An It-slave in the digital saltmine

Today we release op5 LogServer 3.4, a minor release containing the following features and fixes.

• Code refactoring and bug fixes
• Possibility to turn on and off full text indexing
• Speed and robustness improvements to the query logic

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My manager has confirmed that I will go to GoOpen 2009 in Oslo, Norway 16-17 April

op5 is a bronze sponsor and will have a booth where it will be possible to talk to me and my collegues face to face. My biggest problem is if I want to see Mamma Mia or meet Jon Maddog Hall.

For more info http://goopen2009.friprog.no/english

Now I have update the blog to wordpress 2.7.1

If you find anything that do not work please drop me a note at peter@it-slav.net

op5 has started the work on a gui that has the
aim to be the preferred opensource alternative gui to Nagios!!

This is something op5 wanted to do for years now and by judging of
the amount of requests we get from our customers about improvements to
the current gui we are not alone  :) 

The project is in a very early stage and no code is yet publicly
available but we have a couple of prototype screenshots that we would
like to share with you.

Take a look at http://www.op5.org/community/projects/ninja for more info

note: although Ninja is a very cool name, we will change it since it's a
little bit to cool for us = already used by many other projects

So when can you download and use this new shining gui? Well I hope op5
can publish some code on git.op5.org within the next month or earlier
and op5 plan for having the gui stable and usable enough to base our
product op5 Monitor on it in June!

I will be one of the speakers at the Open Source in Schools conference 2009 in London March 6th,

If you are interested take a peak at:

http://www.opensourceinschools.org.uk/

Fusis arranges the conference and op5 is a partner to Fusis.

Background

My blog that uses MySQL as the database backend suddenly got real performance issues. The symptoms where:

• All my Nagios test failed from time to time with NRPE timeout
• The performence of my dynamic webpages was terrible slow.
• The load on the system showed very heavy load, more then 10 for  1, 5, and 15 minutes.
• When using “top” the CPU load on both CPUs was almost 100% and it was almost only httpd processes.
• According to Firefox plugin Firebug it took about 12 seconds to load the startpage with me as the only user.

This bad behavior did not show up when I pointed my webbrowser to static http pages so my conclusion was that I had som problem with MySQL.

The numbers of unique visitors are about 100 / day and 250 page views /day and the machine is:

• Dual PIII 1Ghz
• 4 Gb ram
• SCA 10k RPM disk.

So the hardware should be able to handle the load without any problems.

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This article describe howto get a 1-wire humidity probe to work with Nagios or op5 Monitor.

In an earlier article I have described a 1-wire temperature plugin.

Pre requriments

To get it working you need:

• 1-wire humidity probe i.e. this, it is based on DS2438 & HIH-4000
• A working owfs installation, instructions can be found here
• Nagios or op5 Monitor

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Most unix or Linux admins come across regular expressions occasionally. It is very powerful to handle text with and if you have understood it once it is handy to have an on-line reference source to quickly to lookup the syntax for what you want todo. My problem is that I always forget the syntax 🙂

Take a peak at the excellent page http://www.regular-expressions.info/ to learn more about regular expressions.

This article describe howto monitor an Asterisk server with Nagios or op5 Monitor. Pre-req to get it running is a working Nagios or op5 Monitor installation and an Asterisk 🙂

Theory

In my implementation of Asterisk I have a couple of softphones, 2 hardphones and connections to two SIP providers. I want to monitor the following:

• Possibility for a phone to be able to register at the Asterisk server
• The registration at the SIP providers are OK
• The Operating system is not overloaded
• The server where Asterisk is running is up

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The most common way if keeping track of the time in a computer is by counting the seconds since the day Unix was born, i.e. Jan 1 1970. This is called Unix Epoch and is used in all Posix system, including Windows.

Feb 13 23:31:30 UTC is it 1234567890 seconds since Epoch, this is worth celebrating so have a Ubuntu Cola or a Jolt Cola.

At http://coolepochcountdown.com/ you can follow the exiting countdown to 1234567890.

I will run:

$ watch -n 1 date +%s