Doomshammer's Weblog

Happy 9th Sysadmin Appreciation Day to all of you who share the burden of being just bit more clever with computers than the average sales guy

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I am currently monitoring all my servers with Nagios and I use Cacti to make some fancy graphs of these hosts. As I soon have to disable the server, from which I do the monitoring, I was looking for a new solution. I already read some good articles about Zabbix, so I installed Zabbix on a new server.

The installation was fairly simple. Apache + PHP5 + PostgreSQL - quickly compiled and setup. Now download the Zabbix sources from the Zabbix website and compile the server. Copy the frontend into your webroot and perform the rest of the installtion steps - that's it.

The concept of Zabbix is a bit different from Nagios. It it mainly based on it's own agent daemon (which has to be installed on every host that you wanna monitor), where nagios is rather based on some checking tools that are run against the host over snmp or other service ports (check_http for tcp/80/443, check_ftp for tcp/21, and so on).

At the first glance Zabbix is a bit confusing, but after some reading in the manual you quickly get the point about triggers, actions and stuff. What I like about Zabbix is, that it combines Nagios + Cacti + Content Validation. So I can easily montitor all my hosts (Windows, Linux, Solaris ...), generate some graphs and perform website validation. The frontend concept of Zabbix is very mature. I'll show you some brief screenshots to get some overview of it.



The overview page. It lists all configured hosts (currently only 3 as I didn't had the time last night to add all of them). It shows all configured triggers together with a little status box for each host. If the status box is green, everything is fine- is it red... go ahead and check your host


The web content validation screen. You can configure content validation suites for every host. You can even go through a i. e. complete order process on a website and if one of the steps fails, you'll get informed by Zabbix.


The latest data screen. Thanks to the agent that is running on every host, you can easily access lots of host informations w/o having to configure ugly SNMP suites. The client provides lots of data about the host like performance, OS, cpu, network, and so on.


On-the-fly graphs. For nearly every data you can create graphs - on-the-fly. You can define the time period, you can define the look of the graph. You can also create graph-suites which a building graphs automatically. With this tools you can easily graph the cpu load of your hosts, the network traffic and so one.

There are lots of more features with Zabbix. If you want an easy to use but powerful distributed monitoring system, you should give Zabbix a try.

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A pretty funny project... Picodore 64 - the C64 PDA

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The development of the "Optiums keyboard" is finally done and you can order it. If it wasn't such expensive, I would order one as well

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Yesterday the latest version of Vim has been released! Find the official announcement here.

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AK just released newsbeuter v0.4 which holds a lot of new features. Read more here.

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...yesterday OpenBSD 4.1 has been released

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Wednesday night I got the chance to try out the new Command & Conquer episode "Command & Conquer 3 - Tiberium Wars". This game really rocks! It's been about 4-5 years since I had a "real" game installed on my PC (Quake III was the last one I think) but I couldn't resist to install C&C3- and it's worth installing. It's still the same fun as the other episodes plus really nice graphics. All in all a pretty good 3rd episode of a game- try it!

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Ich hab' mal meinen Schreibtisch etwas aufgeraeumt. Nachdem heute mein Samsung Syncmaster 226BW angekommen ist, war auf meinem Schreibtisch - so wie er vorher eingerichtet war - nicht mehr genug Platz fuer 2 Monitore, Drucker, etc.

Naja.. so siehts jetzt aus- ich denke das Arbeiten wird jetzt einiges angenehmer

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This weekend I built a VPN gateway for one of my customers. The task was the creation of a secure box that is standing behind the Router/Firewall and allows the employees to login into the local network from home.

As an IPSEC implementation would be overkill and very hard to maintain for my customer, I decided to use OpenVPN with a PKI (Public Key Infrastruktur) on an OpenBSD box. Yesterday my customer brought me the server where the gateway should run on. I quickly installed OpenBSD 4.0, updated ports and sources, built a new kernel and did some default configuration. Then I installed OpenVPN via the ports tree. I set up a openssl.cnf to create my own CA and created the server certificates for the OpenVPN server. The configuration of the OpenVPN server was pretty straight forward. Next was the client certificate creation and some fine tuning of the pf rules and that's it.

On client side (all windows clients) I installed the OpenVPN GUI and installed the certificate/configuration file pair. All you now have to do is to start the client, click on "connect" and enter you password and you're finally connected to the VPN. Pretty neat stuff. Easy to installed, easy to maintain. Hope my customer will like it

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That's funny.. When I was working with Lightroom two days ago, I got 2 SQL errors. As I am usually very curious about such things I just opened the Lightroom database in a hex editor (actually vim's xxd) as I was wondering if I could identify the database format... this was too easy- the first line starts with: "SQLite format 3"

I'll open it with dbish later, to have a closer look at the structure

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This is how it looks like, when you are printing >200 contact sheet photos out of Adobe Lightroom
(Point your eye to the size in the print spooler ) *sigh*

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I am still playing around with Adobe Lightroom. It really fits my needs very well. But one thing I wasn't able to find, was a possiblity to move the library database from it's default place (in my case it is placed in: C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\Winni\Eigene Dateien\Eigene Bilder\Lightroom) to another place. I store all my documents and photos in a directory called "Media" of which I easily can perform a backup to my fileserver. So I really need the database moved, to include it into my daily backup runs, as I don't just want the photos being backed up but the meta infos for Lightroom as well.

Finally I found a way to get this done (I found it really accidently ). Just start Lightroom and hold down the Ctrl-key while it's loading. Then a dialog window will pop-up where you can configure the location of the database file. Just mark it as "load this database by default" and that's it

Hint: With MacOS X you have to press 'Alt' instead of the 'Ctrl' key.
(Thanks Philipp Toelke for contributing this hint)

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No further comment *eg*

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Ich hab' mir gestern mal die 30-Tage Testversion von Adobe's Lightroom 1.0 installiert. Das Programm macht im Gegensatz zu den Public Betas die ich getestet habe einen recht ordentlichen Eindruck. Die Bedienung ist, sobald man sich dran gewoehnt hat, recht intuitiv und selbsterklaerend. Da ich bis jetzt meine Fotos immer mit Raw Shooter be-/verarbeitet habe (leider wurde der Raw Shooter von Adobe aufgekauft und wird nicht weiterentwickelt) freut es mich besonders, dass die Entwickler die vielen Shortcuts in Lightroom uebernommen haben- das erleichtert eine Menge Arbeitsschritte doch sehr.

Eine sehr schoene Neuerung (die der Raw Shooter nicht hat) ist die Bibliothek, in der man Fotos direkt beim "importieren" mit Tags und (definierbaren) IPTC Informationen versehen kann und auch direkt in einer Art "Galerien" oder "Fotobuecher" zusammenfassen kann. Sehr gut gelungen ist auch im "Development"-Bereich die Protokoll-Liste. Dort wird, da es sich ja um ein Raw Bearbeitungsprogramm handelt, das keine Aenderungen an den Dateien selbst vornimmt, jede Aenderung protokolliert und kann sofort wieder rueckgaengig gemacht werden. Der Raw Shooter hat eine aehnliche Funktion, aber nur fuer einige Schieberegler- fuer den Weissabgleich fehlt diese Funktion im Raw Shooter komplett, was teilweise sehr nervig sein kann, weil man sich so die original Temperaturwerte selbst merken muss um das Original wiederherzustellen. Sehr angenehm ist auch, dass Lightroom im Gegensatz zum Raw Shooter auch andere Dateiformate als nur Raw Formate unterstuetzt- man kann also auch JPEGs oder aehnl. Formate im Lightroom oeffnen.

Die Dia-, Print- und Webpraesentationsfunktionen sind ebenfalls sehr huebsch und mit viel Liebe zum Detail gemacht. Man kann ohne grossen Aufwand einen Contact Sheets oder Index Prints drucken, eine Diashow erstellen und z. B. als PDF exportieren oder eine Flash- oder HTML-basierte Webpraesentation erstellen. Das sind Funktionenen die dem Raw Shooter gaenzlich fehlen. Das einzige was mir jetzt noch fehlt ist eigentlich nur eine direkte Flickr-Upload Funktion, die die in der Bibliothek vergebenen Image Tags verwendet (Ich bin ja so 'ne faule bequeme Sau )

Alles in allem ein sehr ausgereiftes Programm, dass ich jedem Fotografen der viel mit Raw-Formaten arbeitet (und evtl. schon mit dem Raw Shooter gearbeitet hat) nur ans Herz legen kann. Ich denke, wenn meine 30 Tage Testlizenz abgelaufen ist, dann werde ich wohl die 200$ investieren.

Einen Nachteil hat Lightroom allerdings zum Raw Shooter... das Teil frisst Unmengen an Speicher

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