HP ML110 G5 and Server 2012

[Abstract]
In this post I'll talk a bit about getting Server 2012 running on a HP ML110 G5 server.

[Prerequisites]
Basic knowledge of Windows driver management is necessary to get the HPI0002 management driver working.
You'll also need a HP ML110 G5... :-)

[General]
With the release of Server 2012 to service providers and probably other Microsoft partners a few days ago I wanted to test things out on some spare hardware before deploying.
The only thing suitable to use at the office was a HP ML110 G5 from a few years ago. Officially it isn't supported by HP for Server 2012 and neither is the G6. Only the G7 has been tested according to this overview http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/software/microsoft/windows-server8/index.html.

Another interesting thing about the above page is the following quote "Updated drivers will be provided for test prior to release of Windows Server 2012."I don't see any drivers around so I don't know what they mean by prior to the release. Possibly it has been defined by the HP marketing division as about the same time as Ballmer makes his stage appearance, throwing DVDs to the cheering crowd like some geeky plastic orgy version of a Mardi Gras parade (can't you just picture it?)

Anyway. In the mean time while we wait for HP to release drivers, possibly for the G5 as well as more recent models, we can make due with what we got.

First of all, the raid card is not supported and while 2008 R2 drivers load and find the hard disks, they suffer from serious stability issues.
Neither will the installation finish if Native Mode Operation is set to Auto. You'll find it in Advanced->Advanced Chipset Control in the BIOS setup.
As for other BIOS settings, I did a reset to setup defaults and changed the above parameter and activated Virtualization Technology.

After everything is installed you will see that the chipset is completely native and detected properly (It's an Intel 3200-series) and actually most other devices will work out of the box. They did pretty much the same on 2008 R2 with no ill effects so it would be a sad day if 2012 was worse.

Two things that won't work properly is the graphics card (a Matrox G200e) for which I can't find a driver and an unknown device called HPI0002. This device is pretty harmless and will work fins with the 2008 R2 driver.
The HPI0002 driver has to be installed manually so download it from the link below or google for "HP ProLiant 100-Series Management Controller Driver for Windows Server 2003/2008 x64 edition" and extract it to a custom folder before installing it manually through Device Manager.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=uk&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesId=3884323&prodNameId=3884324&swEnvOID=4024&swLang=13&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=MTX-0198d1de76cb45b6a05f50342e

Raid and graphics card drivers might surface once HP gets into the game and we have a slim chance of getting proper drivers even though the G5 will probably not be officially supported. The G7 uses a B110i raid card and a Matrix G200eH graphics card, names very similar to the ones used in the G5.
I'd say "fingers crossed" but being an agnostic I'll have to settle for; i implore thee random fluctuations of chance in the space-time continuum.

Feel free to ask any questions or add comments regarding this post in the comments. I'll try and answer best i can, promise.
Cheers

TIP: Changing Safari 6 default search engine

[Abstract]
In this tip I will show you how to change the default search engine in Safari 6. This could be to change the language used or to switch search engine altogether.

[Prerequisites]
This has been tested on Safari 6.0 build 8536.25 on Mountain Lion.

[General]
One of the most ridiculously annoying and thoughtless things in OS X is Safari's search engine setting.

While you can switch between Google, Yahoo and Bing, you cannot specify which site the request should be sent to. As far as i can tell, that is decided by the installed language of OS X.

Personally, I always use English when I install operating systems and software and I have done so pretty much since Windows 2000 came out. The reason is simple; instructions and error messages on the internet are almost always written in English, and while I am fully capable of doing a translation on the fly, it often goes wrong because the manufacturers translators didn't think of the same word as me.

I do however set everything else to Sweden or Swedish; currency, time formats, timezone and such. And since I often use Google to find results relating to Sweden I need to use google.se, not google.com.

For over a year now I have learned to live with Safari 5 and going to the address bar to change google.com to google.se every time I needed. In Safari 6 however, the omnibus has made that approach a lot more time consuming and so tonight I decided to have another go at solving the problem.

I was ready to give up once more when i stumbled across an excellent little extension called "Safari Keyword Search" that solves the problem very neatly and also gives us keyword search, a very neat feature.
Keyword search lets you specify keywords to change the search engine on the fly. For example, searching for "Bruce Springsteen" would simply return a normal google search, but adding the Wikipedia keyword "w" to the beginning would instead direct you to Wikipedia and a search result there.

To install and configure the extension, follow the instructions below.

1. Head over to http://safarikeywordsearch.aurlien.net and download the extension.
2. Install the extension by opening the download menu in Safari and clicking it.
3. Open any webpage and right click on any empty space. Click "Keyword search settings"
4. The item list on the left shows you all search keywords and also an item called "Default". Default is the search engine used whenever no keyword is specified. Select "Default".
5. By default, Safari Keyword Search used google.com and I'm feeling lucky. Edit the search string to your preferred settings. In my case I wanted a plain google.se search so I changed it to "http://www.google.se/search?q=@@@".
6. You can add new, modify or remove other items in the list to suit your preferences. For example, you might want to remove everything but Google Maps and Wikipedia but add your favorite fora.

[A tip on adding new engines]

The Url expansion field might be a bit intimidating but there is a simple trick which usually works perfectly. Go to the site you want to add a keyword search for, enter TEST in the search field, set any settings you want and press the search button.

Then copy the entire URL and paste it in the Url expansion field and then replace "TEST" with "@@@".

Safari Keyword Search simply looks at the specified URL, replaces @@@ with whatever you searched for and then opens that URL. Any search engine that is entirely built around querystrings (most good ones should be) will handle that perfectly.

As usual, ask any questions and I will try to answer as best I can.

Cheers

TIP: Apache servername error

[Prerequisites]
General knowledge of Linux is required.

This tip has been tested on Debian Squeeze with Apache 2.2.16.


[General]
Tonight i deployed a brand new Debian server with Apache and i got an annoying, but essentially harmless, warning every time i restarted Apache.
The error was Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 172.25.27.10 for ServerName

The solution, after a little googling and a few false suggestions, was really simple.
Edit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf with your favorite text editor. I use nano so my command was (note that i use sudo even on Debian) sudo nano /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
Add a new line which reads Servername [your hostname], for example Servername webserver01

Restart Apache and everything should be fine.

Feel free to ask any questions or add comments regarding this post in the comments. I'll try and answer best i can, promise.

Cheers

TIP: Disable Ubuntu frame buffer (useful for Hyper-V)

[Prerequisites]
No knowledge of Ubuntu is necessary to use this tip.
This tip has been tested on Ubuntu Server 10.04 x64 and Hyper-V 2008 R2.


[General]
Most who has tried installing Linux-distributions on Hyper-V know that installing and working in console mode can be almost unbearable. I our Hyper-V system i get 5-7 seconds of delay for each dialog during the installation of Ubuntu and every line of text can take a second or more to print.
The feature causing this problem is the frame buffer, it's job is to create some interesting possibilities with the display. It's a fair guess that slowing it down to glacier speed wasn't supposed to be one of them.

To solve this in Ubuntu is actually really simple, you just have to know where to look.

Fixing the problem in the installer
When you boot the Ubuntu Server install disc you first select your language and you are then presented with several options, the first being "Install Ubuntu Server".
If you look in the lower left corner you will see "F6 Other Options". Go ahead and press F6 and then press escape to close the menu that opens up.
You will now see a line of text that was hidden before, it is actually the command to boot the installer and it ends with "quiet --".
Your cursor will be at the end of the line already so go ahead and add a space and then type "vga16fb.modeset=0" without the quotes and press enter.

You should see the usual Ubuntu installer but greatly enhanced in speed.

Fixing the problem permanently

The kernel boot option we added during the install will actually be added to grub and run every time the system boots. But for some reason it gives an error saying modeset doesn't exist. It still works, you will see a lot better performance, but i really hate boot errors, benign or not.

So to fix this permanently, the easiest thing we can do is just blacklist the entire module.

Edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer.conf with your favorite text editor. At the bottom, add "blacklist vga16fb" without the quotes, then run sudo update-initramfs -u and reboot.

The error should be gone.

Feel free to ask any questions or add comments regarding this post in the comments. I'll try and answer best i can, promise. Cheers

Article: Installing Nagios V-Shell on Ubuntu

[Abstract]
In this article I will describe how to install the new Nagios interface "V-Shell" in Ubuntu.


[Prerequisites]
This article requires you to have intermediate knowledge of Ubuntu.
It also assumes that you have a working install of Nagios 3. If you don't please see my previous article "Installing Nagios 3 on Ubuntu" for help.

These instructions has been tested on Ubuntu server 11.04 x64.


[General]
In a previous article I described how to install Nagios 3 on Ubuntu. While that install was fully working, Nagios has (fairly) recently released an optional improved interface which I highly suggest that you take a look at.
The new interface, dubbed V-Shell, looks a lot nicer and extends the functionality of the basic interface that comes with Nagios. I would also seem that V-Shell receives updates and improvements whereas the basic interface is pretty much where it's at.

There are a few things one should know about V-Shell. For one it doesn't actually replace the basic interface, but rather piggybacks on it, parsing it and changing the look. Some features actually link right back into the basic interface.
However, V-Shell is simple and works pretty well and I think that we will see some improvement in the future.
That said, V-Shell is probably not the best interface for Nagios there is and i encourage you to have a look around. I thought Centreon looked very nice but I just couldn't make the damn thing install.

On the subject of installation. I suggest that you go over to nagios.org, find the pdf with the installation instructions for V-Shell and print it out, then use it as toilet paper. Yes, it is in fact that bad.
Not only is it written very specifically for distributions that folder-wise look nothing like Ubuntu, but they also seem to omit about half the instructions needed to make it work.
That is why I wrote this article.

[Installing V-Shell]
Okay, so I will assume that you have a working Nagios 3 setup and are able to access the basic web interface by appending /nagios3/ to the server address.

To install V-Shell follow these simple instructions

1. Download V-Shell to your home folder. I use wget so the full command is as follows. Please note that the url to the latest version might change. wget http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/exchange/nagiosvshell/vshell.tar.gz
2. Unpack vshell.tar.gz by issuing the following command tar -xf vshell.tar.gz
3. My default install of Nagios uses Apache and the root folder is /var/www/. I want V-Shell to be accessible directly from the website root so I simply cleared out all files from /var/www/ and copied the entire V-Shell folder contents to it by issuing the command sudo cp -r /home/eadmin/vshell/* /var/www/
4. There are a few files in there that we don't need to be on the website so go ahead and delete the following files using sudo rm; CHANGELOG, gpl.txt, install.sh, README.txt and TODO.txt
5. Enter the config folder using cd /var/www/config/
6. Somewhere around here is where the V-Shell installation document goes wrong, because it simply tells you to modify the config file and a few things it assumes about Apache. Fortunately I know what to do.
   Open vshell.conf with a text editor, I use nano so my command is sudo nano vshell.conf
7. Since we use the root for vshell, comment out the BASEURL line with a ;
8. Set COREURL to "nagios3"
9. Set STATUSFILE to "/var/cache/nagios3/status.dat"
10. Set OBJECTSFILE to "/var/cache/nagios3/objects.cache"
11. Set CGICFG to "/etc/nagios3/cgi.cfg"
12. Exit and save, then move the file to /etc/
13. Remove the entire config-folder by first going out of it using cd .. and then issuing the command sudo rm -r config
14. Go to /etc/apache2/sites-available using cd /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/
15. Open the symlinked site file, in my case it was called 000-default so I issued the command sudo nano 000-default
16. Find the line that says <Directory /var/www/>
17. Below it, change everything so that only text between it and the next </Directory> is the following:
    Options None
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    allow from all
    AuthName "Nagios Access"
    AuthType Basic
    AuthUserFile /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
    Require valid-user
18. Exit and save.
19. Finally, restart Apache by issuing the following command: sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

And that's it. Fire up your favorite browser and go to http://[server address]/ and login. V-Shell should load nicely.

[A note on folder structure]

This example used the root folder for V-Shell, if you prefer to have V-Shell in a subfolder, for example /vshell/, you can put the files in /var/www/vshell/, change the value of BASEURL above to "vshell" and modify vshell_apache.conf in the config folder to match your paths, copy it to /etc/apache2/conf.d/ and then restart Apache.

Feel free to ask any questions or add comments regarding this post in the comments. I'll try and answer best I can, promise.

Cheers

Article: Installing Nagios 3 on Ubuntu

[Abstract]
In this article I will describe the process of setting up a basic Nagios 3 monitoring server using Ubuntu.
For more in-depth topics, please see follow-up articles that I will be posting.

[Prerequisites]
This article requires you to have intermediate knowledge of Ubuntu.
It also assumes that you have a basic install of Ubuntu server 11.04 (other versions might work fine) on a suitable server. I my case this is a VMware Server guest and I have performed a default installation, only adding an openssh server to simplify management. I have also updated it with all the latest patches and installed drivers.

These instructions has been tested on Ubuntu server 11.04 x64.

[General]
In my line of work I have two choices, I can sit and wait for angry customers to call me to tell me something isn't working, or I could find out myself and be well on my way to solving it when they call.
For about two and half years now, my firm has chosen to do the former, simply because no one had any good experience with monitoring software or the free time to find out.
I can tell you now that if I had known how easy a Nagios install was two years ago, I would have taken the time to do this. Granted it might have been a lot harder back then.

One of the main problems with installing Nagios is it's near complete lack of documentation and the fact that every single guide has a different way of doing it. I will be the first to say that this one doesn't exactly improve that situation per say, but this article has one major advantage; it rocks!

[Installing Nagios]
So lets get started.
Like the prerequisites above explained, I will assume that your Ubuntu installation is already complete and that you have installed any additional tools you prefer, like ssh, a text editor etc. No Nagios-prerequisites are included in this so don't bother about apache, mail servers or anything like that at this point.
You should take a moment to decide how mail will work in your environment. I'm not entirely sure if there are parts of Nagios that can benefit from receiving mail but we will at least have to send out mail. For now I decided to relay all emails to my ISP's smtp server and not to complicate things by setting up a local mail server.
We will use this information in the following instructions

To install Nagios 3 just follow these simple instructions

1. Make sure aptitude is up to date by issuing sudo apt-get update
2. Install nagios 3 by issuing sudo apt-get install nagios3
3. Gape in amazement at how page after page of installation instructions can be condensed into that.
4. The setup will ask a series of questions regarding mail configuration. As discussed above I selected Satellite system as the server type.
5. Depending on your choice in step 4, the setup will ask some questions about mail domains and such. For this setup I choose so specify [companyname].local for addresses that is missing domain name (I don't intend this to happen so it shouldn't matter, hopefully) and specified my ISP's smtp server as relay host.
6. After the mail configuration, the setup will ask for a password for the default user nagiosadmin. We will be disabling this account later on so choose any password for now.
7. That is it. Unless you have received any errors everything should be good to go.

[Creating a new user]

Personally, the first thing I want to do is create a new user and get rid of nagiosadmin for security reasons.

To create a new user you have to do a few things.

1. Create the user in Nagios. My new user is called jonatan so my command looks like this: sudo htpasswd -c /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users jonatan
2. Specify a password.
3. Repeat for additional users BUT WITHOUT "-c", it creates a new file and thus removes any old users.
4. Edit /etc/nagios3/cgi.cfg, I use nano so my command looks like this: sudo nano /etc/nagios3/cgi.cfg
5. A page or two down you will see a few variables beginning with "authorized", read what each one does and then remove nagiosadmin from each one and add users to your liking, I added my new "jonatan" user to every one except for read only users (which is disabled anyway)

[Testing]
At this point we're ready for a test.
Fire up your favorite web browser and enter the following address and login with your user. In my case the server ip was 192.168.0.56 so I entered http://192.168.0.56/nagios3/


Behold! Possibly the ugliest interface in the history of good software. But it does what it's supposed to do so for now just browse around and have a look at what the default config can do.

[Finishing points]
Compared to some other guides out there, this one is straighter than an Australian highway. Ubuntu makes this incredibly easy. Unfortunately, this is the easiest part, Nagios' documentation is legendary and Ubuntu's different folder structure makes a lot of it near impossible to figure out.
But that's a later problem.

In some follow-up articles I will show you how to straight out some small errors in the configs, install Nagios V-Shell and add monitored machines.
Stay tuned!

Feel free to ask any questions or add comments regarding this post in the comments. I'll try and answer best I can, promise.

Cheers

Rant: Where Cisco went wrong

First post in 6 months, yay.

So i need to get this off my chest, and with any luck get a few suggestions or helpful comments.

So i've been meaning to learn Cisco now for a couple of years but have always pushed it back for another time. I figure it's well past another time by now.

I'm at the first step and I'm already stuck, thanks to Cisco and their crazy line of products. Basically I'm just trying to find a suitable device to get going.
As I find that the best way to learn something is to use it live, I figure I'll take my beloved home Vyatta router and put in on hiatus for a while whilst I try out and learn Cisco.

For that reason I have a few requirements that Cisco seem pretty unwilling to meet.

• Roughly 200mbit throughput.
• Static dhcp leases.
• NAT
• Firewall with ACL.
• QOS might be needed.

I really don't think that is a tall order, perhaps the 200mbit throughput is a bit steep but when i have 200mbit internet I think I should use it.

So what devices have we that can do this?
Simply put we can categorize Ciscos current lines for this type of usage into ASA and IOS. IOS is used in all the cool stuff while ASA is more leaned towards all-in-one boxes. The ASA lines sounds great in theory and the 5505 is a very neat device at a good price.
But wait, what is that? The DHCP server can't do static leases? WTF? ASA also has a few other quirks which I have not been able to fully substantiate, making any ASA device not quite suitable to learn from, as well as missing one of the key features i really want.

IOS on the other hand suffers from another condition, it doesn't have a very good firewall. I have found hints that an advanced firewall software pack or such is available but have have not been able to make out how that works or what it costs.
IOS based devices also have another big drawback, they cost a lot when you need high throughput. A 1921 at twice the price of a 5505 can in theory do 200mbit (50 more than 5505) but my sources tell me that since 5505 is made to run a firewall and such, this is actually already calculated whereas a 1921 will drop to sub 100mbit if firewall, nat and acl is activated.
Going for the IOS based routers simply aren't possible because of the price.

So this is were it leaves me. I will have to get an ASA, or possibly a cheaper PIX which is pretty much the same as software and features go. Not good.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Cheers