Emil Krueper

Do you know Nagios? It is a service and resource monitor helping the admin to keep an eye on the hosts. I have been working with the 2.x (now legacy) series for a while, haven’t worked with the 3.x series by now. I am going to install 3.0.2 on some new machines today and migrate the servers with the anterior 2.x to stable 3.x as soon as everything is working fine.

Another chunk of software that recently caught my attention is called puppet. It is “an automated administrative engine for your *nix systems, performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.” Sounds pretty interesting, but it is getting better. “Puppet can let you focus more on how things should be done and less on doing them.” Puppet is open source and is released under the GNU Public License.

And I came across cfengine, a project that was started in 1993 and is similar to the operational area of puppet and released under the GPL, too. Like puppet it is used in both large and small companies, as well as in many universities and governmental institutions.

When I took a closer look at their sites to check who is using which software, both projects state that sites of several thousand hosts are common. That are dimensions where I have to admit I am obviously impressed. And the absence of proper tools for system administration and assistance software is really unthinkable.

Once again the quintessence is that there is a lot of great software available for your needs if you just dig for it. Keep you shovels steady!

Today I have experienced the most beautiful moment in my life. My partner in life gave birth to Einar Alvar Heinrich. I can’t tell you how touching it was, words can’t explain. It felt so incredible when he finally was there. I cut his umbilical cord and hold him tight until his mother was ready to take him. I am very grateful to the staff of the Marien-Krankenhaus Lübeck, they all did excellent work. I believe life is intended to be beautiful!

I just would like to tell everyone it has not happened yet! Einar Alvar Heinrich is still raking in his mothers womb. I am amazed by his iron will not to enter this world. The doctor told us he weighs at least 4 kilogram and is very healthy. What else matters?

This afternoon I have successfully finished building my first fly rod. I have bought two identical Loop blanks from the Loop Green Line series in 9’3″ and the specified line class is #6-7. I am very satisfied with the result and waiting to test it extensively. If the rod performs well I am going to build yet another.

I had promised you to get the new dedicated server running asap. Guess what? It is already done. I feel much better now.

Last night my private root server had a hardware problem, it could not be fixed by the staff of my hosting company. The best option was to switch all the serving daemons to my vserver. Finally, after rerouting and adjustement everything is working again. Expect no miracles from a cheap vserver – until I had the opportunity to setup my new dedicated server you will have to accept some performance glitches for a few days

While everyone else here is asleep I decided to test some recently released distributions in a virtual machine. I had to update my vmware modules to match my actual kernel version. I did

Some setup confirmations later the install routine finshed. So far so good. I started the workstation and when choosing an iso image a message popped up saying: “The folder could not be displayed – VFS error: Invalid parameters.” Known problem, easy fix – try this:

cd /usr/lib/vmware/lib
mv libpng12.so.0 libpng12.so.0.old
ln -sf /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0
mv libgcc_s.so.1 libgcc_s.so.1.old
ln -sf /lib/libgcc_s.so.1

VMware now works again, hooray! Happy virtualization!

Today I had the opportunity to scan the pictures my partner in life got from the gynaecologist. The pictures were taken in the 30th week and he is growing stronger every day. I am curious about him, what will it be like when he is finally here? Still a few weeks to go and this and that to prepare for his arrival. When we were shopping earlier this day we bought a sheepskin and tomorrow we will be out again for something else. My girlfriend bears a lot, she is so brave. But still, these are halcyon days for me, us and our families.

Of course I love working on my dualcore workstation, crammed with 4 gigs of RAM and a rocket fast SATA Raid 0+1 mass storage. I really don’t complain. But the notebook I used on the road and on-site at customers had seen better days. So some weeks ago my employer agreed to buy me a new notebook. To make things short – I ordered the HP Compaq 6715b. It has a 1680×1050 screen resolution, a decent amount of RAM and an AMD X2 Turion Dualcore. The harddisk is quite okay, 250 GB SATA at 5400 RPM. I had to get rid of Windows Vista, so I took my freshly burned Debian Lenny weekly build CD and installed it. Lenny offers a pretty nice working environment. I didn’t use all the space availible, there has always to be playground for testing purposes. I already thought of installing OpenBSD and FreeBSD on the remaing space.

So what is working and what is not? What were the pitfalls in the installation procedure?

I was keen on changing the internal BCM 4312 802.11a/b/g Mini-PCIe WLAN device to something more functional. So I ordered from our wholesale dealer a Gigabyte AirCruiser G Mini-PCIe card with an Atheros chipset. But when I rebooted my computer I was suprised by the dreaded “104-unsupported wireless network device detected” message. It is possible to modify the bios and to insert some hex code to make it work, but I had better things to do. So now I am using the built in card via ndiswrapper and when I need more functionality I simply plug in an (Atheros) Orinoco Gold PCMCIA adapter. The fingerprint reader works fine, I tested it though I don’t need it.

Here is my simple xorg.conf and the output of lspci and verbose lspci

The release of FreeBSD 7.0 two weeks ago was just in time, I fetched the install images and went through the install procedure without any hassle. I haven’t installed the WLAN drivers yet, but the ndis tools are always red-hot in FreeBSD and so I expect it to function properly , too. In FreeBSD I use the radeonhd drivers, 2D desktop performace is fine. On FreeBSD 7.0 the sound is not working yet, but that’s for the time being fine.

My xorg.conf and my pciconf -l -v in BSD.

Altogether I think this notebook is recommendable. Its performance is all right, the display is very nice and bright. The casing doesn’t get too warm and the battery lasts up to three hours.

If you need more information on notebooks running linux or unix, have a look at https://tuxmobil.org and don’t hesitate to submit your experience by yourself.

Hej!

Recently I have changed this place to wordpress, out of sheer curiosity. Now the installation is done I don’t think there is something exciting to discover in WP. But this is nothing of any importance, some weeks ahead I might try another CMS as well or roll it all back to plain html. Nevertheless, be my guest.