My last two posts, Starting NRPE via launchd and Nagios NRPE on OS X Server 10.5, concerned getting NRPE to run on OS X Server 10.5 and having it startup at system boot.
However, this is only part of the battle. Once you have Nagios monitoring setup on your server you also need to have some nice options for checking the availability of your running services.
Tim Wilson from the Savvy Technologist, wrote an NRPE plugin that helps out with this. The plugin check_osx_services does an excellent job of checking on the status for many services running on 10.5 Server.
The documentation on the plugin at the NagiosExchange site is pretty thorough. One thing that is not mentioned is that you will need to run the check_osx_services script as superuser since it calls the system level command serveradmin which must be run as root.
Last week I posted on how to setup NRPE on Mac OS X Server. Here is what you need to do to make it start up at system boot.
On a Linux or Solaris machine you can just include the call to the daemon in an init script like rc.local and it will be started when the OS boots. Unfortunately, Apple has made this a little more difficult on Mac OS X with Tiger and Leopard. The standard startup processes (cron, inetd, xinetd, etc.) have been rolled into a single process known as launchd.
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Recently I was tasked to install the Nagios add-on NRPE on two OS X 10.5 servers.
I read a little on the ‘net about it, but no one actually had much in the way of a walkthrough, so I thought I would fill the void.
The basic steps involve compiling the NRPE source, but doing so involves altering some of the code.
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Over the weekend I setup a Ubuntu 8.04 installation in my apartment. The main purpose was to have a box to use to connect to my Tivo, but I am also going to use it to play with Java servlet and jsp development.
Of course none of this is any fun without Internet access. So I started configuring my Linksys pci wireless adapter. Turns out that the longstanding bug that affects the WPA2 passphrase store in Gnome Network Manager is still not fixed.
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This is part one of a short series of articles detailing the process I went through to restore a friend’s table pc after her hard drive dies due to a head crash.
Background
My friend has a Gateway CX210X Convertible Notebook. This model uses a SATA internal drive. Her drive died sometime last Friday afternoon while working in Windows. You got the standard click of the drive arm against the platter that wouldn’t stop.
I tried some basic restoration techniques to see if I could at least see the drive:
Nothing worked. So I went out and bought a new hard drive for her from one of the local computer places in Valdosta, Belson’s pcXchange.
Installation Problems
At this point I thought I was going to be homefree, boy was I wrong. The first hurdle was getting the Windows install cd to even see the hard drive. Apparently the bios for the CX210X does not have a legacy option to allow the SATA controller to be seen as a standard IDE controller. No problem, I can just use a USB floppy drive to load the drivers before the install, right? Wrong.
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