Unfortunately (for the visitors) we didn’t had any merchandising on board, while we received several requests. On Sunday Axel surprised us with some leftovers from fosdem of debian.ch merch.

At the booth we had a demo machine running Babelbox and xpenguins, which attracted visitors very well.

We received also more than one “Just thank you … ” by satisfied users. :)

Four different talks and one workshop were held by Debian people, but they were not specific to the Debian. The workshop was about OpenStreetMap, lectures was about commandline helpers, grep everything, quality analyzing and team management in opensource projects and Conkeror and other keyboard based webbrowsers.

Many thanks to Jan Dittberner, Andreas Tille, Christian Hoffmann, Florian Baumann, Christoph Egger, Axel Beckert, Adam Schmalhofer, Markus Schnalke, Sebastian Harl and Patrick Matthäi for running the booth, answering a wide range of questions or just chatting with visitors. A special thank to TMT GmbH & Co. KG for providing the complete equipment and sponsoring it’s transportation.

At the end we have to send a big thank to the organizing team of the Chemnitzer Linuxtage. It was fun and a pleasure to find new friends and meet old ones of the Free Software community.

A small sidenote … was anybody aware that OpenSuSE Package search is using screenshots.debian.net?

Ruby 1.9.2

All documentations and howtos requires to install ruby 1.9.2 via rvm. Maybe anybody can tell me, why I could not just install the ruby1.9.1 package which is in fact 1.9.2.0?

Comments

Optopress doesn’t support comments itself. I found 2 solutions for this problem. The most used is just to use Disqus, the other one to live without comments.

I dislike the idea to embed external resources for privacy reasons and to rely on stuff I don’t have under my own control. Is there any alternative solution beside disqus which isn’t hosted offside?

As we have the command definition for “check_multi_icinga” already in place, I created a check_smtp_dualstack.cmd for monitoring a dualstacked SMTP service

command[ IPv4 ] = check_smtp -4 -H “$HOSTADDRESS$”
command[ IPv6 ] = check_smtp -6 -H “$HOSTADDRESS6$”
state [ CRITICAL ] = COUNT(CRITICAL) > 1
state [ WARNING ] = COUNT(WARNING) > 0 || COUNT(CRITICAL) > 0
state [ UNKNOWN ] = COUNT(UNKNOWN) > 1

A simple SMTP service definition does the trick (don’t forget ‘address6′ in host definition)

define service{
use generic-service ; Name of service template to use
host_name localhost
service_description SMTP
check_command check_multi_icinga!’check_smtp_dualstack.cmd’!'-r 1+2+4+8′
}

Okay .. that looks nice, but only at the first view. Imagining what we are actually running as service checks, it seems we just need for every unique service check a new cmd-file for check_multi as I didn’t found a way to generalize the whole stuff yet.

Does anybody know a way to  pass commands for check_multi via service definitions? Something like:

define service{
[...]
check_command                   check_multi_icinga!’check_general_dualstack.cmd’!'check_smtp -p 666′!’-r 1+2+4+8′
[...]
}

Maybe this doesn’t sound so harmful on the first view. But some services rely on a correct source address when getting a reply for a request (for example dns resolver library).

To be aware of the issue, that a service maybe available via IPv4 but not via IPv6 or vica versa, a dualstacked monitoring needs to be in place for dualstacked services. Looking into the issue, I stumbled upon Michael Friedrichs HowTo about Dualstacked monitoring with Icinga.

Luckily we have the full software stack in place on Squeeze (with squeeze-backport). As icinga and nagios-plugins was in installed already, I just needed to fetch check_multi.

aptitude install -t squeeze-backports nagios-plugin-check-multi

Now a new check command is needed, I created the following:

define command {
command_name check_multi_icinga
command_line /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_multi \
-f /etc/check_multi/$ARG1$ $ARG2$ $ARG3$ $ARG4$ \
-s objects_cache=/var/cache/icinga/objects.cache \
-s status_dat=/var/cache/icinga/status.dat \
-s HOSTADDRESS=$HOSTADDRESS$ -s HOSTADDRESS6=$HOSTADDRESS6$
}

For monitoring connectivity I created check_host_alive_dualstack.cmd

command[ IPv4 ] = check_ping -4 -H “$HOSTADDRESS$” -w 5000.0,100% -c 5000.0,100% -p 5
command[ IPv6 ] = check_ping -6 -H “$HOSTADDRESS6$” -w 5000.0,100% -c 5000.0,100% -p 5
state [ CRITICAL ] = COUNT(CRITICAL) > 1
state [ WARNING ] = COUNT(WARNING) > 0 || COUNT(CRITICAL) > 0
state [ UNKNOWN ] = COUNT(UNKNOWN) > 1

Now we just need to replace the check-host-alive command and add a value for  ”address6″ on the host as the following

define host{
use generic-host ; Name of host template to use
host_name localhost
alias localhost
address 127.0.0.1
address6 ::1
check_command check_multi_icinga!’check_host_alive_dualstack.cmd’!'-r 1+2+4+8′
}

Reloading icinga should you show something like this:

Now we have general connectivity of our dualstacked systems monitored.

Unfortunately this year we are lacking a bit manpower compared to the last years. Actually we have 6 persons at our wiki without knowing how much time everybody will be present at the booth. It would be really cool, if we can prevent us from having a Déjà vu.
So if you want to visit one of the best community focused OpenSource events in germany and can invest some time helping to run our booth, have a look into the report from last year and the organization wiki.

If you feel you want to be part of this enjoyable event, please get in touch with me. As the registration for the booth is closing on 28th February, don’t wait too long! ;)

Oct  7 07:45:56 post cyrus/lmtpunix[307]: DBERROR db4: Logging region out of memory; you may need to increase its size
Oct  7 07:45:56 post cyrus/lmtpunix[307]: DBERROR: opening /var/lib/cyrus/deliver.db: Cannot allocate memory
Oct  7 07:45:56 post cyrus/lmtpunix[307]: DBERROR: opening /var/lib/cyrus/deliver.db: cyrusdb error
Oct  7 07:45:56 post cyrus/lmtpunix[307]: FATAL: lmtpd: unable to init duplicate delivery database
Oct  7 07:45:56 post cyrus/master[754]: service lmtpunix pid 307 in READY state: terminated abnormally

Seems like this can be fixed with:

/etc/init.d/cyrus2.2 stop
cat< /var/lib/cyrus/db/DB_CONFIG
set_cachesize 0 2097152 1
set_lg_regionmax 1048576
EOM
/etc/init.d/cyrus2.2 start

Looking more closer into the logs, it turned out that this trouble started last night when I connected with a client running the soon to be released Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot using the new kmail2.

So it looks like the KDE/Ubuntu folks broke again kmail (or any KDE subsystem), as it also has troubles when migrating over from kmail(1) and it looks like it’s not able to access most of the imap subfolders. Well done!

We are running the plattform for the online streaming of Lohengrin live from the Bayreuth Festival Theatre on Sunday, 14th August 2011. Usually we are coming together around noon and having a BBQ while keeping all the stuff up and running.

To get back into this millenium, we (yes, my girl and me) are at the Highfield festival the weekend afterwards. I guess you can find me at the “white stage” or at camp site. Keep on rocking!

Some more about packaging nagios and icinga related packages can be found at our team site.

# grep GRUB_CMDLINE_XEN /etc/default/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_XEN=”pci=use_crs”
# update-grub

It took me two workdays to discover this solution for a DL180G6. Anyways … I’m still having trouble on a DL160G6 when booting the hypervisor, suggestions are welcome.