was compiling a lot of programs (usefull a broadband internet connection in the office) not that it was compiling 24/24h but here's a summary of what I compiled Bash,Emacs,Eclipse,mc,Apache22,php5+extensions,Mysql,KDE 3.5.2, windowmaker, etc... the one that took most was KDE 3.5.2 off course.

But I can say that it's running very smoothly ;)

Now that FreeBSD as even Java due to an agreement with Sun I has gained a lot of points for me since I do a lot of java programming. Even that I could have used gcj for java but that one has still some missing graphical support.

Apache iBatis

I found Apache Ibatis today wich seems very usefull. see
ibatis.apache.org for details in short it's a framework wich maps SQL
results to Java classes. Configuration and query defenitions are done in
XML files thus enabling you to change queries without recompiling your
java appilication as you would have to do if you're using plain old
style JDBC

check it out

First steps with Apache Struts

Here I am for another update of my blog ;)

This weekend i played around with Apache struts wich seems very powerfull. I also read something interesting about Apache iBatis aframewrok for mapping SQLColumns to JavaObjects.

Since I'm studying at the university after my workhours (wich is quiet hard 8:30-18:00 working then 18:30-21:30 university) where I have a Java course all this helps me to have a larger view about java. Also at work I've created my forst Java servlets for data inquery of ourcustomer information.

My age of reinventing the wheel (as i did a lot of times in the past) is gone it's time to use the tools provides by the OS-community.

One big thanks to this fantastic community.

First looks on FreeBSD 6.0

So I decided to give FreeBSD a try on my AMd duron700. First impression is very good fast and easy installation. Also installing of ports through source is very nice. Performance is very satisfing , probably also because off the limited applications installation.

Let's see how it will go later on , right know it's compiling KDE 3.4.3 :)

Then i'll try some diffrent window managers

To Bsd or not to Bsd

I find myself with a big question...
Should I try FreeBSD 6.0 or should I stick with Linux ??

BSD seems very stable and fast.

I realy don't know. Any visitor has any comment please leave one then :)

Slackware 10.2 on IBM/Lenovo X41

I installed slackware 10.2 on my brand new IBM/Lenovo X41 everythng works great and is supported except the fingerprint strip for wich UPEK should release a driver for BIO-API. I only had to compile the latest X from Xorg cvs to have some hardware acceleration support for the Intel 915 chipset. Even the docking station is supported through acpi , you can dock/undock by command line. I the best reference i found to download and configure software packages to support most off the hardware is HERE
I hope this helps all off you to install linux on a X41

My first mail server with webmail

I was contacted by some friends to configure a mail server for providing SMTP/POP3 & webmail service. For several domains. The machine is a nice new HP DL360 with 2 72GB 10K rpm SCSI disks in RAID1. The OS I used is Slackware 10.2
with Postfix, courier-imap, amavisd-new with Spamassassin clamav, Sqwebmail
The only thing I've still have to decide is the configuration/management tool for configuring virtual domains and mail-boxes for the postfix installation. I looked on the postfix website in the add-ons section and am evaluating vipadmin an postfix-manager. I'm currently awaiting to have the server connected to the internet

Back to school

I decided to start studying once again , an to get my graduate in informatics at the university of Milan. Since I'm currently working full-time I will follow the courses in the evening after office hours. this for 3 years, it won't be easy. But I just have to got that paper. Wish me luck :)

Qemu - PC Emulator

Ho yeah,
I'm back again , I just discovered QEmu an open source pc emulator wich runs realy good. I did some tests and emulated a pc and installed windows , BSD.
All ok cool monitor features like screendumps , memory dumps etc.
You can also just emulate aprocessor not a whole system but didn't figured out how to do this (I'm quite lame to read all the documentation i generally skip to the quick start section ;) )

But anyhow this software has convinced me, i plan to try install OS X on an emulated PPC machine (yes it also emultates PPC, X86, X86_64, SPARC)

M0n0Wall

Once again it's long since my last entry.

This time i0m here writing about my discovery about M0n0Wall a nice firewall that boots from CD based on BSD. It has a nice WEB GUI and has a lot of features.

Currently I use it as e VPN server so that I can connect to my home LAN when i'm outside.

Nice

Server Configuration achievement

Whow second post for today, I must be very active :)

I finished configuring and rolling out my mailserver that does relaying for my local domain to the final SMTP server and also doing virus scanning and Spam control. Very funny experience.
Service is running on slackware 10.1 with postfix , amavisd , clamav and spamassassin. Very smoothly and is realy working :)

Xtriboo

I'm back again :)

This time to write about Xtriboo.
What is this Xtriboo well it's a visual chat developped by my friends also known as Nitro and Ste.
This nice community has it's base in Italy but has several users from outside Italy.
It's a nice environment where you can meet nice people to have talk and also play four in a row on the game table ;)

For more info or to register please visit www.xtriboo.com.

Seti@Home group

Has been some time since my last post :) not that someone is coming overhere to read my blog, but I have to keep this blog alive to train my english.

So after some time of inactivity on Seti@Home project wich now is moving to the BOINC framework, I restated contributing in an active way to the project by running the client again. Since I'm visiting Xtriboo chat where we have about 16000 users registered the possibility to find someone interested in SETI is high. That's why i was thinking about launching the Xtriboo's SETI group. I already registered the group on the SETI@Home site and registered already myself to the group. In the meantime I also asked the good Nitro if I can put the groups pages on the Xtriboo's server. I'll have to wait his response before I can proceed, but I believe he will give me green light on that.