My little corner of this place called the World Wide Web
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.
Continue reading
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.
Continue reading
Fringe, a new series on the Fox network that is using a new format Fox dubs Remote-Free TV.
The episodes are longer than your average sitcom. The Wikipedia entry on the show states that this series will have less commercials and promos.
While this is true, one of the interesting bits is that before each commercial they tell you how many seconds should pass before the next segment starts.
Another interesting aspect of the series is how they identify each location during the episode. Often shows just print plain text on the screen, however in Fringe they use 3D text on the screen and it is oriented differently depending on the scene.
As with many software packages that we deploy, system admins quite often get called upon to customize the application to suit the needs and brand of the enterprise they work for.
When I started deploying the Adobe Contribute client, customization wasn’t really on the radar. But as we got further into our deployment and support phases, it was clear that the default screens just weren’t cutting it when it came to clarity of use.
For instance, most of our users connect to the enterprise Contribute Publishing Server. In order to do this they have to enter a custom connect string after opening the client for the first time after installation. As normal with this sort of deployment, there were some users that didn’t read the instructions provided them, or failed to remember the special connection string used in the training classes.
Well, on the default welcome page in Contribute, there is this handy button labeled Create Connection. While this would be quite fine if we weren’t using the Publishing Server for maintaining user permissions and privileges, it doesn’t cooperate with our normal setup.
By customizing the welcome page I was able to remove the nice large link to creating your own connection.
Here’s what you need to know in order to do this. The welcome page is built on the fly from a Dreamweaver template.
Mac File Location
Windows File Location
While re-loading the OS and apps on my iMac at work, I ran into major issues whilst updating MS Office 2008. When running the first update, Office 2008 SP1 (12.1.0) I had no problems, however none of the other updates would run. I kept getting the error “You cannot install Office 2008 Updates on this volume. A version of the software required to install this update was not found on this volume.”
At first I thought that this might be due to some permissions shenanigans revolving around my AD/OD setup, since the logged in user was not a local admin, but had been granted administrator privileges through a nested group trick.
After more searching I ran across a post on the forums MacRumors.com pointing out problems when running updates on an Office 2008 install that had been altered by using Monolingual or XSlimmer.
Both of these programs were developed to slim down the sizes of binary applications on OS X. Monolingual strips the “additional languages” from OS X programs and operating system files, while XSlimmer is designed to remove both the extra language information and the unused binary code in a fat binary. I have never used either of these programs, since I was not concerned about the amount of disk space they utilize.
After more searching, I ran across a post in the Entourage Help Pages discussing troubleshooting Office 2008 installations. While this page also mentioned issues with installations being altered by Monolingual and XSlimmer, it also pointed out an issue with a workaround created to handle a bug in how Safari deals with the docx file extension. While the automator workflow mentioned does not appear to actually affect anything other than the names of files, it did jog my memory about something else Safari related that occured when installing Adobe CS 4 earlier the same day.
While installing CS 4 and the available updates, I was prompted to not only quit Safari, but also to quit XMarks for Safari. For those that don’t know, XMarks is a great service for synchronizing your browser bookmarks between multiple machines, platforms, and browsers.
On a hunch I quit XMarks for Safari, as well as the browser itself. No dice, I still got the error. Knowing how easy it would be to reinstall the helper application, I uninstalled XMarks. Eureka! The Office updaters now ran without a hitch. So, if you are having this problem, try deactivating or removing anything plugins that effect the default nature of Safari.
So this morning I fired up my iMac at work to continue on with editing this PHP form I have been working on. Now I usually use TextMate for my daily editor, since it is very lightweight.
Since I hadn’t actually created a TextMate project file, I just selected all the files and opened them using “Open With” in the context menu. Now normally I ignore the fact that I see the Opera browser listed in the menu, but now I saw it twice. I decided to find out where they live.
Turns out that the most updated versions of Adobe Device Central CS4 and Adobe Bridge CS4 contain Opera in the application package bundles. Opera version 9.27 is inside the Adobe Bridge CS4 application bundle while Opera version 9.20 is inside the Device Central CS4 application bundle.
I can understand why Adobe might need to ship Opera inside their application bundles to make their apps work, but I really wish that the Mac OS wouldn’t see them as usable outside the Adobe usage.
UPDATE (2009-04-26 7:06PM EDT): Apparently I was mistaken. When poking through the preferences of ClamXav in order to restructure my watch folders, I noticed a checkbox that I had overlooked. Apparently you can add the login item from within the main application. However, it still doesn’t start the Sentry app when adding the item. You have to manually click the “Save settings & Launch Sentry” button.
Recently I have bowed to the necessity of installing antivirus software on my Mac, both at work and at home.
In investigating the possibilities I decided to try out the open source antivirus solution ClamAV. While I tend to gravitate towards commercially supported security products when possible, I currently don’t have the extra money to spend on the Intego VirusBarrier product, and the budget at work is quite strained, as are budgets for most people.
I like the ClamXav frontend for the ClamAV engine. I know that I can do all the scanning functions from the command line, but I am fan of gui frontends do to the fact that they are often more user-friendly.
The ClamXav is a nice frontend. The only problem I have with it is that there is inherent mechanism to launch the sentry program at user login. The ClamXav Sentry application is contained in the Resources section of the Contents of the ClamXav application bundle. Below are the steps to add the application as a login item.
1. Open System Preferences from the Apple Menu
Open System Preferences
2. Open Accounts Preference Pane
System Prefences
3. Select Login Items
Login Items
4. Click the Plus sign button at the button of the Login Items list.
5. When the dialog window comes up, hit the Command + Shift + G keyboard combo.
6. In the window type the following:
/Applications/ClamXav.app/Contents/Resources/”
then click the Go button.
Enter the file path to the Resources of the ClamXav bundle
7. Select ClamXavSentry.app from the list and click the Add button.
Select the Sentry app
8. Congratulations, you have successfully added the ClamXav Sentry as a login item.
Login Item Added
I also wrote an Applescript application that will add the login item for you. The benefit of using my utility is that it launches ClamXav Sentry after adding the login item. You download a zipfile containing both the application and script file.
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.
One of the small annoyances I have with Firefox is the default URL used for the Google search plug-in. While I generally just type in a search term and hit enter, I do sometimes just hit enter without a corresponding search term just to get sent to the main Google page. Why do I do this? Mainly so that I can view the updated Google logos when they change for holidays.
With a default installation of Firefox the default Google page is the Mozilla Firefox Start Page. While this is nice from a corporate branding sense, this special page does not have the links to either iGoogle or the Google Accounts login page, nor does is feature the often customized Google logo. Also, none of the other search plug-ins that I have tested in Firefox exhibit a similar “feature”, they all dump you at the default page for that particular service.
Here’s how to change all of that.
Firefox 2.x for Mac OS X
Default: http://www.google.com/firefox
Changed: http://www.google.com
Firefox 2.x for Windows
Default: http://www.google.com/firefox
Changed: http://www.google.com
Voila! Now you have what many of my friends would have logically concluded as the expected action for the Google search plugin for Firefox.
Note that this mod will have to be changed for each successive update of the Firefox application, so it may not be to your taste.
Those of you out there who are running an installation of SCT Luminis 3 may have noticed that the browser check always comes up warning you that the browser is unsupported when using Firefox 2, even though all the features seem to be completely supported.
This is due to the fact that the browsercheck javascript does not know about the new agent string that was introduced with Firefox 2. Generally a new release, or service pack to Luminis fixes this for newer browsers.
In order to change this you will need to alter a couple of files in you Luminis install.
The two files that need to be altered are:
clientsniffer.js
In this file you will need to alter the conditional of the big if-statement that follows the assignment for the variable is_nav5.
The problem is that the if checks for the existence of a revision number of 1.8. What you need to do is add an additional check for a revision number of 1.8.1.6. So the if-statement conditional becomes:
if (is_nav5 || agt.indexOf(“rv:1.7.12″) != -1 || agt.indexOf(“rv:1.8″) != -1 || agt.indexOf(“rv:1.8.1.6″) != -1)
The next thing to do is to add an additional Firefox variable that is set to true if the major number is 2. I added this after the existing variable is_fox1_5.
var is_fox2 = (is_fox && (is_major == 2));
browserchk.thtml
In the browsercheck file you need to alter if-statement that sets the variable supported to have a true value. This if-statement should follow immediately after the one that checks for whether java is enabled in your browser.
What you need to add is an additional OR check, so that the if-statement conditional looks like the following:
if ((is_nav8) || (is_nav7) || (is_moz1_7) || (is_win && is_ie5up) || (is_win && is_ie6) || (is_saf1_3) || (is_fox1_5) || (is_fox2) || (is_win && is_fox1))
I have tested this change with Firefox 2.0.0.6 on the following browsers:
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