Fladi.at

I’ve been using monit to monitor the processes on my servers for several years now. During this time I’ve written test-cases for several daemon processes, especially tailored for Debian GNU/Linux (Unstable/Squeeze):

• apache2
• apt-cacher-ng
• atd
• avahi
• bind
• clamav
• couchdb
• courier-auth
• courier-imap
• courier-mta
• cron
• dhcpd
• dovecot
• ejabberd
• gnump3d
• slapd
• memcached
• mysql
• nagios3
• nscd
• ntp
• postgresql-8.4
• puppet
• samba
• smartd
• snmpd
• spamassassin
• squid3
• ssh
• supervisor
• syslog
• tomcat6
• tryton

All of them are now available at this location: http://storage.fladi.at/~FladischerMichael/monit/

Feel free to use them in your own envirnoment or just an example on how to monitor a service. Feedback and improvements are always welcome.

Oh, the joys of administrating Novell systems. In SLES 10 they are still using rug to manage the package repositories. Investigating a deadlock while upgrading from SLES 10 SP2 to SP3 I discovered this error message, written in fancy engrish:

# rug refresh
ERROR: A Refresh request already Running.
This Refresh is Ignored.
Please Try After Sometime.

I think this is maybe related to Novell’s strategy to change their remote package downloader every month or so (you,rug,yum,zypper,…) while still maintaining their high level of crappiness.

In the end i had to “kill -9″ the zmd process to advance with the update. One day, I swear to you Novell, I’m gonna replace all this immanently broken SLES installations with Debian!

Using Celery in one of my projects I always found it a bit uncomfortable to start the worker processes by hand. Today someone else came up with the same problem on ServerFault. It motivated me to investigate a bit further on other options to accomplish this task.

Looking inside the contrib folder of the celery distribution led me to a project called Supervisor. It’s purpose is to control project related tasks in addition to the usual Sys-V-Init process running at boot. Actually it starts one management process through Sys-V and then starts tasks or daemons configured for various projects like celery worker processes.

Debian/Unstable already has a package for Supervisor which offers the directory /etc/supervisor/conf.d/ as a drop-in-location for project-related configurations.

aptitude install supervisor

I took the sample configuration from my python-celery Debian package and placed it at /etc/supervisor/conf.d/project.conf, modifying it to fit my needs:

; =======================================
;  celeryd supervisor for Django project
; =======================================

[program:celery.project]
command=django-admin celeryd --settings=setting --pythonpath=/path/to/project/
directory=/path/to/project/
user=nobody
numprocs=1
stdout_logfile=/var/log/celery/project.log
stderr_logfile=/var/log/celery/project.log
autostart=true
autorestart=true
startsecs=10

; if rabbitmq is supervised, set its priority higher
; so it starts first
priority=998

Running some statistical analysis on the Apache2 logs from the past year (2009) I noticed something frightening:

Number 6 was the most used version of Internet Explorer during the whole year. 18.7 % of all requests originated from IE6 while IE7 was at 13.8 % and IE8 reached 6.1 %.

The good news is that only 40.2 % of the traffic was caused by Internet Explorer browsers. The various versions of Firefox accumulated 36.6 % with version 3.0.10 being the most commonly used (4.9 %).

Hopefully there will be one day soon when Microsoft stops support for IE6. I really dare to hope so.

The dataset contained almost 500.000 records (hits) and analysis was carried out with AWStats.

The Qualcomm Gobi chipset built into my HP EliteBook 8530w finally works with GNU/Debian Unstable.

It requires a 2.6.31 Kernel and a separate firmware loader plus the appropriate firmware.

ATTENTION: The qcserial driver is currently broken in Linux 2.6.32 and later! Follow my advices only if you are using a Linux kernel version of 2.6.31! You can check your currently running kernel with:

uname -a

I’ve packaged the loader (gobi_loader-0.4) for Debian/Unstable amd64 and i386 (untested) architecture and it’s available at my private repository:

http://debian.fladi.at/

For direct access to the .deb files:

• http://debian.fladi.at/pool/main/g/gobi-loader/gobi-loader_0.4-2_amd64.deb
• http://debian.fladi.at/pool/main/g/gobi-loader/gobi-loader_0.4-2_i386.deb

Install the package according to you architecture and make sure there was no error.

Now for the firmware: Sadly, I’m not allowed to distribute the firmware files due to copyright issues but they can be downloaded from HP:

Qualcomm Mobile Broadband Drivers – Gobi1000 (aka un2400)

Download the “sp45888.exe” file there and extract it to e.g. /tmp/un2400 with cabextract:

mkdir /tmp/un2400
cabextract -d /tmp/un2400 sp45888.exe

You can now find both firmware files at /tmp/un2400/Qualcomm/QCImages/Source/Packages/0/:

• amss.mbn
• apps.mbn

Copy both of them to /lib/firmware/gobi:

cp /tmp/un2400/Qualcomm/QCImages/Source/Packages/0/*.mbn /lib/firmware/gobi/

That’s it, now reboot and once your system is back up take a look at your USB devices with lsusb. You should see the un2400 device there. NetworkManager picked it up automatically as a modem and I was able to configure my 3G connection with a nice and fancy GUI