Fudcon Tempe flickr pool..please add your pics.

I have created a flickr pool for FUDCon Tempe. It’s an open group, and you can add as many pictures as you want. If you are uploading the pictures to flickr, please add them to this group too. Thanks.f

26.50 USD, fedora-medical tracking bug, package reviews, and FUDCon.

Day 2 at FUDCon turned out to be a productive day. I decided to go shopping for some hands which can help me with the medical spin. The lightning talk went well and was well received. As I mentioned, the main problem with this project right now is packaging and package reviews.

Someone (probably Smooge) pointed out that Tibbs has promised to do ten reviews in exchange for a t-shirt. Instantly, 26.50 USD were collected for medical spin and the t-shirt. Ian, who was administering the talks looked very confused with all the money in his hand. 😉
Christoph added a tracking bug for fedora medical in bugzilla, which will be very helpful.

After the talk, I sat down with Christoph reviewing packages and learning tidbits of packaging. Adamwill and Tim joined us. It was an afternoon well spent. It took a long time to review things, but I learned quite a few things.

On the QA part, Adamwilll pointed out that Robatino produces the deltas for (N-1) Final -> N Final, so one need not download the whole ISO again and again, which is not easy in most of the places. This is something I was thinking for a long time, and I am happy now.

In the evening, Herlo gave me lots of Fedora Media and Case Badges, which will be very useful.

It’s a pity that I had to come back to Fort Collins today and could not attend the hackfest, but it was very nice to meet old friends and meeting all the people I have talked over IRC. Hope we will meet again.

A big thanks to FUDCon organisers, who did a fabulous job.

Lastly, I took quite a few pictures, which I shall sort and upload by tomorrow.

Installing TRAC

I am trying a few Request Tracker for Fedora Freemedia. I just Installed TRAC. So here is a rapid documentation.

1. yum -y install subversion mod_python mod_dav_svn trac sqlite
2. mkdir /var/www/trac
3. trac-admin /var/www/trac/project initenv
   • Project name: Freemedia
   • Database connection string: default (Only press return)
   • Repository Type:blank (we are not using version control)
   • Path to repository: blank (–do–)
   • Templates directory:/usr/share/trac/templates
4. The output will be like this

“Project environment for ‘freemedia’ created.
….
Congratulations!””

5. Start Trac  “tracd –port 8000 /var/www/trac”
6. Browse TRAC at http://localhost:8000/trac
7. Configure more at /var/www/trac/conf/trac.ini

WBUT has joined NTP cluster.

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.

Nagios, do you pay for sms service?

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 !!! 🙂

Mirror stats and openoffice .

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. 🙂