I just come back from this years slackathon. It was interersting to meet some of the persons on the OpenBSD mailing lists.
I have to admitt that most of the presentations was to deep into the kernel to my knowledge but I liked the conferances anyhow.
The Slackathon was the end of a Hackathon mostly founded by NIC.SE, so many of the OpenBSD core developers was there including Theo De Raadt see pic below.
I’ll attend this years Slackathlon in Stockholm. I hope I will see you there
Welcome to this years Slackathon!
It will be held August 15th, at the Stockholm University, though not in
the same conference room as the previous years, since it couldn’t hold
all visitors anymore!
As previous years, the website is slowly getting into shape, and
probably wont hold the complete “truth” until afterwards, since we
update it as we get more correct info. Be sure to check the web more
frequently as we get closer to the event.
The url is http://www.slackathon.se:2009/
The description still points to the old location, but I’ll spank some
sense into the web slaves so they make a better “how-to-get-here” that
actually shows you are going to “Hörsal B3” and not the old conference
room. We’ll put some blowfishes up to point people that come from the
subway station in the right direction.
This year, there will be even more OpenBSD developers attending, since
the Slackathon 2009 is right after the f2k9 Filesystem Hackathon which I
am hosting at my work using a grant from the IIS foundation (the guys
and gals running the .SE top level domain)
Also note, that since there doesn’t seem to be an OpenCon this year, the
Slackathon probably is the only major OpenBSD-only conference held, so
even if it collides with HAR2009 and the Stockholm “midnight run”, you
don’t want to miss it!
Get them begging skills warmed up and draw donations from friends,
employers, parents or other rich entities that you think should donate
to OpenBSD and OpenSSH! It would also be nice if you help spread the
word around on various forums and communities.
As with previous years there will be no entrance fee and dinner will be
served for free to everyone, but I’d still need you to pre-announce if
you want it so I can make the correct amount of food, and also if you
want the vegan version.
For all of you who don’t live nearby, we can probably find you a couch
to sleep on here, just send a heads-up and we’ll dig up a few
“volunteers” to share their living quarters with you.
Hope to see you all there!
At op5 we are using Webex as conferance tool. I’ve been struggeling to get it running on Ubuntu 9.04 and I have finally got it to work.
Just run:
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras sudo apt-get install libstdc++5
and now it works perfectly well.
An interesting article describing howto use Skype to send SMS notification for Nagios or op5 Monitor can be find here:
http://wiki.nagios.org/index.php/SkypeSmsNotification
My recommendation is to use an GSM modem to send SMS, because if the network is down no SMS can be sent with this solution and SMS is normally used as an alternative alarm route.
Another aspect is that Skype is using propertiary protocols and that should be avoided.
I use MythTV quite frequently and noticed that it is instable when using sasc-ng as a decoder to decrypt encrypted DVB-T channels. So approximatly every third day the MythTVbackend server stops and need to be started again. I have wriiten an earlier article about howto monitor MythTV with Nagios or op5 Monitor so I get noticed that it has stopped. But I need to manually start it again. This article describe howto make Nagios or op5 Monitor to start a stopped MythTVbackend. It can be used for starting almost any service.
I have used the examples provided by Ethan at Nagios official documentation describing eventhandlers.
Normally it is not recommended to let a tool like Nagios or op5 Monitor start a service that has stopped, because it is probably a reason why the service has stopped and the correct procedure is to fix the root cause of the problem, not the symptom.
The MythTV backend runs on one machine called lala (after a character in Teletubbies) which is not the same as the Nagios or op5 Monitor server. I use nrpe to run the start script i.e.
/etc/init.d/mythtv-backend start
There is several options here but I already setup the nrpe agent and it is simple to make Nagios or op5 Monitor to use nrpe to run a script. Read the rest of this entry »
op5 develops plugins for op5 Monitor, based on Nagios. As a courtesy to the community the plugins developed are free and can be downloaded from:
http://www.op5.org/community/projects/op5-plugins
The plugins is also located in a Git repository and can be checked out from:
A new place to find articles, plugins and other information abot nagios is http://exchange.nagios.org/.
It has been very interesting and two intensive days. The highlights IMHO:
During the Nordic meet on Nagios I meet alot of interesting people, learned alot and had good food and drinks.
I hope to see you next year at Nordic Meet on Nagios 2010!!!
The conferance about Nagios in Stockholm has started. The event will be broadcasted on internet. If you have questions to the speakers you could enter them directly into the Nordic meet on Nagios homepage or to nmn@jabber.org using jabber protocol.
In my drawer I found a GPS reciever for my cellular, I have never used it because the GPS software in my phone is crap. But when I found it, I realized that it might work to connect it via bluetooth to my laptop so I could have a stratum 1 NTP server at home. But after a few hours I ended up with having a very nice graphical GPS system with maps. A stratum 1 NTP server at home is cool, but in my opinion this is better 😀 Read the rest of this entry »
