The Diary of a Nobody

Today after a few hours of struggles, I managed to get rsync work.

So Fedora 9 is happily getting synced to my mirror and it will be done by the release time.

For a few days, 4 to be precise, we must keep ourselves offline to get the whole bandwidth.

Though I have marked ourselves “disabled”, people trying to update F8 or F7 may get timeout for next one hour or so.

Sorry for that.

Will come back with Fedora 9.

What gives you a euphoric feeling?

For me, it’s a sleepless night, a graph (synchronized every half an hour) slowly moving towards the cut in line, combined with, well, a book of cryptography and coding ;).

Yesterday, I (or we at WBUT) configured and included ourselves in the NTP cluster. The machine which hosts this server is orca.wbut.ac.in. From now onwards, most of the time sync requests from India is going to be redirected towards us and we are happy to have them.

As always, we are the first and sole participant from India in the cluster. I am extremely hopeful that we will soon get a few more servers across India.

Anyway, we are currently operating as stratum 2 server. But soon we may be getting hold of a card like this and upgrade ourself to a stratum 1 server.

Before closing, two screenshots.

1. Our score (cut off is 5)

2. And our sync

PS: As this cluster is extremely sensitive, it takes 4-5 hours to re sync once a server is out of sync or rebooted.

I don’t think nagios need any introduction. Neither does the fact that it can send out email and sms alert.

But what about getting alerts on your phone ? And at free of cost?

A few weeks back, I found this gateway. Surely, there are many other such gateways, but I did not have time to search for them. Rather, I decided to go on with my experiment on the network I manage at WBUT.

This gateway supports email2sms. But it requires you to register and upload your phone number and mail id ( from which you are sending these alert mails) to be added to your portal profile. So I registered an account with them with my mobile number 9999999999 and email nagios@orca.wbut.ac.in.

The gateway also requires that the mail, which will be converted to sms, have your mobile number as a subject.

So to accomplish that, without any loss of functionality of the alerts, I had to change the command.cfg file a bit.

All I did was to change the mail function to

‘notify-host-by-email’ command definition
define command{
command_name notify-host-by-email
command_line /usr/bin/printf “Nagios Host: $HOSTNAME$ $HOSTSTATE$ Time: $LONGDATETIME$\n” | /bin/mail -s “9999999999″ $CONTACTEMAIL$

}

Where 9999999999 would be your mobile number and nagios@your_server would be email registered with the portal.

Thats all. Just shut down one of your hosts and wait. You received a sms. Didn’t you?

Of course, this is implemented for monitoring the servers at WBUT. Whenever a server is down or unreachable for more that 15 mins, we get a sms !!!

We have got listed in OpenOffice mirror and

after a long time, I have got these back on line….

Usage of http which serves CRAN, Mozilla, OpenOffice and LDP.

Usage of ftp which is for Fedora only.

Cumulatively they are serving over 55G a day.

Are you a engineer? Are you looking for a job in one of those big IT companies? Then this is a how-to for you.

1. Read the notice about companies coming for placement. Life goes on normally. Date closes in…closes in…

2. A day remaining. Convince yourself about how much you hate the company. Go through the earlier aptitude papers…(Don’t you dare to forget bubble sort!!! Are not you a ME student? ).

3. Go to the PPT. (Pre-placement talk…they say so.) Get bored…start complaining about the pay package.

4. Time for aptitude test. Get strictest instruction “Do not use any unfair means”. Get the question paper…WOW…its the same paper you saw at morning!!! WOW!!! Quite a few answers are marked !!!! (Why should a company spend on new paper every time?…These papers must have at least 5 year life cycle).

5. At this point of time listen to a warning “Do not leave your fate to others!!! If the answers are marked…do not use them”. (Dude, we never look at each other’s paper. Leave alone copying.)

6. Write the answers. Its a collaborative effort. (Mark…mark…mark the answers on the question paper…some day your son/daughter may also sit for this company. Who can tell the future?)

7. Aptitude test completed. Tell your friends that you need some sleep and you are going home. You watched one and a half movie, had a short (two hours) nap…your friend call and tell you to show up for interview. (How could they bring out the results so fast? Damn…the movie was so interesting!!!)

8. Dress well…head for the interview room.

9. Interview room.

Good afternoon, sir.

• “So, tell me about yourself”

Bla bla bla bla…

• “WOW, that was nice. you are a masters in computer science?”

yes sir.

• “Swap two variables without using temp.”

bla bla bla bla…

• “Nice”.Can you tell me the difference between Windows and linux?” (Feel like banging your head on the table? Dude, they are only testing your “Basics”…)

bla bla bla bla

• “Thank you, nice to meet you…hope for the best.”

10. Next day. Go out to watch a movie. Your friend calls. You got selected. (Damn…the movie was so interesting!!! Must they disturb every time I watch a movie?)