Category

Binary Talks

06.10.09

How to fix NetworkManager’s OpenVPN plugin in Ubuntu 9.04 Binary Talks | (5)
The OpenVPN plugin for Gnome's NetworkManager is somewhat broken, at least in various Ubuntu releases. Even with proper configuration it runs into an "NeedSecrets" error although the same command with the same configuration from shell via sudo work's just fine. But fear not mighty roadwarrior! Here's a fix to let the NetworkManager get back to work. Needless to say that this is just a temporary solution (a fix is in the making), but the only thing you have to do is to add an at_console policy to /etc/dbus-1/system.d/nm-openvpn-service.conf right between the two already existing policies. Then the file should look like the following: Afterwards ...
06.09.09

Nagios Exchange opens up Binary Talks | (0)
Just a short note from my side: A week ago Ethan launched Nagios Exchange, an addon and plugin repository similar to MonitoringExchange, which is part of the whole Nagios website framework. I began to add all of my plugins to it as well, but due to the approval process it might take a while till they're downloadable. I'll let you know when it's done. Nevertheless, from now on you're even more free from where to download the plugins I've written. From now on they're available via this blog, via SVN, via MonitoringExchange and via Nagios Exchange. I'll update them on all sources.
06.03.09

Hadoop DFS Check Plugin for Nagios Binary Talks | (5)
Since I'm currently occupied with kicking off a several terabytes large Hadoop cluster I thought it'd be a good idea to provide a few Nagios plugins related to Hadoop. Just in case you don't know: Hadoop is a free Java software framework that supports data intensive distributed applications. It got its own filesystem called HDFS which scales up to petabytes of storage running on top of the operating system's filesystem. Hadoop is inspired by Google's MapReduce and GFS, the Google File System. Yahoo for example uses several Hadoop Clusters with 100.000 CPUs total in 20.000 boxes (2.000 boxes per cluster) according to ...
06.02.09

PNP Template for Process Check Plugin Binary Talks | (0)
Just a short note: Here's the appropriate PNP Template to the process check plugin which I've recently written to create nice and shiny graphs: # This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify # it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by # the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or # (at your option) any later version. # # This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, # but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of # ...
06.02.09

Microsoft’s Bing vs. Google search World wide web | (1)
Microsoft just relaunched its search engine Live and renamed it to Bing to make a fresh start. Despite the fact that it has several interesting features like playing flash videos within the actual search results by hovering or additional site information to the right of almost every search result, it - sorry to say - still disappoints. For example, searching for Linux in Bing shows Microsoft product placement within the search suggestions. Though this lets every IT professional grin from ear to ear, it could have major impact on "not so professional" people when they want to see what "this so ...
05.30.09

Process Check Plugin for Nagios Binary Talks | (11)
This is a sh-compliant check plugin for Nagios which enables you to monitor a specific process whether it's running or not and to see how much cpu/memory it's wasting. This can be accomplished with the check_procs plugin which is included in the official Nagios-Plugins package as well, but it doesn't generate any performance output. At least that's what I've experienced lately (I'd have written the plugin anyway for training purposes). The script No special needs, just the basic stuff. The script parses the output of ps aux in different ways. You need to provide a specific process via -p/--process, if warning/critical thresholds ...
05.25.09

Towel Day 2009 World wide web | (1)
Fellows in our company asked me why I'm wearing this nice and shiny new accessoire around my neck the whole day and the answer is rather simple: It's Towel Day! So long Douglas, and thanks for all the fish!
05.24.09

Last.fm profile gone for good reason World wide web | (0)
I just hit the panic button and deleted my Last.fm profile after I've read a german blog post at Koehntopp's blog and afterwards several articles at Techcrunch. 116.186 plays down the drain, but for good reason. It seems that CBS, Last.fm's parent company, requested user data related to the leak of an U2 album to actually forward this data to the RIAA. Although I haven't been some kind of a target, this is unacceptable for me since I'm interested in where my data is being used and for what purpose it gets stored. Koehntopp already mentioned this two years ago, now it ...
05.24.09

nginx Check Plugin for Nagios Binary Talks | (1)
Update: Please also consider reading the article regarding Update 1.1 for check_nginx.sh. Ok, this was obvious. Here's a Nagios plugin I've just finished to check whether nginx is running and to get some performance data like requests and connections per second as well as requests per connection. Please note that the StubStatus module for nginx must be compiled into it, this isn't done by default! And please make sure that you've added a location directive to your nginx configuration like the following as well. The script must be able to access it! location /nginx_status { stub_status on; ...
05.21.09

howto: Let nginx serve the Nagios web-interface Binary Talks | (8)
For serving the Nagios web-interface it's not necessary to run an Apache webserver. It also works quite well with others like lighttpd or nginx. Here's how to configure nginx with basic auth so that Nagios knows who you are. Prerequisites Almost any package management system like apt pulls the Apache webserver as a dependency. I therefore strongly suggest you to compile and install Nagios manually since then you've got way more options to play with. Stick to the official documentation if you consider to do so. The following config files are all based on Nagios' default configure options. Get CGI going nginx isn't capable ...