These days I played a little bit around with Nagios, which is able to check several hosts and services. With the support of a free vServer of EUserv I did a setup of such a system.

My highlight is that a downtime of a service will notify me via Twitter. Furthermore the Gentoo Nagios guide helped my very much. There exist several Nagios plugins to check ssh, jabber, irc and other tcp ports and many other things to monitor.

If somebody knows a free Nagios infrastructure I'll be interested in this. :-)

Yesterday I listened to the podcast Bits und so #135. There was a little chapter about an really interesting application: f.lux.
It changes the temperature of your screen colors to be like the naturally light of the day or the night around you.

I tried it, and I find the colors really warm and they're not as bright as before. So I believe it will help me to work better in the hours of an evening or afternoon.

For all German readers: Golem published an article about f.lux, too.

Maybe as you noticed twitter shutted down their jabber services for a long time. The reason is that you couldn't have your friends updates in your jabber client anymore. Couldn't you really? Wait! There's something you should possible know. ;-)

Today I invented a little gateway between the twitter API and the xmpp protocol. To speak with a jabber server you need a new account and you need sendxmpp. It's as easy as writing mails with sendmail. sendxmpp could read from stdin and send it then to your jabber address. There is only one little missing feature: You could only send messages or send something to a chatroom. For example in psi a new message window will popup everytime you'll get a message.
If you have a look into /usr/bin/sendxmpp it's a simple perl script. On line 301 there begins a message block where the message is formed to be send to your jabber account. You need only to add after to, subject and body a 'type' => "chat". Then everytime you'll got a message from your sendxmpp client you will see it in a normal chat window. That's really cool.

But how do we get the twitter updates for you? There exists a little script with the name bash loves twitter: blt. On the first run you tell him your account name and your password and then everything will run fine. If you run it multiple times you'll see the updates of your friends on your bash shell.

The last step for you is to build a loop or a cronjob so that blt asks twitter for updates and pipes it through sendxmpp to your jabber account regularly.
But keep in mind that it is only a unidirectional channel. :-/
To put updated to twitter via a jabber window, please use identi.ca or the laconi.ca software at all.

Thanks for your patient.

Today I installed rdiff-backup to handle my backups. It is an interesting project which can handle incremental backups. It works like rsync over a ssh connection. So you needn't to up/download everything everytime. Furthermore it preserves all information, it is space and bandwidth efficient and you can backup several operating systems with it.

It has got a good documentation and there're step-per-step instructions to set up a "push up" solution.

But I needed a "pull down" solution. It wasn't very hard to set something like this up. But you should be careful with shell=/bin/false.

If you're using LDAP with those options in /etc/conf.d/slapd

OPTS="-h 'ldap://127.0.0.1 ldaps://foo.bar.tld:23523'"

a missconfigured /etc/resolv.conf could be fatal. Your slapd would not run and die with

slapd[12876]: daemon: getaddrinfo() failed: Temporary failure in name resolution

A possible solution is to resolve your hostname yourself. Just put a $IP $HOSTNAME of yourself in the /etc/hosts. That should be very safe.

Another point is that if your name resolution is broken ssh will have got problems with local users if it cannot reach the ldap daemon because it is down.

Connection closed by remote host

This only happens if you send a public key to authorize yourself. To fix this issue try to don't send any public key

ssh foo.bar.tld -l localuser -o PubkeyAuthentication=no

Thanks to KillerFox for reproducing these things.

Today I fired WindowMaker and installed fluxbox which is based on blackbox. Then I thought about which program I should use to watch my system activities.
There are two choices currently: GKrellM or Conky.

GKrellM (GNU/GTK Krell Monitors/Meters) uses the GIMP Toolkit, so it needs some more system resources. It has got a fancy configuration window where you can edit everything on your own with one click. Because it's in its own window you can display it above all others - nice option.

Conky is a small monitor which uses some command line tools and some X libs. It can display itself to the root window or can also be run in windowed mode or write to stdout (conky FAQ). The configuration is handled by ~/.conkyrc. It's not very complicated but very complex - you should have a look at some screenshots and modify their configurations to fit your imaginations. The Gentoo Conky Howto is also a good point to start.

In the end Conky is very flexible and very configurable but because it's defaultly in the root window makes it unsympathic. GKrellM is very static and somehow unflexible. But I prefer Conky nevertheless because of its possibility to display huge information at once.

09/26/06 03:01  (librenix.com) Conky: Lightweight system monitoring:
                 http://librenix.com/?inode=9453

Do you believe in randomness?

Did you ever think about how you can make your blog (powered by nanoblogger) more stylistic? Maybe with some set of icons? Maybe you want to show an icon next to your title to describe it more visually? :-)

I wrote yesterday and today on a little patch for nanoblogger to get the icons next to my titles. It wasn't so easy and it isn't not cleanly implemented and maybe a little bit to brute forced, but at least it works for me[tm].

I wrote some nb-icon-features.patch and a new /usr/share/nanoblogger/plugins/entry/icon.sh-plugin for the nanoblogger. In addition I had to set a variable

BLOG_ICONS="noia"

to work for my blog, because all of my icons are stored in the directory noia under my weblog directory in the blog.conf.

In your templates entry.htm,parmalink_entry.htm you need only to change

<h3 class="title">$NB_EntryTitle</h3>

into

<h3 class="title">$NB_EntryIconAddr $NB_EntryTitle</h3>

And hopefully everything will work fine.

Enjoy your new nanoblogger and stay interested!

Today I tried to work on my configuration of mutt. At first, I read the manual page of mutt and then its documentation.

I tried to get everything running as easy as on fencepost.gnu.org. But I figured out that Debian seems to use a different default config (no, I don't mean /etc/mutt/Muttrc!) than Gentoo. It's annoying. But then I looked at the Gentoo resources about the Muttrc. That was a very good point to start. The Muttrc there together with the documentation - a wonderfull combination.

So I modified something to fit my taste and then started mutt. Great look and feel - so much better than every GUI!

Yesterday ProLinux wrote an article about cdrtools of Jörg Schilling.

He changed the license of his tool from GNU GPL to the CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License [of Sun]). That shouldn't be the problem, but Debian and the whole FSF think that the CDDL is GPL incompatible.

"This is a free software license which is not a strong copyleft;
it has some complex restrictions that make it incompatible with
the GNU GPL.
It requires that all attribution notices be maintained,
while the GPL only requires certain types of notices.
Also, it terminates in retaliation for certain aggressive uses of
patents. So, a module covered by the GPL and a module covered by
the CDDL cannot legally be linked together. 
We urge you not to use the CDDL for this reason.

Also unfortunate in the CDDL is its use of the term
'intellectual property'."


-- gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

Just because the CDDL is incompatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines, the Debian guys tried to clarify the issue with a bugreport but all they got was a plan about 9 points of Schilling.

It is only absurd and unpracticable for the Debian guys to lose their religion. So we need a cdrtools package free of any license issues. That's why some of the community force a cdrtools fork.

The result of this issue is, that new versions of cdrtools aren't going to go into the Debian repositories. Some of the Debian maintainer will manage the old (GPL coverd) versions and make there local changes until we have got a free cdrtools fork or a miracle.

Happy birthday LINUX!

15 years ago (25-Aug-1991 20:57) Linus wrote his famous usenet posting about the beginning of LINUX. He announced there that he started writing a new kernel.

But you shouldn't forget that this couldn't have happened if the GNU project hadn't contained the gcc,emacs and so on.

Via symlink.ch, pro-linux and the featured article on the German Wikipedia

Symlink wrote, that today the Debian project celebrates its 13th birthday. This is even done in Berlin, Germany today and Saturday in Zürich, Switzerland.

Everything began with the announcement of Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. At the beginning he called his system "Debian Linux Release" (post on comp.os.linux.development)...

The whole history of the Debian project can be found at the Wikipedia or at the own project history of Debian.

Congratulations!

If you have got a look at kernel.org, you noticed that LINUX 2.4.33 was released today.

The ChangeLog has got 298 lines and includes an ext3 fix and prevents a DoS attack agains IPv6 (IGMP side) and some more things...

Gentoo published sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-2.4.32-r7.

Yesterday I received a mail from Martin Schulze about the Upcoming Release of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0.

Etch should be relased on December 2006. It's the first Debian version which includes the amd64 port.
And this time all 11 architectures should be released together.

The Linux kernel would be a 2.6.17. Other news would be gcc version 4.1 as the default compiler, Xorg and some new apt bugs^Wfeatures.

Until the time of Etch's release, there are several parties (as usual). For more information have also a look at BSPMarathon @wiki.debian.org.

If you want to create and then burn an audio CD you need WAV files. But how to convert your favourits MP3 songs?

You simply use:

mpg123 -s track.mp3 | sox -t raw -r 44100 -c 2 -s -w - track.wav

Or if you have got more than one track in this directory you want to convert:

for track in *.mp3;
    do mpg123 -v -s "$track" | \ 
    sox -t raw -r 44100 -c 2 -s -w - "$track.wav";
done

I've forgotten the shortcut for the ChangeLog function of emacs today.

 C-x 4 a 

Thanks for your interest. :-)