I’ve had a go at building one, it mostly works (this is my nagios box), it’s a rebuild of the f7 source, I have to frig about with the spec file, so I’ve published my source rpm here, search for Nick in the .spec file, you’ll see my bodge.

The smolt rpms are in my yum repo, feel free to download the packages and have a go.

• smolt-0.9.8.1-1.noarch.rpm
• smolt-firstboot-0.9.8.1-1.noarch.rpm
• smolt-gui-0.9.8.1-1.noarch.rpm
• smolt-server-0.9.8.1-1.noarch.rpm

EPEL – Fedora Project Wiki
EPEL is a volunteer-based community effort from the Fedora project to create a repository of high-quality add-on packages that complement the Fedora-based Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its compatible spinoffs like CentOS or Scientific Linux.

About time, and thank you redhat/fedora, want fedora extra packages in centos, then install this epel-release .rpm frickin’ sweet !

First off a warning: Don’t do this ! All the documentation, for CentOS, RHEL, Fedora, any redhat linux all say, clean installs are the best way, and upgrades are not advised…. therefore I offer no support or warranty that this will work, in fact, I you advise you to read this post, but step away from your consoles !

But, if you think it might be a laugh, the centos documentation is a bit old, and not 100% correct, so here is what I did. First up (as root – obviously), clear out your yum cache,and install the CentOS gpg key.

yum clean all
rpm --import http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-4

Next, install some base centos packages, take not that some need to be forced on

rpm -Uvh --nodeps http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4.4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/centos-release-4-4.2.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4.4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-elementtree-1.2.6-4.2.1.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4.4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-sqlite-1.1.7-1.2.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4.4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/sqlite-3.3.3-1.2.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh --force http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4.4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/python-urlgrabber-2.9.8-2.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh --nodeps http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4.4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/yum-2.4.3-1.c4.noarch.rpm

finally remove the whitebox rpm db.

rpm -ev rpmdb-whitebox

Move any “whitebox” mirrors still in /etc/yum.repos.d and

yum install rpmdb-CentOS

Once you have that sorted, you can complete the upgrade with

yum update
reboot

& cross your fingers
If you come across the following warnings while using yum: Warning, could not load sqlite, falling back to pickle , I found…

yum install python-sqlite

Fixed the problem. And there we have it, all my boxes are now running CentOS – yay – just in time to look at the CentOS 5 upgrade

Dependency Problems ?
If a whitebox rpm is newer than the CentOS one, it won’t get upgraded, this might cause problems when installing new packages via yum. To solve the problem download the rpm manually from http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=13 and force an upgrade

rpm --force -Uvh Something-CentOS.rpm

UPDATE: If you’re using something like Root Kit Hunter, you will notice a load of md5 hashes fail, these are whitebox rpm’s that didn’t need upgrading, to correct the problem you need to replace these with CentOS versions.. example rkhunter output:

/sbin/init  [ BAD ]

Find which rpm, init belongs to

# rpm -q --whatprovides /sbin/init
SysVinit-2.85-34.3

and upgrade it

wget http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/mirror.centos.org/4.4/os/i386/CentOS/RPMS/SysVinit-2.85-34.3.i386.rpm
rpm --force -Uvh SysVinit-2.85-34.3.i386.rpm

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).

This led to me to the conclusion that there must be a way to get the server to fix it’s self. after all, why do a job when you can get a computer to do it for you ! Fortunately I had a light bulb moment and realised that I could use the init scripts that are provided by redhat, the below code will restart apache (httpd) and mySQL on a redhat based system in the event that the service was not stopped cleanly. (In-fact this config has only be tested on CentOS, your mileage may vary on anything else)

#!/bin/bash

# taken from redhast default scripts - /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions

# Set up a default search path.
PATH="/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin"
export PATH

status() {
        local base=${1##*/}
        local pid

        # Test syntax.
        if [ "$#" = 0 ] ; then
                echo $"Usage: status {program}"
                return 1
        fi

        # First try "pidof"
        pid=`pidof -o $$ -o $PPID -o %PPID -x $1 ||
             pidof -o $$ -o $PPID -o %PPID -x ${base}`
        if [ -n "$pid" ]; then
# Uncomment this if you want OK messages
#               echo $"${base} (pid $pid) is running..."
                return 0
        fi

        # Next try "/var/run/*.pid" files
        if [ -f /var/run/${base}.pid ] ; then
                read pid < /var/run/${base}.pid
                if [ -n "$pid" ]; then
                        echo $"${base} dead but pid file exists"
                        /etc/init.d/${base} restart
                        return 1
                fi
        fi
        # See if /var/lock/subsys/${base} exists
        if [ -f /var/lock/subsys/${base} ]; then
                echo $"${base} dead but subsys locked"
                /etc/init.d/${base} restart
                return 2
        fi
        echo $"${base} is stopped"
        return 3
}

# found in /etc/init.d/httpd
httpd=${HTTPD-/usr/sbin/httpd}

status mysqld
status $httpd

If you save this, as /etc/cron.hourly/auto_recovery.sh , then do chmod +x /etc/cron.hourly/auto_recovery.sh , assuming you’ve not changed the default cron setup, every hour mySQL & httpd will be checked, if they have died the’ll be restarted and root will get an e-mail about what happened.

Cool eh !

A final finishing touch: I wanted to change the default “Database Down” error messages on my two most popular applications.

• Melvin Rivera has written a tutorial on how to customize the wordpress error page, note that it involves editing a file outside of wp-content, that means you’ll have to re-do this “hack” every time you upgrade wordpress.
• PHPBB: Setting a custom error page on that is really easy, first create a php page displaying your message. Then at the bottom of /path/to/phpbb-install/includes/db.php you’ll see

  // Make the database connection.
  $db = new sql_db($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpasswd, $dbname, false);
  if(!$db->db_connect_id)
  {
  message_die(CRITICAL_ERROR, "Could not connect to the database");
  }

  change it to

   // Make the database connection.
  $db = new sql_db($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpasswd, $dbname, false);
  if(!$db->db_connect_id)
  {
   include("/path/to/my-custom-error-page.php");
          die();
  }

Now if you database dies, for the time it’s down (before cron fixes it) wordpress & phpbb sites would get a much prettier error message. Obviously there’s no solution for apache as there’s nothing to serve the pages, but hopefully this kind of thing doesn’t happen to often

For cacti, there’s a how to, but I found it a little over kill – I didn’t need step 2 , as my catci install is an rpm from dag, and I didn’t bother with step 4, as it worked without it, but hey ymmv!

Nagios was simpler, depending on how you installed nagios, will effect file permission , owners, directories etc. Again, I’ve got another dag rpm, so for me I logged in as root,

cd /usr/share/nagios/
wget http://www.nagios.org/images/favicon.ico

then edit index.html. just before </head> , insert

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/nagios/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />

refresh your browser (delete the cache if necessary), and job done !

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.

I found a work around for my stupidity, on redhat based boxes (RHEL, CENTOS, WHEL, FEDORA) there is a development package to do the job, so to to get the snmp v3 encrypted goodness going run,

yum install net-snmp-utils net-snmp-devel

Yum will pick up the dependencies you need. Now as root, run (make sure snmpd is stopped first)

/usr/bin/net-snmp-config --create-snmpv3-user -a PASSWORD MYUSERNAME

You’ll get the following output…

adding the following line to /var/net-snmp/snmpd.conf:
   createUser MYUSERNAME MD5 "PASSWORD" DES
adding the following line to /usr/share/snmp/snmpd.conf:
   rwuser MYUSERNAME

Before testing make sure that UDP 161 is permitted through iptables, and restart snmpd

/etc/init.d/snmpd start

now from another box, you can test, snmpwalk is the command, if it works your screen will fill up with loads of interesting snmp stuff, if it fails you’ll get an error. Timeout usually means UDP 161 is blocked or they can’t ping each other, and you’ll get authentication failure messages if there is a problem with your snmp accounts.

snmpwalk -v 3 -a md5 -A PASSWORD -x des -X PASSWORD -u MYUSERNAME IP.ADD.RE.SS

good luck !

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

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:

• linickx-fedora.repo

  [LINICKX]
  name=LINICKX Fedora Yum Repo
  baseurl=http://www.linickx.com/files/rpm/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/
  gpgkey=http://www.linickx.com/files/GPG-KEY-NICK
  gpgcheck=1
  

• linickx-whitebox.repo

  [LINICKX]
  name=LINICKX WBEL Yum Repo
  baseurl=http://www.linickx.com/files/rpm/whitebox/$releasever/$basearch/
  gpgkey=http://www.linickx.com/files/GPG-KEY-NICK
  gpgcheck=1
  

copy the .repo’s into your /etc/yum.repo.d dir and you should be away ! Let me know if you have any problems

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