The Ruby Oniguruma gem pissed me off the other day. I was trying to install the ultraviolet gem, and while building dependencies, compiling was done, that failed. Ultraviolet depended on oniguruma. gem did it’s thing and started installing that, but oniguruma has extensions that must be compiled, and to do so needed some headers from oniguruma itself.

I’m not a debian developer, but I like debs. First, if I was doing this with debs instead of gems, a binary package compiled for my architecture would have been pulled in automatically and life would have moved on. If I really wanted to build this from sources, libonig-dev would have been installed when I ran ‘apt-get build-dep liboniguruma-ruby’.

I’ve built a couple ruby debs in the past by stealing from other debs, but last night in my frustration I went out, read a bunch, chattered some, and started building more. You can find a repo here:

deb http://ubuntu.ninjr.org/ hardy ninjr
deb-src http://ubuntu.ninjr.org/ hardy ninjr

And if you so desire grab the key with:

wget http://ubuntu.ninjr.org/btm@loftninjas.org.gpg.key
sudo apt-key add btm@loftninjas.org.gpg.key
sudo apt-get update

Gunnar Wolf responded to my query about packaging with an awesome tip, libsetup-ruby1.8.

1. apt-get install libsetup-ruby1.8 ruby-pkg-tools fakeroot dpkg-dev debhelper cdbs ruby1.8-dev
2. Grab a .tgz or .gem
3. untar it (or ‘gem unpack foo.gem’).
4. cp /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/setup.rb package-1.1.1/
5. mkdir package-1.1.1/debian
6. cd package-1.1.1
7. dch –create -v1.1.1-1
8. fix your email, pick a package name (libpackage-ruby is my choice), put in ‘unstable’
9. cd debian
10. put this in ‘rules’:

    #!/usr/bin/make -f
    # copyright 2006 by Esteban Manchado Vel�zquez
    
    include /usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/simple-patchsys.mk
    include /usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/debhelper.mk
    # Ruby package with setup.rb
    include /usr/share/ruby-pkg-tools/1/class/ruby-setup-rb.mk

11. Make a ‘control’ file like this:

    Source: libtextpow-ruby
    Section: libs
    Priority: optional
    Maintainer: Bryan McLellan 
    Build-Depends: cdbs, debhelper (>> 5.0.0), ruby-pkg-tools, ruby1.8
    Standards-Version: 3.8.0
    
    Package: libtextpow-ruby
    Architecture: all
    Depends: libtextpow-ruby1.8
    Description: a library to parse and process Textmate bundles.
     .
     This is a dummy package to install the GD library bindings for
     the default version of Ruby.
    
    Package: libtextpow-ruby1.8
    Architecture: all
    Depends: ruby1.8, libplist-ruby, liboniguruma-ruby
    Description: a library to parse and process Textmate bundles.
    
    Package: libtextpow-ruby-doc
    Section: doc
    Architecture: all
    Description: a library to parse and process Textmate bundles.
     a library to parse and process Textmate bundles
     .
     This is the documentation package, with upstream documentation as well as
     generated rdoc.
    

    On the package libpackage-ruby1.8 line, change architecture to ‘any’ if the package compiles any extensions so your package output will correctly be architecture specific. If the ruby package has no docs, pull that section out.

12. cd ..
13. dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

That’s about it. Contributing to debian appears difficult. I think you’ve got to know someone who knows someone to get involved. But at least this way you can start building debs.

The signal to noise ratio on my cellphone / pda / smartphone is too high. I want a pager just for nagios notifications so I can leave my phone on vibrate. Apparently pagers have dissappeared. I toiled on AT&T/Cingular’s site for a while, and found a few articles from years past about how pagers were going away.

So the logical conclusion? Grab another SIM card and get another device to use as a pager. I can’t find one though. I can’t believe that.

• Rugged – Mil-spec whatever. No worries about dropping it.
• Long battery life – Weeks to months
• Small Form Factor – Think the old Motorola Advisors, must disappear onto a belt clip.
• Simple UI – Getting the text messages must be a single button.
• Sound/Vibrate – Should have a switch to go from vibrate to audible pretty easily.

I don’t really care if it has a qwerty keyboard and can do two-way communciation. I’d be okay with that. Really I just need the above features. It can have more if it so desires.

Any ideas?

I grabbed the tomcat plugins from Ticket #74 for munin, specifically tomcat-plugins.tar.2.gz. I then made small changes to the URL and xml lines to work with our jboss install.

-my $URL      = exists $ENV{'url'}      ? $ENV{'url'}      : "http://%s:%s\@127.0.0.1:%d/manager/status?XML=true";
+my $URL      = exists $ENV{'url'}      ? $ENV{'url'}      : "http://%s:%s\@127.0.0.1:%d/status?XML=true";
-if($xml->{'connector'}->{'http'.$PORT}->{'requestInfo'}->{'bytesSent'}) {
-    print "volume.value " . $xml->{'connector'}->{'http'.$PORT}->{'requestInfo'}->{'bytesSent'} . "\n";
+if($xml->{'connector'}->{'http-0.0.0.0-'.$PORT}->{'requestInfo'}->{'bytesSent'}) {
+    print "volume.value " . $xml->{'connector'}->{'http-0.0.0.0-'.$PORT}->{'requestInfo'}->{'bytesSent'} . "\n";

Do this for each xml entry and you’ll be all set:

$ for file in `ls` ; do ./$file ; done
accesses.value 550
free.value 201360024
used.value 317947240
max.value 1037959168
busy.value 4
idle.value 5
volume.value 4574821

‘sudo gem install ultraviolet’ produced a bunch of build errors (ending in ‘make: *** [oregexp.o] Error 1
‘) for me on ubuntu hardy. I tracked it down to the ‘oniguruma’ gem not building.

sudo apt-get -y install libonig-dev
sudo gem install oniguruma

All better.

A while back I posted about ‘ldap auth for request-tracker3.6 on debian etch‘. I upgraded the old server from debian etch to ubuntu hardy recently, here is an update:

I’ve recently rebuilt request-tracker and there is a newer method for handling LDAP using ExternalAuth. You can find it on CPAN. I created a deb for it:

# get librt-extension-commandbymail for some dependencies
wget http://mjj29.matthew.ath.cx/debian-upload/librt-extension-commandbymail-perl/librt-extension-commandbymail-perl_0.05-1.dsc
wget http://mjj29.matthew.ath.cx/debian-upload/librt-extension-commandbymail-perl/librt-extension-commandbymail-perl_0.05.orig.tar.gz
wget http://mjj29.matthew.ath.cx/debian-upload/librt-extension-commandbymail-perl/librt-extension-commandbymail-perl_0.05-1.diff.gz
dpkg-source -x librt-extension-commandbymail-perl_0.05-1.dsc
wget http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/Z/ZO/ZORDRAK/RT-Authen-ExternalAuth-0.05.tar.gz
tar -xvzf RT-Authen-ExternalAuth-0.05.tar.gz
dh-make-perl RT-Authen-ExternalAuth-0.05
cp librt-extension-commandbymail-perl-0.05/debian/RT.pm RT-Authen-ExternalAuth-0.05/debian/
# add -Idebian to RT-Authen-ExternalAuth-0.05/debian/rules
# $(PERL) -Idebian Makefile.PL INSTALLDIRS=vendor \
cd RT-Authen-ExternalAuth-0.05/
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

The take the examples (RT-Authen-ExternalAuth-0.05/etc/RT_SiteConfig.pm) and add them to your RT_SiteConfig.pm like:

Set($ExternalAuthPriority, [ ‘My_LDAP’
]
);
Set($ExternalInfoPriority, [ ‘My_LDAP’
]
);
Set($ExternalServiceUsesSSLorTLS, 0);
Set($AutoCreateNonExternalUsers, 0);
Set($ExternalSettings, { # AN EXAMPLE DB SERVICE
‘My_LDAP’ => { ## GENERIC SECTION
# GREAT BIG SNIP HERE
}
}
}
);

We use munin a lot. Consequently munin-graph takes up more than 5 minutes every time, breaking munin-cron, and loosing data. Since we graph a lot more data than we normally look at, because most of it only matters when we’re planning something or when something breaks, we don’t need new graphs every five minutes. So I switched munin-graph to use munin-cgi-graph. The basic instructions are in the munin CgiHowto. It’s pretty easy.

But each node page has a lot of graphs, so it’s annoying to wait for them all to get created. FastCGI helps, so I went about setting that up too.

First, package ‘libapache2-mod-fastcgi’ is in non-free, so you may not find it. I started using ‘libapache2-mod-fcgid’ for a bit, but since I was having trouble, downloaded the fastcgi package from non-free and added it to the local repository. munin-cgi-graph is in /usr/lib/cgi-bin on debian so I added this to my apache config:

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
<Directory /usr/lib/cgi-bin/>
AllowOverride None
SetHandler fastcgi-script
Options ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
<Location /cgi-bin/munin-cgi-graph>
SetHandler  fastcgi-script
</Location>

I had munin-cgi-graph working if I removed the SetHandler line, but when I left it, I’d get a lot of errors and no graphs like:

FastCGI: incomplete headers (0 bytes) received from server

[error] [client 10.0.0.60] Premature end of script headers: munin-cgi-graph

Warning: Request for graph without specifying domain. Bailing out.

I had to apply a diff to mod-cgi-graph for fastcgi support. For whatever reason I skipped this, perhaps assuming it had gotten into the deb already. Download the diff to your home directory then apply it.

cd /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
cp munin-cgi-graph munin-cgi-graph.in
patch -p0 munin-cgi-graph.in ~/munin-cgi-graph_fastcgi.diff
mv munin-cgi-graph munin-cgi-graph.orig
cp munin-cgi-graph.in munin-cgi-graph

Gave some props to uvb (hardy docs) today, slides are online. I’ve been playing with it, and pretty quickly switched to using it for all new installs.

A while back I setup mediawiki on debian etch. Recently I upgraded to MediaWiki 1.11.2-2 (ubuntu) from 1.7 (debian) and started having problems logging in. clicking on “login / create account” would return to an ‘index.php’ wiki page. Going to Special:Userlogin would give me the login page, but would say “No such action”, “The action specified by the URL is not recognized by the wiki” after submitting.

A few people have seen this in different circumstances. The most related thread I found to my problem mentions wgUsePathInfo.

I kept getting an error about a ‘redirect loop’ though, and finally realized my Apache rewrite configuration was using an absolute file path. I settled on this apache configuration combined with setting wgUsePathInfo to false in my LocalSettings.php:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(index.php|skins|images|icons|opensearch_desc.php|api.php|~.*)
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /index.php?title=$1 [L]

Request-tracker is more useful with the CommandByMail extension because you can interact with tickets in less steps. It likes to parse everything in the form ‘word: word’ as a command though, so ‘http://somewhere’ causes an error email to be generated.

When dealing with people that are emailing RT for support, you’re already usually dealing with a fairly non tech save crowd, who can be confused by the error message. I modified TakeAction.pm as such:

diff TakeAction.pm.orig TakeAction.pm
663c663,668
<     my $ErrorsTo = RT::Interface::Email::ParseErrorsToAddressFromHead( $args{'Message'}->head );
---
>     my $ErrorsTo = '';
>     if ( defined( $RT::ErrorEmailAddress ) ) {
>       $ErrorsTo = $RT::ErrorEmailAddress;
>     } else {
>       $ErrorsTo = RT::Interface::Email::ParseErrorsToAddressFromHead( $args{'Message'}->head );
>     }

Then add a line below to your RT_SiteConfig.pm and restart

Set($ErrorEmailAddress, 'noc@example.com');

First I converted the disk, which was a flat file:

qemu-img convert webapp02-flat.vmdk -O qcow2 webapp02.qcow2

Then I grabbed vmware2libvirt. Initially I got an error:

./vmware2libvirt -f webapp02.vmx -b eth0
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “./vmware2libvirt”, line 255, in <module>
</disk>”’ + get_network(vmx,  bridge, netmodel) + ”’
File “./vmware2libvirt”, line 70, in get_vmx_value
raise V2LError(“Bad value for ‘” + key + “‘”)
__main__.V2LError: “Bad value for ‘displayName'”

The -b was because I use bridging instead of the kvm ‘default’ NAT networking. Removing all the whitespace from the vmx file fixed that. I ran ‘virsh’ and used define to import the configuration. I had to go back an edit the config in /etc/libvirt/qemu to change the target dev to ‘sda’ and bus to ‘scsi’, as well as modify the source file to match my path. I also had to change the ‘eth0’ to ‘br0’, I wasn’t sure initially how smart the python script was. Then used define again in virsh to load the changes and everything was pretty happy.

Later I started getting

sd 0:0:0:0: ABORT operation started.

sd 0:0:0:0: ABORT operation timed-out.

Eventually the SCSI bus would reset and things would work, but it was annoying as hell. I changed the fstab and grub menu.lst entries from sda to hda, went back into the xml file and switched back to IDE and hda. I saw this thread about issues with the scsi driver and 2.6.21. It may not have been related, IDE worked fine. I was running debian etch with 2.6.18-6-686 but am in the process of migrating to ubuntu hardy.

I hate politics. Bike Portland has an article about the Pro Walk/Pro Bike conference that’s here in Seattle this year. I didn’t know this was coming, so it’s pretty awesome that we got our green strips on 2nd and 4th avenue just before it. Of course just about every time I’m in a green strip, especially riding home down 2nd avenue, cars still turn into me and I have to evade or push off them. The most ironic was that the last time I had to push off a car was the first day I road the green strips on 2nd avenue.

I like the Seattle bicycle master plan, but I often question how long it’s going to take to get there. From the

On transportation, Nickels declared that in Seattle, “We recognize that the age of the automobile has passed,” and he said they’re working toward a balanced transportation system. A major part of that balance is the 25 mile Burke-Gilman Trail that was opened in 1978.

Man, weren’t things progressive back in.. whoa, 1978? What’s our big accomplishment now? Well, props to the Chief Sealth Trail. While the Interurban is nice everywhere but downtown (north, south), shame on the downtown portion of the trail being in a dirty dumpster filled alley where the homeless pass out and the road surface is uneven brick.

In august I learned about the trail along the SODO light rail that goes from the end of the bus tunnel to Forest. The master plan wants to extend it, but good luck. And of course there’s the missing link from 2nd ave to the light rail.

Looks like the Burke-Gilman trail will get some work done on it’s missing link at least:

Backing up those words, Nickels announced that he’ll include $8.6 million in his upcoming budget to complete a major missing link of the trail.

I’ve thought about this a lot. There’s an old rpcapd project that’s not particular linux friendly to start, and it’s old. But I saw these notes about pipes and it gave me the idea.

1) I have PKI setup so I can authenticate to other machines using keys. I’ve already entered my passphrase.
2) I’ve installed tshark on the remote machine, and wireshark on my machine
3) The sudoers file on the remote machine is configured with “%admins ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/tshark”
4) The remote machine is debian, and my machine is ubuntu

mkfifo /tmp/shark
ssh remotehost sudo tshark port 1433 -i eth1 -w - > /tmp/shark &
wireshark -k -i /tmp/shark

Whatever your filter use, you’ll want at least ‘not port ssh’ or ‘not host yourhost’ otherwise you’ll just be seeing the constant ssh traffic. In this particular case I was looking for only MSSQL traffic on port 1433.

Granted, you could just install wireshark on the remote machine and use X over ssh to run it, but I like this, because I’m a giant dork.

Every so often RT 3.6.6 just stops sending email. If you display a ticket, you normally see a line about an email being sent after each comment or correspondence. When in RT fail mode, those lines just aren’t there. Restarting apache cures the problem. I went into the apache error.log (interestingly the one for apache, not the one for the RT virtual host) and found this:
[Thu Aug 21 01:40:53 2008] [crit]: Could not send mail: Couldn't run /usr/sbin/sendmail: Cannot allocate memory at /usr/share/request-tracker3.6/lib/RT/Action/SendEmail.pm line 334.

Stack:
[/usr/share/request-tracker3.6/lib/RT/Action/SendEmail.pm:334]
[/usr/share/request-tracker3.6/lib/RT/Action/SendEmail.pm:288]
[/usr/share/request-tracker3.6/lib/RT/Action/SendEmail.pm:107]
[/usr/share/request-tracker3.6/lib/RT/ScripAction_Overlay.pm:242]
[/usr/share/request-tracker3.6/lib/RT/Scrip_Overlay.pm:507]
[/usr/share/request-tracker3.6/lib/RT/Scrips_Overlay.pm:195]
[/usr/share/request-tracker3.6/lib/RT/Transaction_Overlay.pm:181]
[/usr/share/request-tracker3.6/lib/RT/Record.pm:1466]
[/usr/share/request-tracker3.6/lib/RT/Ticket_Overlay.pm:746]
[/usr/share/request-tracker3.6/lib/RT/Interface/Web.pm:467]
[/usr/share/request-tracker3.6/html/Ticket/Display.html:107]
[/usr/share/request-tracker3.6/html/Ticket/Create.html:375]
[/usr/share/request-tracker3.6/html/autohandler:291] (/usr/share/request-tracker3.6/lib/RT/Action/SendEmail.pm:349)


Googling for portions of that error message lead me to this thread.

My munin graphs show a lot of swapping for that host. So I’m gonna crank up the memory and look again some other day.

There’s two places to configure things. First, go into BIOS Setup (F2), Integrated periphials and set ‘Serial Port’ to ‘BMC Nic’. Then go into the configuration for the BMC by hitting CTRL+E on startup. Assign an IP address and turn it on, set a password.

From all I can tell, the IP address should be different than that of the interface. Although I saw a note in a Dell BMC document that I’ve since closed that some ports like 623 can get all eaten up by the BMC. Telneting to port 623 still doesn’t work for me, maybe that’s just a feature with newer BMCs or with console redirection turned on. ipmitool traffic is traveling on 623 UDP.

Then install ipmitool (‘apt-get install ipmitool’ if you’re elite) and run something like:
ipmitool -H ipaddress -U root -P password power status

You may also be able to configure this all from the command line by loading the drivers and interacting directly:
sudo modprobe ipmi_si
sudo modprobe ipmi_devintf
sudo ipmitool lan print