Wordpress like many web applications relies on apache (or something else) to serve the HTTP pages and mysql to store the data. Your wordpress website is important to you, so you need an external monitoring system to let you know what’s going on.

Nagios is a great, enterprise class, open-source monitoring application; and what you need do is configure it to exactly represent how wordpress works; if you can get that right you can immediately get notified if any piece of the puzzle fails.

A couple of weeks ago, I was proper ill with flu; the problem with looking after your own server is that only you can fix it - it’s well and good having monitoring systems (nagios) telling you about faults, but if you can’t read or see the alerts the fault won’t get resolved.

During this time I was ill, for an unknown reason the mySQL process on my server died, as such my website (and others I look after) were down for 8 hours. The fix was simple, one command, restart the service and normal service was resumed (excuse the pun).

I’ve been watching the progress of the “Nokia Internet Tablet” for a while now, it 1st caught my eye as it uses gnome rendering type stuff for the graphical front end, and the backend is some linux (debian?) embedded device, so the availability of an off the shelf linux PDA for a self confessed linux nut is a dream come true !

I’ve not brought on yet, firstly because my gadget fund is low (saving for a PS3.. probably) and mainly because there were no “off the shelf” GPS solutions, since most open source projects are US based, I didn’t want to mess about with trying to get something to work in the UK… importing maps, different blue-tooth issues, blah blah, you know the deal.

I think it’s safe to say, if you can’t get something to work then the manual is rubbish or the user is stupid, with setting up snmp v3 on linux, the user is me, so the fault is probably lies there.

SNMPv3 moves away from the community string idea from older version, and into a username & password combo. The correct tool for creating users is snmpusm, but no matter how many times I read the man page I can’t work it out. I get that you copy a user from the initial user, but how do you create the initial user ? If I try on my box I just get an “snmp timeout” error.

November was a slow posting month, the reason being that I’m working on a rather time consuming project, one of the areas I’ve had to focus on again is Linux Security.

Security goes on and on forever, you can do as much or as little as you deem necessary, too much will consume resources*, too little opens you up to attack; this article talks about some steps I take, be advised tho’ this will generate a load of e-mails, and if you’re not going to read them why bother implementing them.

…and their server is down…..

Fedora Project
We are working hard to bring fedora.redhat.com back up to its fully operational state.

DOH !

Oh well I haven’t got time to install it now anyway, I’ll wait for the “Zod” frenzy to finish I think

I don’t know everything about linux, who does ? So if I put one into a production environment I want to know if anything changes.

It took a couple of goes, but I finally managed to build a tripwire rpm for Redhat Enterprise Linux, I’ve been testing it for a couple of weeks, all looks good.

It’s available from my files directory or my repo , if you have any problems let me know

This has been on my to do list for a while… I have finally converted my little reporsitory of rpm’s into a proper yum repo !

The old xfce repo has been mergered into a new Whitebox repo, which in fact can be used for CentOS, WBEL or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

A new fedora repo exists as well, those with a keen eye will see new rpm sections for FC5 64_86 (my new pc!).

All packages will be signed with my gpg key, and config files can be found here:

Ok, so I’ve moved jobs, the first thing that’s massively different is that I can’t use Linux :’( - the new place has load of custom fat client windows apps (help-desk & crm) so I can’t dump windows.

Now this post isn’t a Linux vs windows rant, more, a note about how it’s effecting me. To start with, I’ve been using evolution for so long that I’ve actually forgotten how to use outlook !!!!!! Other stuff is IM & RSS readers, I’m using thunderbird because I can’t find a suitable replacement for lifera , and MSN it’s got adverts all over it, back to gaim I think !

News on digg shows that FC5 Test2 is out !!.

Now I don’t usually care about test releases - FC is unstable enough - but what is cool is the screen shots with the new FC artwork & logo’s, tiz very nice

The release notes: http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc5/test2-latest-en/ have loads of information if you need it, notice that the fedora website is now supporting the new logo as well - little things eh !

Sorry yum friends, when I saw the announcement from xfce about Xfce 4.2.3.1 I sighed, not because my love for xfce has changed, but I remember what I’d forgotten.

When my place of work moved office I lost my white box build server as soon as I’ve got one, I’ll get the rpms built, in the mean time please see www.xfce.org

I’m in the process of trying to get working on Fedora Core 4 in the usual chase the dependency scenario you can easily get into I needed to build an wxPython package.

I hope these are of use:

• wxPython-common-gtk2-unicode-2.6.1.0-1_py2.4.i386.rpm
• wxPython2.6-devel-gtk2-unicode-2.6.1.0-1_py2.4.i386.rpm
• wxPython2.6-gtk2-unicode-2.6.1.0-1_py2.4.i386.rpm

So I’ve been clearing out some stuff and I found another thing of use.

When I had a Sony Vaio, I remember the most annoying thing to get working was X11, specifically finding the right Fedora Core xorg.conf. I’ve uploaded my working xorg.conf here , now if you’re a really newbie and need some steps read-on, else you’re probably done

Firstly, if you boot the PCG-C1F from the CD-ROM, and just hit enter at the install prompt, anaconda will try and start X, and when it does it can’t set the resolution right. So, the best thing to do is install in text mode. Text mode is started at the install prompt with:

A while ago I put some effort into getting SSL support working with XMMS on Fedora Core 3, unfortunatley I didn’t get very far

Ages a go Dustin Kirkland was kind enough to help me out (he wrote an SSL patch for XMMS), but I never got a change to finish, Since this message has been flagged for follow up for soooooo long now, I thought it only fair to share what Dustin sent me, when (& if) I get this finished I’ll publish an rpm good luck !

I’ve been too busy to notice that Solaris 10 is out for public release.

This time round I have a problem, my usual SPARC ultra 5 that use for sun testing has gone production so I don’t have a machine to test Solaris 10 on …. BUT, to my surprise the x86 version is FREE - WOW !

So here are some screen-shots of me installing Solaris 10 in Qemu