TOra For Database Development

TOra

TOra is an open-source multi-platform database management GUI that supports accessing most of the common database platforms in use, including Oracle, MySQL, and Postgres, as well as limited support for any target that can be accessed through Qt's ODBC support. TOra has been built for various Linux distributions, Mac OS X, MS Windows, and UNIX platforms.

Set Up an Email Gateway with CentOS Linux�5.4 � Aaron Walrath – Another IT Guy's Meanderings

A very useful mail gateway setup on Linux to be an edge server for MS Exchange.

Set Up an Email Gateway with CentOS Linux�5.4 � Aaron Walrath – Another IT Guy's Meanderings

Heartbeat on CentOS

When you try to install heartbeat using yum when the dependencies are not installed you get the following error.

yum -y install heartbeat

useradd: user hacluster exists
error: %pre(heartbeat-2.1.3-3.el5.centos.x86_64) scriptlet failed, exit status 9
error:   install: %pre scriptlet failed (2), skipping heartbeat-2.1.3-3.el5.centos

Due to this error heartbeat is not installed.

A simple fix is install heartbeat again using yum and that should solve the problem until someone upstream fixes the installer.

EPEL - FedoraProject

EPEL - FedoraProject

Very Good resource for yum based installation of packages not available from the Main repository.

Nagios Plugin to check file age on remote machine

You have to have a user account on the remote machine with ssh public and private key setup so that nagios user can login with our a password. The time is in seconds.

Nagios Command definition is as follows

define command{
        command_name    check_remote_fileage
        command_line    $USER1$/check_remote_fileage -H user@$HOSTADDRESS$ -f $ARG1$ -w $ARG2$ -c $ARG3$
        }

Script

#!/bin/bash
if (( $# < 8 )); then
        echo "Usage: $0 -H hostname -f remote file path -w warn -c crit"
        exit 3
fi

while getopts "H:f:w:c:" OPT; do
        case "$OPT" in
        H)      HOST=$OPTARG
                ;;
        f)      File=$OPTARG
                ;;
        w)      w=$OPTARG
                ;;
        c)      c=$OPTARG
                ;;
        \?)     echo "Error"
                exit 3;
                ;;
        esac
done

CURRTIME=$(ssh $HOST "perl -e 'print time;'")
FILETIME=$(ssh $HOST  "perl -e 'printf "%d\n", ((stat(shift))[9]);' $File")
let "DIFFTIME = CURRTIME - FILETIME"
if (( $DIFFTIME >= $w && $DIFFTIME < $c)) ; then
        echo "WARNING: $File is $DIFFTIME sec old (threshold w= $w) "
        exit 1
elif (( $DIFFTIME >= $c)) ;then
        echo "CRITICAL: $File is $DIFFTIME sec old (threshold c= $c) "
        exit 2;
else
        echo "OK: $File is with in threshold $w / $c "
        exit 0
fi

NetBackup Activity Monitor

At my work during project Go Live! sessions I am often asked for the status of the scheduled backup which end early in the morning on weekends. I hate to wake up early on weekends so this is a nice little thing I do to achieve the task while I am sleeping. 

I found neat little perl script which uses the following two tools from netbackup to give a nicely formatted output in email. The tools are bpdbjobs which lists the list of jobs performed and bperror which gives you the status of the job. 

Click here for the original post and script. 

Now once you have the script which sends an email, all I have to do is set an at job to execute the script at the time the user wants the status of the backup. 

Google Chrome Froze

After using Google chrome [BETA] for couple of days, the much hyped sandboxing failed today for me. While browsing a site with flash plugin, the browser froze, it was unresponsive. Their feature of being able to close bad tabs failed as I was not able to get the Task manager from the browser itself. I opened up Task manager to see bunch of chrome.exe processes. I assumed the one which takes up the maximum memory to be the actual browser itself and the rest as tabs and started killing each one of them until the browser is responsive again, but by that time I have lost all the other tabs I was browsing.

This could have happened as plugins themselves are run as separate process. A small widget or a program which runs outside of the browser that works the same way as the task manager for google chrome would be useful in this scenario as you could just fire up the second program to identify and kill the troubling process, just a thought.