Tue, 17 Oct 2006
Check Disk... Checker?
You start off with a couple of partitions. You add a MySQL instance and
put it on a new logical volume. You break its logging out to a different
volume group for performance reasons. You take a snapshot for query
tuning and mount that. You add a chunk of disk for a
short experiment you were going to try... thanks to legacy,
laziness and easy to use LUNs you eventually end up with more mount
points than you know what to do with. And at the worst possible moment
one of them will fill and you'll discover you forgot to add it to Nagios for monitoring. Or you inherit a bundle
of crack fueled servers that have been "evolved" and never gifted with
decent monitoring.
The check_disk_checker.pl script was written to help find mount points that you're not monitoring. It scans through your local Nagios NRPE config files, looks at your current mount points, and complains about any mounted partitions that are not being checked according to the local NRPE configuration files. Of course there is nothing to say that what you have locally is what the remote Nagios is polling but that's outside the scope of this post.
check_disk_checker.pl shells out and grabs a list of all mounted partitions. It then
pulls a list of check-disk lines out of any config files
matching nrpe*.conf or nrpe*.cfg (our local naming scheme) that live
in /etc/nagios. It then extracts the partitions each one checks (it
grabs the value following a -p argument) and complains if it
doesn't find a check for each mounted partition. The script can be run
under Nagios as a plugin or stand-alone for help controlling a legacy
system.
It also plays well with the Linux Check Mounted Disks Nagios Plugin...
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Posted: 2006/10/17 00:04 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 15 Oct 2006
The Flu Sucks - I Ain't Dead...
...I just look like it. I've spent the last week and a bit wrapped up in
bed fighting the flu (and it won). I've been a good boy and stayed off-line
in an attempt to keep the headaches tolerable so now I have the joy
of nearly a fortnights backed up emails; and the same again in my work
accounts. I'll be (slowly) working my way through the pile from
tomorrow. I've never really suffered from the flu until I joined my
current company, where it seems to decimate a chunk of the office every
six months, and I'm willing to take a stand and say I'm against it.
It's also amusing to note that I missed the company paid flu injections my employers had done in the office on Friday because I was off with... tada! My luck is special.
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Posted: 2006/10/15 21:55 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 04 Oct 2006
Where are the Second Generation RSS Readers?
I'm subscribed to a lot of RSS
and Atom feeds. I've tried online readers but I never found any that could
match the user experience of SharpReader so I stuck with it on the desktop.
But now I'm starting to want some functionality that none of the readers
I've looked at seem to include.
Firstly the easy stuff, when was the last article posted on a blog? When was the last time I clicked through it? (I typically double click everything I want to read so it opens in a new FireFox tab. I then work my way through them.) How many posts have been made in the last N months? And, it's a little different to the other requests, I also want it to try and open posts through Google Cache or the Coral network if they've gone away or the remote site is down.
Now we get to the more... odd stuff. I want to know how long, in total, I had the last twenty posts in the current feed open. This'll help me remove sites that I delete items from with just a glance at the post title. When was the last time I received a successful HTTP response code? (I recently did a clean out of my feed list and removed anything that 500 or 404'd at midnight, every night, for five days). I can gather some of these by working through the application logs but I'd like a nice, GUI, way of seeing it.
My time is one of the most valuable things I can give a site (Amazon and Play already own my bank accounts ;)) so where are the tools to help me spend it wisely?
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Posted: 2006/10/04 22:36 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 03 Oct 2006
Transcribing Comics - A job for the Mechanical Turk?
There are a couple of webcomics I read on a daily basis (a couple a week in
the case of MegaTokyo) and recently
I've found myself wanting to link to a couple of different strips in blog
postings; and then discovered that they're almost impossible to search
through.
None of the webcomics I read regularly have any kind of strip content search. You can't see who was in which strip, you can't search on the punchlines - which is what I want - and, apart from a couple of sites which have a one sentence summary, you can't get any more context about any days issue than the time it was uploaded. I understand that transcribing them would be dull as hell but why not just farm the work out via the Mechanical Turk?
The images are already online, you can filter by asking a couple of sample questions (which of these is Dogbert) to determine that the speech will be attributed to the correct person, poll three people per strip to make sure you don't get bitten by typos, and with a decent "submit results" web form you'd get some nicely formated data (who spoke in which panel for example) for free. And I get to find the Dilbert strip that ends with "You'd have to lift your arms up and run around."
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Posted: 2006/10/03 22:32 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 02 Oct 2006
Closing the 2005/2006 PiP
Each year I put a small todo list up on Unixdaemon and see how many of the
goals I can meet. The 2005/2006
Pragmatic Investment Plan is now closed so it's time for a quick look
back.
First up we have the writing of articles. I'll come to this in a separate post as I'm still not happy with what I want to say. Training courses are an easy one. I did two main courses and I can't remember much from either of them. The mistake is a common one, I didn't actually implement any of the things I'd learned when I got back to the office so a lot of it didn't stick. I've stored enough that I can find my way around both Exim and PostgreSQL but I can't help thinking they could have been more useful to me if I'd have got my hands dirty when I got back from them. Still, I meet the numbers.
Conferences are always fun and this years is no exception, apart from EuroOSCON which I thought was a way too expensive let down. I didn't go to this years (and I won't be going to any in the near future) so I spent the money on a house instead.
It wasn't quite that bad but it's not on my list of recommended conferences and its pricing is... interesting. I missed LUGRadio (ill), the UKUUG events (personal commitments) and the 2005 London Perl Workshop (on-call) but I did get to my first YAPC in years, and Birmingham PM did a great job, a d.construct, which had a great audience and corridor track, and the highlight of the conferences (again) FOSDEM. Which was great. I'll be booking next years tickets RSN. Honest. Not a day before like this years.
And on to the books, I've discovered while completing this list that the number of books I read from start to finish has dropped significantly. I now either buy a book for the last half-a-dozen advanced chapters, borrow an introduction to a topic from a friend or just sub to a planet or two and a lot of blogs. I've reached the tipping point where most of my technical information comes directly from my peers blogs rather than via printed paper. And with the exception of the Pragmatic Programmers line most tech publishers are less than interesting these days. I want one with some system admin topics that are actually worth reading. Not yet another command reference.
Lastly we have events. I dove in at the start of the year and ended up involved in organising nine different tech events (five were me working alone) in the first six months of the year. And then a change in my personal circumstances ate all my time and I've done pretty much nothing since. I've learned that I do enjoy organising them but I don't like being a wingman. It's too much like work when I have to organise with someone else. I do have plans for a London Linux Workshop next year. But I said that this year.
So do I pass? Sorta, a lot of last minute pushing and a number of mostly done tasks gets me a C+ this year. I'm not starting another PiP just yet. I need to think about possibly doing two things at once instead, one for longer term goals (of which I don't really have any) and one for more iterative tasks, which'll give better feedback with shorter delays.
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Posted: 2006/10/02 23:32 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 01 Oct 2006
Linux Check Mounted Disks Nagios Plugin
For my own use as much as anyone elses... One of the problems that's
haunted me at least once per company I've worked at as a tech is "the
disappearing partition". It's there, it's accessible, and it should be
persistent across boots. But it isn't! The machine reboots and
then you discover that the database partition is no longer visible.
The check mounted
disks Nagios plugin looks at the mounted partitions and compares them
to what's in /etc/fstab (minus a couple of things like cd
drives, floppy disks, swap partitions etc). And warns if there are any
discrepancies that'll bite you on a reboot. It also round trips and makes
sure what /etc/fstab thinks is mounted is actually there.
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Posted: 2006/10/01 23:01 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
