Emil Krueper

Today I decided to do a NetXMS test installation on my root server. Why am I doing this? There’s so much other monitoring software available to perfectly fulfill this purpose. Well, why not – maybe it’s just great.

The install procedure here is done on debian etch. There might be smallish quirks for other distributions. Just ping me for help or whatever.

As ever just grab the current sources and put them somewhere you like. I copied the core files’ source code to my server and I dare say you’ll get more bandwidth here. No offense meant. *scnr*

cd /usr/src/

wget https://uruz.org/files/netxms-0.2.22.tar.gz

Extract the file and change dir to the fresh and virginal source code.

tar xvzf netxms-0.2.22.tar.gz

cd netxms-0.2.22/

Now it’s time to perform a miracle and configure the coming build process. I prefer MySQL for myself while NetXMS should work with PostgreSQL, Oracle etc. And I’d like to have NetXMS resident in /opt/

./configure –with-server –with-agent –with-mysql=/usr –prefix=/opt/netxms

make

Get a cup of tea and maybe tell your girlfriend how much you’d like to _____ her and to _____ with her on the _____ all night long, but in fact you are still too busy and have to solve this first. There’s plenty of time to relax when it’s done.

make install

Lo and behold! The server is installed!

Now copy the default netxms daemon and agent configuration file to /etc/ and edit them afterwards.

cp ./contrib/netxmsd.conf-dist /etc/netxmsd.conf

cp ./contrib/nxagentd.conf-dist /etc/nxagentd.conf

nano /etc/netxmsd.conf && nano /etc/nxagentd.conf

Next simply create the database and initialize it with the sql/dbinit_mysql.sql script.

mysql -u root -h localhost -p

mysql> create database netxms;

mysql> GRANT all ON netxms.* TO ‘netxms’@’localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘password’;

mysql> \q

/opt/netxms/bin/nxdbmgr init sql/dbinit_mysql.sql

The next step is to start the netxmsd and nxagentd.

/opt/netxms/bin/netxmsd -d && /opt/netxms/bin/nxagentd -d

So when that’s done run the admin console and connect to the server to change the default password of the admin user. And if you like you could add another unprivileged user for trivial monitoring. That’s all best described in the console docs. And of course have fun playing with it, it looks promising.

It is late now at my place and I am going to bed to be fit for work tomorrow. I promise to enhance this post asap and maybe going to build a .deb file, don’t expect it to happen until I woke up or so. I’ll sleep soundly knowing NetXMS is watching over my server.

P.S. I really would enjoy a linux console, but that’s not availbile yet. *poke around*

I feel so unhappy right now. The weather forecasts are all saying we are getting very bad weather this coming weekend. That means I possibly can’t go to fetch them. Life sometimes really sucks even worse than the day before. At least I am doing good progress in relocating things. And Sarah is so deliriously happy about the new apartment – I have shown her a video via the internet. Well, it’s not the time to give it up. Maybe the weather is going to surprisingly change at the weekend. I hope so.

This weekend I have been very busy with preparing our relocation to Bad Oldesloe. It feels good to know we are going to leave this way too small apartment behind. And I am so happy to finally see Sarah, Erik and Einar again.

Sad to say Sarah had a spinal disc herniation shortly after going to Nuremberg. This old apartment we are leaving behind is on the fourth floor without an elevator and so it was impossible for Sarah to come back. Thus I haven’t seen her and the boys since they left on the 18th of October. It frequently made me feel so downfallen not to have them around me.

I am relieved to know it’s almost overcome and for the next days I am going to move things from this place to our new apartment. And when that’s done I am going to pick up my family from Nuremberg and take them to our new home. And we are going to take good care of Sarah’s injury.

Today I received a comment from Kang about a fix for VMware Workstation 5.5 and Linux 2.6.27.

You get the file here and of course at his place, too.

It works like any other vmware-any-any-update:

wget https://uruz.org/files/vmware-update-2.6.27-5.5.7.tar.gz
tar xvzf vmware-update-2.6.27-5.5.7.tar.gz
cd vmware-update-2.6.27-5.5.7/
./runme.pl

Good luck.

edit: The archives were updated. Thank you, Kang.

I’d like you to know I’ve quit my contract with my current employer. I’m gonna leave at the end of this month. I’ve been working there for 3 years now and I’ve been doing all the stuff that matters like server administration and embedded linux development. I guess I was pretty good somehow. No one was really amused when I announced my dismissal. I have had some helluva fun and some nice teammates there and the work was frequently challenging. But no regrets, it’s time to move on. I’d like to hereby thank the staff of Solcon Systemtechnik GmbH for the past 3 years of cooperation.

You might already have seen the short blog entry for my first fly rod building project. So, on Friday I suddenly felt like I’d have to act at once and place an order for some rod building material. There are several reasons. One reason is that I am all alone at home from the 18th to the 26th of this month. Sarah, Erik and Einar are going to Nuremberg. Being busy kills time. Another reason is pure consuming desire I just wanted to do something besides the usual things. Yes, recently I once again enjoy sitting on the table in the evening doing handicraft work. In short it means less computer related occupation at home – I spend enough time at work in front of my screen.

I’ll blog in detail the steps of building the new rod when all the parts have arrived.

I had to update my kernel to something 2.6.26, so VMware was broken again. I tried to fix it with the previously working fix from here, but that didn’t work. I had a look at the recently released vmware-any-any updates. No, these didn’t work for me either. When I tried to start a virtual machine I got a message like

Version mismatch with vmmon module: expecting 138.0, got 168.0

Yes, I know – using VMware Workstation 5.5 is pretty stupid and doesn’t make things easy – nonetheless no explanations now. Thus I extracted the vmmon.tar file and edited vmmon-only/include/iocontrols.h and in line 48 there is

#define VMMON_VERSION           (168 << 16 | 0)

I fixed this by modifying the version value from 168 to 138, saved the changes and once again ran the runme.pl script. Okay that helped. Alright. No, it obviously didn’t help.

Unable to change virtual machine power state: Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to.

GRMBL. Now that’s stupid. So I lurked around every corner and found this vmware-any-any-update117 version which finally helped me out.

HTH

P.S. Of course I consider dropping VMware for some other solution…asap.

Edit: For linux 2.6.27 just have a look at this page!

On Sunday we have been on a visit to my older brother and his family. Nerdy as I am I had our Sony Handycam with me on the trip and arrived back at home with plenty of new video footage. So I just wanted to make some videos available and digitalized and converted the dv source material from the camcorder with dvgrab and ffmpeg.

So this is some kind of a minimal HowTo, hope this helps someone.

If you are like me, you don’t like the idea to rely on 3rd party websites like younameit.xyz. There are a few good reasons to keep the video on your site – you have the physical control and you don’t need to accept confusing licence agreements. So here we go!

First I piped the output of dvgrab directly from the firewire to ffmpeg. This deinterlaced, converted and scaled the dv file to something more useful for a web page. I think that the following options are fine, feel free to change them and of course make use of man dvgrab and man ffmpeg.

dvgrab -format dv1 – | ffmpeg -deinterlace -f dv -i – -f flv -vcodec flv -s qvga -aspect 1.333 -qscale 3.5 -acodec libmp3lame -ab 32k -ar 22050 example.flv

Next I uploaded the example.flv file into the root directory of the domain. I use the open-source FlowPlayer Flash applet to actually embed the FLV video in my web page. I had to get a copy of the flowplayer.swf and flashembed.js from their page and copied the files to the root directory as well.

And finally I added the following lines to the html page.

<!– include flashembed –>
<script src=”flashembed.js”></script>

<!– this DIV is where your Flowplayer will be placed. –>
<div id=”videodiv” style=”width:640px;height:503px”></div>

<script>
// place Flowplayer to our DIV
flashembed(“videodiv”, “FlowPlayer.swf”, {config: {

// Flowplayer configuration as comma separated list
videoFile: ‘example.flv’,
initialScale: ‘scale’

}});
</script>

That’s it. You should now have your video embedded in your page.

August is almost gone. It was some kind of wet and sticky. Anyways, my achieved aims this month were:

• not to eat less but to lose some weight
• not to get sunburned
• to upgrade some more machines nagios, snort and stuff
• to spend less then 30 Euro a month for books at amazon
• to be a good partner and father
• to keep straight on and focused on the world domination

Is something else going to happen soon? There are still a few days left. Stay tuned!

While surfing the net in my lunch break I’ve found this picture. It is so incredible funny, I almost gave a sign of life to my team mates.