NRPE for Endian Firewall

Finally I had the time to compile NRPE (the nagios addon) for Endian Firewall. If you are in a hurry, look for the download section below.

First of all, an important finding is that Endian Firewall (EFW) seems to be based on Fedora Core 3, so maybe sometimes you can spare some work by installing FC3 RPMs directly. And that's what we'll do right away, so we can move around EFW more easily.

Packaging and installing NRPE

• Install wget:
  
rpm -Uvh http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/core/3/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/info-4.7-5.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/core/3/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/wget-1.9.1-17.i386.rpm





• If you don't have an Endian Community Account, register yourself at: http://www.endian.org/register



• Then you can run, from the shell:
  
efw-upgrade

  This command will ask you the profile your dummy endian should assume and will install the necessary build tools if you choose development.



• Grab the source for NRPE from: http://www.nagios.org/download/addons/ (it was version 2.12 in my case):
  
cd /root
wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/nagios/nrpe-2.12.tar.gz





• Now place the files for RPM building. Refer to rpmbuild(8) man page if you are not familiar with the requirements.
  
cd /usr/src/endian/SOURCES
cp /root/nrpe-2.12.tar.gz .
tar xfvz /root/nrpe-2.12.tar.gz
cp nrpe-2.12/nrpe.spec ../SPECS





• For NRPE to work seemlessly within EFW some minor adjustments have to be made. I'm providing them here, with a brief explanation: nrpe-2.12-init-script.patch will fix some assumptions made for general RPMs and nrpe-2.12-spec.patch will remove unused dependencies and provide an EFW startup script. Apply these patches into the distribution you unpacked in the previous step - refer to patch(1) man page.
  
  After applying the patches to the uncompressed distribution, you'll need to repackage the tarball - it will be automatically decompressed for the building stage.



• Now build everything:
  
rpmbuild -ba /usr/src/endian/SPECS/nrpe.spec


  This should compile you the RPM for you current architecture. It will integrate in for shell administration only, which means you won't be able to control it from the web interface.


• Finally, install the package:
  
rpm -ivh /usr/src/endian/RPMS/`uname -i`/nrpe-2.12-1.`uname -i`.rpm


  And that should be it, for NRPE. Go on and setup /etc/nagios/nrpe.cfg and don't forget to add the firewall rules for the port you selected (default is 5666).

Packaging and installing nagios-plugins

• Grab the source at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/nagiosplug/files/
  
  
cd /root
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/nagiosplug/files/nagiosplug/1.4.14/nagios-plugins-1.4.14.tar.gz/download





• Repeat the procedure you did for NRPE: place the tarball on SOURCES and the spec file on SPECS:
  
cp nagios-plugins-1.4.14.tar.gz /usr/src/endian/SOURCES/
cd /usr/src/endian/SOURCES/
tar xfvz nagios-plugins-1.4.14.tar.gz
chown -R root:root nagios-plugins-1.4.14
cp nagios-plugins-1.4.14/nagios-plugins.spec ../SPECS/





• This bundle of plugins includes the so-called standard plugins for nagios. They are a lot and you maybe can just cut some off so the building is quicker. Also, you may avoid depend on perl(Net::SNMP), perl(Crypt::DES) and perl(Socket6) - which you can grab from DAG's RPM repo (remember the FC3 branching).


cd /root
wget http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/perl-Net-SNMP/perl-Net-SNMP-5.2.0-1.1.fc3.rf.noarch.rpm
wget http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/perl-Crypt-DES/perl-Crypt-DES-2.05-3.1.fc3.rf.i386.rpm
wget http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/perl-Socket6/perl-Socket6-0.19-1.1.fc3.rf.i386.rpm



• Finally, install everything:
  
rpm -ivh perl-Net-SNMP-5.2.0-1.1.fc3.rf.noarch.rpm \
perl-Crypt-DES-2.05-3.1.fc3.rf.i386.rpm \
perl-Socket6-0.19-1.1.fc3.rf.i386.rpm \
/usr/src/endian/RPMS/i386/nagios-plugins-1.4.14-1.i386.rpm



Final notes

Be aware that this is a sample demonstration. I was more interested in having it done for my case - since I can fix future problems - rather than doing a proper/full EFW integration. If you think you can contribute with tweaking this build process just drop me a note.

Download

Here are the RPMs which include the supra-mentioned tweaks (this required extra patching on the .spec file and include the patch within the source):

• nrpe-2.12-1.i386.rpm (src.rpm)


• nagios-plugins-1.4.14-1.i386.rpm (src.rpm)

As prendas da MySQL para 2009

Bem, já lá vai algum tempito, mas aproveitei o tempo de férias para dar algum feedback do que de novo apareceu relativamente ao MySQL.

Começo por sinalizar o aparente descontinuamento do ramo 5.0.x do MySQL, pelo menos no que toca à manutenção activa. Também já não era sem tempo, já que a versão 5.1 trouxe demasiadas coisas boas para ser ignorada.

A seguir deve seguir-se a 5.4.x; as novidades foram muito bem recebidas, sobretudo pela malta do Solaris e do InnoDB que, por sua vez - e devido ao facto do InnoDB passar a ser desenvolvido em forma de plugin - deverá evoluir nestas questões de forma independente do core. Mas a grande grande novidade...

... é o surgimento da versão 5.5 como milestone 2 a caminho do próximo ramo GA que, além de fundir as novidades da 5.4, oferece-nos (finalmente!):

• a possibilidade de alargar o particionamento para além das funções de particionamento, que eram pouquíssimas e até para particionar por data eram necessários alguns estratagemas;


• o suporte para key caches por partição (fantástico!);


• as tão esperadas funções SIGNAL e RESIGNAL - as marteladas que eram necessárias para contornar esta lacuna eram terríveis de manter :);


• o suporte para a replicação semi-síncrona sob a forma de plugin;


• e outras, que não obstante não serem enumeradas por mim, não devem ser descuradas na leitura!!

Claro que já houve experimentadores destas tecnologias, e aqui vos deixo mais material de leitura:

• A análise detalhada sobre as melhorias do particionamento, por Giuseppe Maxia (que esteve há dias no SAPO Codebits);


• Um Quick Start sobre a replicação semi-síncrona, também do Giuseppe Maxia;
  
• Um in-depth sobre a utilização do SIGNAL/RESIGNAL, por Roland Bouman;

Convido-vos a deixarem aqui links para os vossos artigos e comentários sobre as restantes funcionalidades.