Roedie’s Wonderful World of Whatever

I needed to monitor 3 NetApp filers with Nagios.

Since the filers are quite accesible through things like ssh, web interface and SNMP I didn’t think it would be hard. But, when doing a quick search I’ve found this excellent nagios plugin made by Sven Velt. It is available at http://people.teamix.net/~svelt/check_netappfiler/. It has saved me *lots* of time.

It even seems to be prepared to be used with pnp4nagios too. I haven’t tried this since I’m not using it.

One strange thing though… I can query all the filers with standard SNMP settings even with SNMP disabled on the filer(s). This has suprised me a bit. It might be a bug, but I’m not sure.

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For some time I’ve been wondering why none of my Debian/Ubuntu workstations would resolve something like ‘proxy.mycompany.local’. Simpy resolving ‘proxy’ would work.

I already knew that .local is not a correct tld, but since it was recomended by Microsoft to use this when installing Active Directory we used it. I never had any problems with it because most of the time I just use ip addresses when I need to access a server.

Now I installed a proxy server and a new mail relay server so I started using them as proxy.mycompany.local and relay.mycompany.local. The I found out that none of my Debian or Ubuntu workstations would resolve those addresses. At first I blamed the Microsoft DNS server for this. That’s the easiest and most logical thing to do . But Windows XP/Vista clients did resolve those addresses. Strange huh?

Then I started wireshark on my client. I did a query for proxy.mycompany.local and then there was…. an MDNS request instead of a normal DNS request?!?

This quickly gave me the conclusion that it was something avahi related because this does all the zeroconf stuff with Debian/Ubuntu. Avahi seems to be configured to pick up any request ending in .local and make MDNS requests for it. This must be a problem for more people because there must be loads of Microsoft networks out there ending in .local. I won’t say this is a fault from the avahi guys because it’s also completely wrong to use .local as tld.

My current solution is to just simply disable Avahi on my workstations. On Ubuntu I just do ‘System -> Administration -> Services’ and disable ‘Multicast DNS Service Discovery’ there. With Debian I just disable the startup of Avahi in /etc/default/avahi-daemon by settting ‘AVAHI_DAEMON_START=0′.

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There’s another way to create vlan interfaces with Debian/Ubuntu. It’s even shorter than the previous example. Just add the following to /etc/network/interfaces:

auto eth0.10
  iface eth0.10 inet static
  addres 10.0.0.2
  netmask 255.255.255.0
  gateway 10.0.0.1

Just make sure you dit ‘apt-get install vlan’ or something like that.

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It’s just that I can’t remember how to make vlan’s witch Debian. I always have to re-invent the wheel or look at old configs which are never where I think they are… So… Here it is so I don’t have to remember it and maybe some other people will find it useful.

In /etc/network/interfaces you add the following:

# Vlan 10
iface vlan10 inet static
    adress 10.0.0.2
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    gateway 10.0.0.1
    vlan_raw_device eth0

This will add vlan10 to interface eth0. It’s so easy but I just cannot remember it when I need it.

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I’ve backported keepalived from Debian Lenny to Etch (4.0). Both i386 and amd64 are available for download here. There was no need for changes from the original package, only a recompile.

I’m thinking about packaging feedbackd and use it together with keepalived to adjust the weight of realservers during runtime. I’m not sure if it’s feasible, else I will write my own poor mans implementation.

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Because the release of Nagios 3.0 is comming closer, I wanted to have a look at it. I’ve found some nice packages on the blog of Sven Velt. Those packages are for i386 only and I needed amd64 packages. I just took the sources and recompiled them for the amd64 architecture. You can get them here. I take no credit for the packages because I merely compiled it.

Nagios 3 looks good. It has some nice new features like the multi line output for plugins. This wil likely make it possible to run more checks with less stress on the Nagios server. I’ll post more when I find more nice features

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We’ve got Microsoft Exchange server…. *sigh*… I’m very Linux minded, but now I administer 4 Microsoft Windows 2003 servers. One of then runs Exchange 2007.

Today I needed group mailboxes. Simple… A mailbox to which multiple users have access. So I just open the Exchange 2007 Management Console, create a new mailbox, add a group as the owner, put the right people in the group and we’re done… Not quite. It’s not possible to add a group as owner to a mailbox from the management console.

Google is your friend. So I shifted to the pages google gave me but none of the had the real answer I needed. Until I finally hit this page written by Tyson Kopczynski. It explained that it isn’t possible to do it from the management console, but you have to use the Microsoft Exchange 2007 Management Shell.

Just to save you (and myself) a click I copied it here:

1. Create a Domain Group named MBX-<mailboxname>-Full.

2. Next, run the following command to grant MBX-<mailboxname>-Full full access to the shared mailbox: get-mailbox -identity “<mailboxname>” | add-mailboxpermission -user “MBX-<mailboxname>-Full” -accessrights ‘FullAccess’

3. Finally, run the following command to grant MBX-<mailboxname>-Full modify access to the mailbox’s “Personal Information” attributes: get-mailbox -identity “<mailboxname>” | add-adpermission -user “MBX-<mailboxname>-Full” -accessrights:ReadProperty, WriteProperty -properties ‘Personal Information’ -extendedrights ‘Send-As’

Of course you need to replace <mailboxname> with the name of you mailbox… Duh…

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Finaly I took the hurdle… I ordered two Perl books. Now lets read them and drop the shell scripts

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I just read groklaw. It seems like Microsoft is out to try to destroy FOSS again. Just read this and go figure why you shouldn’t be using it. I myself have 4 M$ servers at work but this kind of stuff makes me think if I just could somehow ditch them…

Microsoft doesn’t mind FOSS software as long as it runs on top of windows and doesn’t compete with any of their products.

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