One Suggestion by ... Calhariz

Thanks to the work of Laurent Bigonville, now the at daemon have SELinux support.

So here is a new release at 3.1.18.

Please test it.

Some notes on locking.

flock (1) (2)

lockfile (1)

Do not put the PID inside the lock file.

mutt_dotlock (1)

lockfile_create (3)

maillock (1) lockfile-create lockfile-remove lockfile-touch lockfile-check

lockfile-create --use-pid -r 0 file ; echo $?

lockfile-remove file

if ! lockfile-create --use-pid -r 0 file ; then echo no lock ; else echo lock ; fi

I have published a new version of switchconf.

There are a number of changes since the previous public release 0.0.9 that I have to thank to John Halam. He sent me a big patch with a lots of new features that I am integrating one by one.

You may download switchconf from here.

Interesting limits of openafs 1.6.x

Max Partition? max signed int64

Volume Max Size?

Bigger than 2TiB

Quota Max Size

2 TiB

Max Files per directory

64.000 entries, around 32k filenames.

Max Files per volume

Around 32 million files.

Max Filename?

255 chars

Number of ACL-Entries (per directory)?

20

Maximum number of servers for a read only volume:

13

I have made a Debian package for kibana software. You may download the kibana_0.2.0_35_g40f2512_3-1_all.deb file or the sources kibana_0.2.0_35_g40f2512_3-1.dsc.

In the past I had to install many times, by hand, extra software on Unix machines, specially because of missing useful software like a C compiler or because I like too much to use the bash. In the end it can get very messy I promised myself to never do again a make install for manually installing software in a Debian machine.

It's possible and it pays on the long run. When you take a program from outside the distribution you need to: configure, compile, install and document what you have done. So you can do it again with the next version. Specially when you have done local modifications. If you put your software inside a Debian package and follow the most sensible Debian Policy rules you get:

• The documentation on how to configure, build and install the software is in debian/rules file.

• It's easy to upgrade or remove the software, because is a Debian package.

• You can use a patch system like quilt or dpatch to isolate your local changes from the upstream sources. If you create different patches files, for every logical feature you enhance or fix, it will be easier to drop them when the new version have the desired feature and to know what features needs to be ported for the new version of the upstream software.

• You can do it even with the binaries of proprietary software. Its easy to take an rpm or tar files with the binaries and insert them inside the sources of a Debian package. With the proper care it's easy to update the sources for the next upgrade.

For example I have been doing this for packaging the pristine upstream binary of eclipse, because the teachers of my University usually requests a newer version of eclipse than what is available from Debian stable or even unstable.

Another example is the support software for HP hardware before HP officially supported Debian. I have taken the original rpm files or the scexe scripts and convert them into a debian file. Usually I need only to change two files with every new release of software, the Makefile with the name of the new rpm file and the debian/changelog with the new version and what is new.

In the end it's easier than it seams to create and maintain a Debian package. It's a steep curve, but pays off on the long run.

The good thing is all this approaches are compatible with a puppet or chef system for managing the Unix servers.

Monitoring a network or a group of servers using nagios have some problems. Receiving alarms by email or have a browser with a open page to the nagios site is an option that don't fit well in the work flow of some people.

Nagstatmon is a program that solves that problem. It opens a small window or icon on a taskbar of your desktop and show how many alarms are active. When an alarm triggers you can see where and what kind of alarm and easily open a connection for managing the equipment in fault.

This program is available in Debian testing (squeeze) but the package is compatible with Debian stable (v5.0, lenny).

The homepage for the software is http://nagstamon.sourceforge.net/

Debian package v0.0.9-2 of switchconf have migrated from unstable to testing. This new version have changed only the package, not the code of switchconf. Follows the changelog.

  * Fix bashism in a private rule on debian/rules file (Closes: #581451).
  * Add remote_fs to dependency of init.d.
  * Bump standard version to 3.8.4, no changes needed. 

I have published a new version of switchconf.

There were changes to the build process so it depend less on Debian software. The package was build to be used on my job, so was not uploaded to Debian.

Can be downloaded from https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?grou...