Month: January 2008

General

Happy 50th Birthday LEGO Brick, my old friend

January 28, 2008 by 0 Comments

The infamous LEGO brick that we all know and love turned 50 years old today.

Personally, I have been a fan of LEGO for as long as I can remember and much to the credit of my forward-thinking parents (or were they just hoarders?), I still have pretty much all of it to this day. In recent years, I have discovered a renewed appreciation for this wonderful toy, mainly due to my 9 and 5-year old nephews and my 3 year-old daughter, all of whom play with the myriad of less-than-shiny bricks, wheels, windows, roof tiles and mini-people on an almost daily basis.

Amazingly, the boys have lots of their own (modern) LEGO but seem to prefer the simplicity and imagination of my collection. There aren’t many toys that could survive intact for over 30 years and still hold the imagination of today’s tech-hungry children for so long!

The LEGO company itself was actually first formed way back in 1934 by a Danish carpenter, Ole Christiansen, who had been making wooden toys for a number of years prior to that. It was in 1934 that he first named his company “LEGO”, a name that was derived from the Danish phrase leg godt that means “play well” but interestingly, LEGO also means “I assemble” in Latin. It was not until much later, in 1958, that the first LEGO brick was patented.

Gizmodo have also put together a great LEGO timeline in celebration of this momentous day.

Sources: SlashDot, WikiPedia

Technology

To script or not to script

January 26, 2008 by 0 Comments

In an interesting article on the merits (or not) of scripting languages, James Turner outlines where some of their strengths and weaknesses lie. He uses Perl as the example in this instance but on reading the article I found that many of the pros and cons readily apply to most other scripting languages I’ve used (Tcl, Python, Bash, Sh).

In particular, his comments about them being strong on cross-platform support and weak on performance-related applications definitely ring true from my past experiences with Tcl/Tk. However, one point that he did not make, which I feel is definitely one of scripting languages’ stronger points, is in the area of custom testing and debugging, in the context of prototype product design and integration.

The likes of Perl, Python and/or Tcl really can enable you to glue together some pretty compelling, custom-made testing utilities, often without the need for complicated frameworks or other plugins. In particular, the ability to create your own extensions (using C or even SWIG) can make for some pretty powerful, tailor-made manufacturing test tools (trust me, I’ve been there!).

Of course this may not suit everyone’s needs, and there will be those that will opt for off-the-shelf products that do similar. However, if you are dealing with a newly designed product or hardware appliance featuring custom firmware not seen before, that needs to run on several different platforms, then a decent scripting language will most definitely be your friend.

Source: CIO.com

Technology

Syslog connections rejected using Syslog-NG on Solaris

January 25, 2008 by 2 Comments

The Problem

After an upgrade from Syslog-NG version 1.6.7 to version 2.0.5, our syslog server began reporting the following error each time an event was received from a remote host:

Syslog connection rejected by tcpd; from=’AF_INET(127.0.0.1:XXXXX)’

The syslog server was a Solaris x86 system which had a number of reverse SSH tunnels to several SPARC-based syslog clients. The version of syslog-ng was obtained from sunfreeware.com in binary form on both systems.

The Solution

It turns out that Syslog-NG 2.x introduced support for TCP Wrappers (which tcpd is part of) and thus, the settings in my /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny files were actually preventing syslog-ng from accessing port 514 on the local host. Adding the following entry to hosts.allow seems to have fixed the problem:

syslog-ng: localhost

Of course you will need to refresh/restart the inetd service after you do this (svcadm refresh/restart inetd).

Technology - TSSG

Structure 101 by Headway Software nominated for Jolt award

January 23, 2008 by 1 Comment

Congratulations to the team at Headway Software whose excellent Structure 101 product has been nominated for a Jolt award (in the Design and Modeling category). The Jolt Awards are the “Oscars” of the software industry and it is a fantastic accolade for any company to even be nominated.

The very best of luck to Chris, Paul, Ian and the rest of the Headway team in March when the winners are announced.

Sources: Chris Chedgey, Reuters

Technology

Installing Nagios on Solaris

January 21, 2008 by 10 Comments

If you are not familiar with it, Nagios is an open source system and network monitoring application that keeps a watchful eye on hosts and services that you specify, alerting you when things go bad and when they get better. It was designed to run under Linux but, according to the creators, should also run on other Unix variants. With this in mind, I decided to try it out on Solaris.

Fortunately, they provide a very comprehensive User Guide and trust me, you’re going to need it. Suffice it to say, there is a section early in this document entitled Advice for Beginners which is pretty blunt about how tricky Nagios is to set up and, believe me, they are not wrong. Having said that, they do also say that once you get it running you will never want to be without it and I can definitely subscribe this this notion too.
Anyway, here are my notes from installing Nagios on Solaris:

My Setup

  • Solaris 10 (u3) for x86
  • Sun Studio 12
  • Nagios 2.10
  • Nagios Plugins 1.4.11

Building Nagios

I downloaded the Nagios source tar ball and unpacked it as a non-root user. Then, following the User Guide, I ran the configure script with no argument (implying I wanted all default settings) followed make all and this seemed to work fine.

Building Nagios Plugins

Nagios does most things by using other scripts/applications which it calls plugins. The Nagios website provides a collection of popular plugins for you to build. Once again, I did so using a configure command followed by a make all command. However, this did not go entirely smoothly:

  1. A number of the plugins failed to build citing an “undefined symbol: floor” error. This was resolved by adding -lm to the LIBS defined in line 328 of nagios-plugins-1.4.11/plugins/Makefile. This could probably also have been fixed by adding $(MATHLIBS) to the links statement of the affected plugins but that would have been more work.
  2. The check_dhcp module failed to compile citing several unknown data types (i.e. u_int8_t and u_int32_t). This was resolved by adding a -D__solaris__ to CPPFLAGS definitions at line 161 of nagios-plugins-1.4.11/plugins-root/Makefile
  3. The nagios-plugins-1.4.11/plugins-root/Makefile was also missing the same -lm link parameter as the plugins Makefile (line 221)

Once all of the above changes were make, all of the plugins seemed to build correctly.

Problems Found During Nagios Configuration

1. check_ping plugin did not work

No matter what way I configured the use of the check_ping plugin (in localhost.cfg, services section) it always reported:

CRITICAL – You need more args!!!
Could not open pipe:

A number of websites suggested that this was an IPv6 issue and that I should have used the --with-ipv6=no in my original call to the configure script when building the plugins. However, this was not the solution for me. It turns out that the definition of PING_COMMAND in nagios-plugins-1.4.11/config.h was empty and thus the check_ping plugin was actually making no attempt whatsoever to ping the requested host. I suspect that the reason for this is that I built the software as a non-root user which, on Solaris, does not have the ping command in it’s path (since ping is located in /usr/sbin on Solaris). Hence, the original configure script was unable to produce a valid definition for PING_COMMAND.

The solution to this was to edit nagios-plugins-1.4.11/config.h and add the following definition for PING_COMMAND (line 796)

#define PING_COMMAND “/usr/sbin/ping -s %s 64 %u”

The above command specific to Solaris and makes the Solaris version of ping behave like the Linux ping command. After this edit, I had to force a rebuild of the check_ping plugin (touch plugins/check_ping.c; make)

2. statusmap.cgi did not build

I only noticed this when I tried to view the Status Map section of Nagios. In short, the reason why this has not built is that I was missing a GD library on my Solaris system. The solution was to download and install a version of the GD library (and each of its dependent packages). I got mine from sunfreeware.com. The statusmap.cgi utility then built correctly and once I copied it to the libexec directory where Nagios was installed, it worked.

3. VRML Browser Plugin required

When I tried to view the 3-D Status Map options in Nagios, my brower kept launching a “Save As” dialog box. I turns out I needed to install a VRML plugin in my browser. I chose one called Cortona from Parallel Graphics. It seems to work fine in Firefox although, as yet, the 3-D Status Map view is more impressive than it is useful (for me anyway).

Conclusion

Nagios indeed took a long time to install, configure and set up. However, I can confirm that it was worth the effort and I am very pleased with it so far.

Technology

MySQL Proxy Gotcha on Solaris SPARC

January 21, 2008 by 0 Comments

The Problem

During a recent install of MySQL Proxy on a Solaris 10 system (sparc u3), we encountered the following error whenever we supplied the --pid-file command-line argument:

Conversion from character set ‘646’ to ‘UTF-8’ is not supported

However, if we omitted the --pid-file argument, it worked just fine.
The Solution
Running ldd against the application revealed no missing libraries but when we ran it with truss, we discovered that it was indeed missing some library files:

open64("/export/home/mysqldev/mysql-proxy-32bit/inst/glib/lib/charset.alias", O_RDONLY) Err#2 ENOENT
access("/usr/lib/iconv/geniconvtbl/binarytables/646%UTF-8.bt", R_OK) Err#2 ENOENT
access("/usr/lib/iconv/646%UTF-8.so", R_OK) Err#2 ENOENT
open("/usr/lib/iconv/alias", O_RDONLY) Err#2 ENOENT

It turns out that the Solaris system we were using was originally installed using the Core System cluster (SUNWCreq) and did not have all the requisite Unicode packages installed. So, an installation of the SUNWuiu8 package (from the Solaris distribution media) duly resolved the matter.

Technology

Running multiple instances of MySQL with Solaris Coolstack 1.2

January 21, 2008 by 0 Comments

We recently had a requirement to run two instances of MySQL on two separate Solaris systems (for the purposes of dual-master replication). The systems in question were both SunFire T2000s running Solaris 10 (U3) and Coolstack 1.2 and already had a previous/single instance of MySQL running (SMF service csk-mysql).

In the end, it was a relatively straightforward exercise in that all we really did was replicate the existing instance (control script, configuration file and manifest file) and change the necessary bits of the resultant files so that the new instance was sufficiently different to the old, in the end, producing two independent SMF services (csk-mysql1 and csk-mysql2). Specifically, the following files were created:

MySQL Control Scripts:
/opt/coolstack/lib/svc/method/svc-cskmysql1
/opt/coolstack/lib/svc/method/svc-cskmysql1

MySQL Configuration Files:
/etc/my1.cnf
/etc/my2.cnf

MySQL Manifest Files:
/var/svc/manifest/network/cskmysql1.xml
/var/svc/manifest/network/cskmysql2.xml

The manifest files were identical but for the name of the service and the control script they invoke. The control scripts were also identical but for the configuration file and DBDIR that they use and the difference(s) in the configuration files were mainly in terms of the port numbers and socket files used.

Beware

The only thing that caught us out was in modifying the control scripts (to tell them which configuration file they should use). This was done by adding a --defaults-file argument to the invocation of mysql_safe. However, you need to ensure that this argument is the first one you pass to mysql_safe. Otherwise, MySQL will launch will not load the correct configuration settings. This is not (well) documented so beware!

Also, when trying to access the new instances via the mysql client, you will need to add the -P and -S arguments.

Technology

Renaming a Solaris system

January 20, 2008 by 0 Comments

I’ve had to change the hostname of a number of Solaris systems over the past few weeks, some of which were (sparse) Solaris zones. Here are some notes for my/your future reference:

File Global Zones Non-Global Zones
/etc/nodename Yes Yes
/etc/hostname.ifname Yes No
/etc/hosts Yes Yes
/etc/inet/hosts Yes Yes
/etc/inet/ipnodes Yes Yes

Notes

  1. You will need to replace the ifname above with the name of the appropriate interface on your system.
  2. Depending on your system configuration, I may of course be missing some files. However, the above worked for me!
  3. None of the systems in question were running IPv6
Technology

Uninstalling Sun Studio

January 16, 2008 by 1 Comment

I recently had reason to upgrade to a newer version of Sun Studio on a Solaris 10 system. I had Studio 11 installed but needed to go to version 12 for better support of natively compiled Ruby Gem packages (e.g. mongrel). However, uninstalling Sun Studio is not the most readily documented thing in the world so, for my own future reference, here is the easiest way to do it:

# cd /var/sadm/prod/com.sun.studio_11
# ./batch_uninstall_all

After this, just follow the on-screen instructions …