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Nagios 3.0b4 ebuilds and nagios-plugins 1.4.10 September 30, 2007

Posted by Tobias Scherbaum in : Gentoo , 4comments

I finally managed to put some Nagios 3.0b4 ebuilds together and committed them to my personal dev-overlay on friday. Besides supporting the latest bleeding-edge Nagios I added support for another webserver, lighttpd aka lighty - thanks to Tiziano Müller for his patches (bug #191675). For testing lighty  w/ Nagios I set up my first lighty installation ever -and I’m still kinda impressed of its easiness :) Another thing I consider for Nagios 3 ebuilds is FHS compliance - there’s been a bug opened this weekend (# 194141). I’m pretty unsure about that, as this will probably break all Nagios installations on Gentoo boxes out there, plus Sysadmins would need to adjust all their customizations while upgrading to a newer Nagios version. As I said, I’m *very* unsure about that - so any feedback on implementing FHS compliance for nagios-* ebuilds is welcome :)

After getting up I usually read my mails - so I did on early saturday morning. One email I found was the announce of nagios-plugins 1.4.10, no suprise as there was a discussion about things to get fixed for 1.4.10 on the nagiosplug-devel mailinglist just some days ago. But 1.4.10 also fixes a buffer overflow in the included check_http plugin, after doing a quick version bump (and adjusting some patches) stabilization is now handled by our security team in bug #194178.

Back from a weekend in Kopenhagen August 13, 2007

Posted by Tobias Scherbaum in : Gentoo, Me, Myself and I, On the road ... , add a comment

Like mentioned in the last update of my little “tour-calendar” just some days ago, I spent the last weekend in Kopenhagen visiting Corny (and some other now-former-Gentoo Developers). Instead of my favourite airline Lufthansa I booked Skandinavian Airlines this time, mainly because Lufthansa doesn’t offer any nonstop-flights from Dusseldorf to Kopenhagen and the SAS flight was *very* cheap. It was my first flight with a McDonnell Douglas MD-80 (MD-82 to be precise) type machine ever on which I discovered that these machines are quite noisy …

On Friday evening we visited Kopenhagen’ Tivoli which basically is a leisure park in the middle of central Kopenhagen, it’s located nearly next to the main station. Their somewhat special pricing-system made it quite difficult for us, while being already lined up for the rollercoaster we found out, that we would need some additional tickets … well …. *sigh* … 10 Minutes later we were again lined up for the rollercoaster - this time with ride-tickets :P After taking some other rides we went out for some beers :)

Saturday was a classic-sightseeing day, we visited the little mermaid, Amalienborg Castle and other typical tourist attractions. For sunday Alexander Færøy organzied a little bbq-party at his place where some other people including Bryan Østergaard joined us and we grilled some “Pölser”, basically saucages. Before the bbq started we did a little touristic boat-trip around Kopenhagen’s harbour.

For the price of “wow, this is a really cheap flight!” I had to take the first plane back to Germany on early Monday morning - early as in “i needed get up at 5 in morning” which sucks. After I had a quite nice seat in one of the last tiers of the machine on the outbound flight I decided to take the same seat again - which was a really bad decision. Instead of a MD-82 SAS decided to operate this flight with a MD-87 which is a shorter variant of the MD-82. So … my quite nice seat in a MD-82 was a seat in the last tier of a MD-87, right next to the engines. Quite loud as I can tell :P The way from landing at DUS airport back home took me exactly 60 minutes - including baggage claim, transfer to the airport rail station, a 20 minutes train ride and 10 minutes to walk - wow!

Finally! July 19, 2007

Posted by Tobias Scherbaum in : Gentoo, Gentoo-Buch , 7comments

Gentoo Linux - Die Metadistribution, the book I wrote, should be available in book stores soon - today I received my first three copies. Seeing this as the final ending of months of hard work I spent on writing that book, I’m now somewhat proud for getting this done :) I uploaded the first picture of the books I received here (yeah, ugly picture - was taken with my mobile’s cam). I’ll keep you informed on when the book is available in book stores ;)

Rivendell - broadcast automation software June 17, 2007

Posted by Tobias Scherbaum in : Gentoo , add a comment

Yesterday I came across a quite nice (read: GPL’d) broadcast automation software: Rivendell. As some people in the forums already tried Rivendell and the Wiki explains how to install Rivendell from CVS on Gentoo boxes I started to put some ebuilds together which are now in my dev-overlay. They’re currently in a very experimental state - at least I got Rivendell running with them. If you have corrections and additions mail them to me (and include the patch for your fixes as well :P).

Little PPC bugfixing spree … June 17, 2007

Posted by Tobias Scherbaum in : Gentoo , 7comments

Somehow I was in the mood of starting a little bugfixing spree on Friday after I got home from work. From more than 100 hundert PPC-Bugs we’re now down to less than 30. Nearly all keywording bugs are fixed for now - so we can now take a look at the “real” bugs ;) The bugfixing spree was really needed as some of the bugs were laying around already for several months, but also some of the bugs were already fixed.

A third group of bugs were - I name them - “random keywording requests”, some developers apparantly like their packages to be keyworded and/or stable for any architecture supported by Gentoo. Which makes it even harder for smaller architecture-teams like PPC to handle this and the “real” keywording requests in a reasonable timeframe. While we did those random keywording requests in the past we can’t as of now due to lack of man-power - at best we currently have a group of only about five developers regularly looking at PPC-bugs. Plus we lost our last participant in the AT-program a week ago. Thanks for the work you did for Gentoo/PPC, Nathan!

Current state of Nagios packages June 10, 2007

Posted by Tobias Scherbaum in : Gentoo , add a comment

It’s now nearly two months after Jokey’s mail to the dev-Mailinglist asking for Nagios maintainers and one month after I took the challenge of maintaining them, but first of all fixing some bugs which were added to a tracker - as a larger number of them got stuck in Gentoos Bugzilla.

Things I fixed include

- a valid home-directory for the nagios-User (for example if you want to add a custom my.cnf)
- setuid check_icmp Plugin (it won’t work otherwise)
- migration of nagios-core to econf and dropping (deprecated) gnuconfig
- check not only for jpeg but also png support when installing the web-frontend
- fixed pre-stripped binaries in nagios-core

plus version bumps of nagios, nagios-core and nagios-nrpe. I also added nagios-plugins-1.4.8 and 1.4.9, of which 1.4.8(-r1) is about to be stabled soonish (ppc64 were quite fast, thanks Markus!). For a detailed list of things which were fixed consult the ChangeLogs.

The Tracker-Bug nowadays mainly consists of minor bugs, of which 3 are requests for new packages (ndoutils, nagios_grapher, nagvis) and one bug covers a Nagios guide, which I’ll look at together while writing a nice example config - Debian already has a nice one ;)

One thing I came across while fixing some Nagios bugs was the installation layout Gentoo is using. While I really like it, it’ll need to be changed somewhen in the future to easily use Nagios with Apache and SuEXEC enabled. This requires the Nagios CGI’s to be installed inside of /var/www instead of /usr/nagios/sbin. To make this change as smooth as possible I tend to make this change together with moving to Nagios 3 which has seen it’s 4th Alpha-Release in May. If you have other suggestions how to solve this problem w/ SuEXEC feel welcome to share them with me :)

On the road - once again! May 15, 2007

Posted by Tobias Scherbaum in : Events, Gentoo, On the road ... , add a comment

It’s once again that time - one event is taking place just directly when an other one just closed its doors. In the next 3 weeks I’ll be visiting Graz (Austria), Hamburg (Germany) and the LinuxTag, this time taking place in Berlin,Germany.

Starting my Road-Trip this Friday with a journey towards Graz where we (amne, roger55 and some other Gentoo people - what about wschlich btw?) will represent Gentoo at the LinuxTage (19.05.), an event which itself is part of an larger event - the Austrian LinuxWochen. On Saturday we’ll have a booth and show our latest release 2007.0. Later on amne and I’ll hold a talk about our beloved Metadistribution. While the talk itself isn’t that spectacular or even new, it’s the first time we’ll held this talk together, I guess that’ll be much fun!

The weekend after that I’ll be visiting Hamburg to attend a Gentoo User Meeting, mainly organized by some Forums People. I’ve never been in Hamburg before, so I engaged Jokey to be my personal city-guide. Maybe we have enough time to visit at least some of Hamburg’s most famous tourist attractions.

My Road-Trip ends in Berlin where I’ve been for the last time one and a half year ago. Besides visiting LinuxTag and taking LPI exams to finally pass the Level 2 (and hopefully Level 3) certification, the most interesting part of the Berlin journey is meeting people. hollow and rbu to name some of them (what about hd-brummy, plate, trapni?), but also zypher will probably be in Berlin - and lots of other people too.

That being said - if you’re interested in meeting me (and sign keys …) on my Road-Trip, just drop me a mail!

Yet another Gentoo User Meeting (GUM) taking place March 12, 2007

Posted by Tobias Scherbaum in : Gentoo , add a comment

After we skipped some Meetings in the past few months another (somewhat inofficial) Gentoo User Meeting is taking place this Wednesday evening at the usual GUM Ruhrgebiet location. This time we join the LUGOR (Linux User Group Oberhausen/Rheinland) who will meet at the some location we usually also do, the topic for their meeting is an “Introduction to Gentoo”. Most of the LUG people are already using Gentoo (for years!), but there are some people still stuck with that thingy called “Ubuntu” ;)  You’re welcome to join and help us to show them Gentoo’s benefits and Pro’s!

If you’d like to attend you’ll find all necessary information on the LUGOR website, or just drop me an email ;)

FOSDEM report, part two - maybe the last the one? ;) March 12, 2007

Posted by Tobias Scherbaum in : Gentoo , add a comment

A little bit late and mostly because of that somehow short. The reasons for this late second part of my FOSDEM report are kinda personal …

On Saturday I spent most of the morning and early afternoon at our booth, talking to other devs, IRCing, and so on - well, of course we were also talking to some visitors ;) On early afternoon GMsoft arrived at the booth, carrying his HPPA C3600 with him. Hey, I had some RAM for him in my backpack, which we immediately plugged into the box and hey, little surprise - it just worked! Around ~14 o’clock we could hijack our devroom and as we were some of the early people in there we got some nice seats in the front. Yeah!

Getting a VGA-cable was kinda hard, as we learned. Neither the King of Tacos nor any of the other people had or could organize one. Finally SeJo got us an VGA-cable and Bryan could (somehow still in time!) start the first of this two presentations about the Gentoo Hardened project and securing systems in general. While Bryan held his second talk about SELinux I took an LPI Exam (getting there was a nice trip throughout the whole university …), afterwards I went back to the devrooom and attended the other talks. With Wolfram and Lars (and Matti? can’t remember *cough* …) we went back to the youth hostel after FOSDEM closed its doors and before joining the other people at the restaurant “Roma” for our saturday-evening-all-together-dinner. The dinner was quite nice, but somehow I thought we would’ve the dinner at a more “traditional” restaurant. Besides the dinner being somehow “unexpected” it was a very nice evening :)

Sunday morning started earlier than the Saturday one, I had another LPI exam at 10 o’clock for which I had to be at the ULB some time in advance. Also Danny (who was sharing a room with Lars and me) had his Paludis talk at the same time, so we all had good reasons to be at the university on time. After taking the LPI exam I spent the whole sunday at our developers room, sitting there, IRCing, talking to other people and of course listening to the talks ;) On about ~16:30 we had to leave the ULB to reach our train back home at Brussels Midi (which is also Brussels South and Brussels Agglo - I guess I won’t understand that a one train-station has three different names …).

Being at FOSDEM now for the second time (2004 we only were 10-15 Gentoo people) my conclusion is definitively very affirmative - I met lots of people I only knew from IRC or mailing lists until FOSDEM, we signed some GPG-keys, we had joy, we had fun and of course some beer :) See you again next year at FOSDEM 2008 in Brussels!

FOSDEM report, part one February 24, 2007

Posted by Tobias Scherbaum in : Events, Gentoo , add a comment

After a very smooth train-ride via Cologne we (Kugelfang and I) arrived at Brussels-Midi yesterday evening at 17 o’clock. We met with hansmi, killerfox, blubb, CHTEKK and some SysCP Developers at the train station and moved to the youth hostel via Metro from there.

After having lunch at Pizza Hut we tried to attend the usual Beer-event, but the location was already more than full when we got there. So, we went back to the youth hostel. After searching for a night-shop where we bought some beverages (i.e. beer) we found out that the youth hostel also has a little bar. I tried Grimbergen Gold, Westmalle and Leffe Gold - all of them very tasty :)

We arrived the ULB this morning at about 10, Pylon and I where the first Gentoo people at our booth … As you probably notice the wifi-network is up and running, I’ll report a little bit more later on … (at least I’ll try to ..)