Cyconet Blog

new nagios-plugins (1.4.14-1), now also installable on kfreebsd and hurd

cyco — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 13:03:06 +0000

Last night here at BSP I released nagios-plugins (1.4.14-1), which has a couple of fixes and enhancements. For more information, see the changelog.
The main change may, that with this version, the package should be installable on non-linux archs, where iputils-ping is not available. The downside of using inetutils-ping is, that its behavior is different from iputils-ping. As result of this, check_ping will timeout much often, even if there isn’t any problem and you will have false positives. As suggested long ago, at least on this archs, you should consider to replace the use of check_ping with check_icmp.

[selfnote] Change CD-image while (HVM) domU is running

cyco — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 15:23:15 +0000

xm list | grep <VMName>
xm block-list <VMName_Number>
xm block-detach <VMName_Number> <VMName_Vdev> -f
xm block-attach <VMName_Number> file:///iso/disk.iso \
hdc:cdrom r

dkms rocks … or … how to get the Intel 82576 GBit NIC running on Lenny

cyco — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:07:18 +0000

We ordered a couple of the new HP DL160 G6, cause they can be equipped with a lot of RAM. Unfortunately it’s always the same with HP and the bandnew ProLiant 100 series … the driver for the NICs is missing/too old in the latest stable debian release. The DL160 G6 is shipped with a Intel 82576 GBit NIC, which isn’t recognized by Lenny, see also #522922.
I installed the system with another NIC installed (not really, but this is a way it works :) and wanted to get free the PCI-X slot again. So I did backport dkms and downloaded the latest igb driver. A short look into /usr/share/doc/dkms/HOWTO.Debian did advice me the way to create the DKMS driver package. Just after a couple of minutes I did roll out the igb-dkms_2.0.6_all.deb to the target maschine(s).
On the target systems I just installed dkms, the DKMS package and appropriate linux-headers and … sim, salabim … there was the interfaces. :)

Just after election … welcome in reality!

cyco — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:47:33 +0000

OpenWRT WDS works like charm

cyco — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:20:18 +0000

A try with OpenWRT 8.09 in April to setup a WDS with additional AP functionality and encryption, like described in the documentation, failed. So I keeped with my halfbroken solution running on DD-WRT, which is going a bit too commercial these days in my eyes.
Now I have found time to try OpenWRT again for this purpose, since the issue was fixed really fast. I just did setup a stock 8.09.1 installation and then dropped the following into /etc/config/wireless:

config ‘wifi-device’ ‘wl0′
      option ‘type’ ‘broadcom’
      option ‘channel’ ‘5′
      option ‘disabled’ ‘0′
config wifi-iface
      option device “wl0″
      option network lan
      option mode ap
      option ssid “OpenWrt”
      option encryption psk2
      option key “keyforclients”
config wifi-iface
      option device “wl0″
      option network lan
      option mode wds
      option bssid 00:16:B6:19:63:C8
      option ssid “OpenWrtWDS”
      option encryption psk2
      option key “pskforWDS”

And guess what? It worked like a charm! So I could replace the odd DD-WRT boxes. Anyways ... does anybody have an idea where to find the sourcecode of anything > v23 SP1?

[selfnote] Cloning/Backing up NTFS systems

cyco — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:27:34 +0000

For some reasons, you may need to clone/backup NTFS based systems. Lets say your NTFS system is located at /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1 is a spare partition where you can store your image.

At first you need to boot a live system to take an image:

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1
dd bs=512 count=1 if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/sdb1/xp_vbox.mbr
ntfsclone -s -o – /dev/sda1 | bzip2 -9 -c > \
/mnt/sdb1/xp_vbox.img.bz2

To restore the image you just need:

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1
dd count=1 bs=446 if=/mnt/sdb1/xp_vbox.mbr of=/dev/sda
cat /mnt/sdb1/xp_vbox.img.bz2 | bunzip2 -c | \
ntfsclone -r -O /dev/sda1 -

P.S. If you are elective in germany, have a look at this!

Act now … go vote!

cyco — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 20:58:41 +0000

Du bist Terrorist

cyco — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:49:52 +0000

Du bist Terrorist from alexanderlehmann on Vimeo.

Rette Deine Freiheit

cyco — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:48:12 +0000

nagios-plugins 1.4.13+git200906171200-1 uploaded

cyco — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:26:35 +0000

Today I uploaded a new nagios-plugins package to unstable. At first I thought I will wait for the next upstream release, but after the announcement to release soon, the months passed by. While we skipped the last stable release due the lenny freeze, there are a couple of bugs fixed in the latest svn snapshot and within the package itself:

[...]
* new upstream
– check_http doesn’t enforce port (Closes: #494835)
– check_http –onredirect=sticky follows using the same IP address
(Closes: #502529)
– Fixed buffer overflow in check_ntp/check_ntp_peer (Closes: #528686)
– Fixed check_mrtg returning UNKNOWN instead of OK (Closes: #335871)
– Fixed check_by_ssh interpretation of quotes in -C parameter
(Closes: #425312)
– Fixed coredump from check_nt when drive not found (Closes: #521097)
– Removed -n option in check_smtp’s help and usage output (Closes: #525307)
– Fixed check_icmp –help output for warn and critical thresholds
(Closes: #530553)
– Fix potential buffer overflow in check_snmp – enforce MAX_OIDS limit
(Closes: #460405)
[...]
* add trailing $ to check_httpname, thanks Daniel Pocock (Closes: #524629)
* add informations into README.Debian how to use plugins (Closes: #525168)
* add check_nscp which uses the default port of NSClient++ (Closes: #528262)
[...]

So I thought it would be comfortable for the users to upload the svn snapshot instead to wait longer for a stable upstream release and leave the bugs unfixed or incorporate the bugfixes into latest stable release, which have to be sorted out again with the next stable release.
If there are no show stoppers, a backport will appear hopefully short before debconf at backports.org.

While we are at it, yes I’m at debconf too from 23th to 31th. Hopefully see you there.