Monitor APC Stats with Zenoss

I’ve (finally) published my first public project to the Internets! It’s a set of scripts to grab stats from the APC PHP opcode cacher for graphing inside Zenoss (though should be compatible with Nagios). It’s incredibly simple, but I have yet to find anyone else who has done this for Zenoss so I thought I would share in case it’s helpful. For now, it just grabs the hit ratio of the cache.

In the famous last words of many an open source project, “In the future, I plan on adding”:

  1. fragmentation graphs
  2. a ZenPack for easy installation
  3. Ideas?

Grab the scripts at Github and rough install instructions are listed on the README page.

Here’s a fairly boring screenshot of the graph in action:

Filed under How-Tos / Tips, News : Comments (1) : Jan 28th, 2011 by Wyatt Walter

Off Topic: Dreaming of Work

This post is mostly just an attempt to one-up Jason Nassi’s post on his bizarre dream, but my comment was a bit too long to leave in a regular comment elsewhere.. Plus, I thought my dreams might be enjoyed by others.

To the cloud!
A few weeks ago, I was working on a project at work to load test our application on EC2. One night during the project, we discovered that the fridge in our apartment had stopped working. It had been degrading over time, but we just kept turning it down (up?) and finally figured out what was happening. Anyway, that night I had a dream that our fridge had stopped working, so I wrote a script to push the stuff from our fridge into AWS to cool it so nothing would spoil. It was a perfectly good plan. I was going to pay per hour for them to cool our stuff and then pull it back down once we were all fixed up :)

Kicking the tires
Lately we’ve been looking for a new place to live that’s a little closer to work. We looked at a number of places last weekend. This last week at work, we had some issues with a newer version of PHP and some configuration options. And the dream? You guessed it. I was walking through one of the places we had been last weekend making sure each room had the right version of PHP for us.

Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (2) : Jan 21st, 2011 by Wyatt Walter

Using API Tools on Amazon AMIs

I did a fairly deep dive into some new cool things in EC2 this weekend and ran into something that caught me off guard. The default Amazon AMIs come with the EC2 tools pre-loaded and ready to go. Or so I read. But, when trying to run, I was greeted with a nice stack trace:

Unexpected error:
javax.net.ssl.SSLException: java.lang.RuntimeException: Unexpected error: java.security.InvalidAlgorithmParameterException: the trustAnchors parameter must be non-empty
at sun.security.ssl.Alerts.getSSLException(Alerts.java:208)
at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.fatal(SSLSocketImpl.java:1665)
at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.fatal(SSLSocketImpl.java:1628)
at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.handleException(SSLSocketImpl.java:1611)
at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.handleException(SSLSocketImpl.java:1537)
at sun.security.ssl.AppOutputStream.write(AppOutputStream.java:83)
(snipped)

Turns out it doesn’t quite have everything it needs. Even though it’s complaining about trustAnchors and such, all it really needs is a Java Runtime Environment..

yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Dec 13th, 2010 by Wyatt Walter

.local CNAME Queries Failing on OS X 10.6.5

I was helping my sister with an issue with connecting to her school’s email server from her MacBook last night and discovered something interesting. Her school uses a webmail.domain.com address for the front end for OWA which is just a CNAME to its real address – a .local address. This all worked fine until a few weeks or so ago – we later pieced together that that’s when she upgraded to 10.6.5.

It seems that in 10.6.5, OS X can’t follow that CNAME for some reason. I could ping the .local address just fine and the browser connected just fine, but when I tried to use the .com CNAME’d hostname, it would fail. The kicker? The dig utility seems to ignore all of this madness which made it lie to me, and that did not help at all while troubleshooting.

I was able to find an Apple forum thread about this with someone saying that rolling back the mDNS binaries to those shipped with 10.6.4 seemed to fix it, but it didn’t help in my case (and some others in the thread). I personally don’t use anything at work or at home using the .local domain, but I hope this gets fixed soon as it breaks a lot of Microsoft-centric networks as a lot tend to use .local for one reason or another..

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Dec 7th, 2010 by Wyatt Walter

Samsung TV Settings Reset at Power Off/On

This one is a bit off topic, but something that has been bugging me for the last week or so and I finally figured out, so I thought I’d share in case anyone out there is going through the same thing. I’ve been trying to adjust picture settings on our TV to get a little lower power consumption out of it, but every time I would change them, the settings would reset after 30 minutes or after restarting the TV. I dug through the manual and all over Samsung’s support site, but found nothing.

The answer was that the TV was stuck in a “demo mode” which is for when the TV is in the store so customers don’t mess up the settings too badly. With a little help from this thread, I was able to get it out. You can see if it’s in demo mode by hitting the “info” button the remote and if it says “demo mode” on the screen, then well I hope that explains it. Getting it out of this mode was trivial:

    1. Go to cable or air input
    2. Press volume up on the tv
    3. Press and hold the menu button on the tv

    That’s it! You should be able to hit the info button again and actually see info for the channel.

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    Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Nov 1st, 2010 by Wyatt Walter

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