I have upgraded the database and the wordpress install that power this site to the current versions. Now it’s time to fix my table backup scripts. Please let me know if there are problems or unexpected behavior.

The break I’ve been taking from blogging is willful and self-imposed. We have been moving from Raleigh to Chapel Hill, and only yesterday did we finally get the last box unpacked. We still have a lot of sorting and arranging to do – this house is smaller than the last – but we are out of the woods in terms of the dregs of moving. I don’t think I ever want to move the washer and dryer again, and the entertainment cabinet… don’t get me started.

Sadly, there’s more arranging to do, and soon. My wife’s grandfather passed away from a stroke a few days ago, and we had been keeping our extra furniture at his house. This will have to be moved in the near future – and I’m not sure where a gigantic dining room table fits into our life at this point. It would be a Greek tragedy to dispose of it now, so we will figure it out. Just another piece of the puzzle.

A number of months ago, I found myself working on a very large Nagios installation – 2000 hosts, 3300+ service checks, and that was just the beginning. Looking at what had been improved from Nagios 1.4 (which was the older version that was running and needed to be upgraded) and Nagios 3.2, the new shiny version, I saw a lot of under-the-hood kind of changes that are well appreciated, in terms of performance and scalability, but very little that would make an end user even slightly interested in the upgrade. The web interface is straight out of 1998 – using frames and compiled C code to drive CGIs. The database backend had been pulled out and made into a standalone product called NDOUtils, which was still listed as beta, and hadn’t received an update in over 2 years.

In short the primary Nagios developer had slowed down on the end user stuff – probably busy with other things. Today, I found out what those other things are, and I’m not sure I’m pleased. He has announced a commercial, closed-source front end called Nagios XI, that purports to fix a lot of the problems the community wants fixed. It looks like he’s been working with other projects (like pnp4nagios) to make Nagios XI similar to Zenoss or Groundworks – an better integrated monitoring, reporting and analytical platform.

What amuses me is that earlier this year, a number of independent developers became tired with the slow progress on Nagios, and forked the whole project. The name of the fork is Icinga, which is by design unpronounceable. They have already added Oracle databases as a supported backend, and fixed a number of long standing ndo2db problems. They are also close to releasing an AJAX-y web front end. All open source, and they are encouraging community involvement.

To be entirely honest, at this point, the next time I’m planning a major system upgrade, I’m going to look long and hard at Icing’s project. My predecessor had already abstracted away all the crummy web-UI for the Nagios, and I’m extending that as best I can. It looks like the Icing project has my priorities closer to heart than the ‘core’ Nagios developers. We’ll have to see how it shakes out.

I have installed OpenSolaris on a VM in my home network, and updated it to the latest bits (129 at the time of this writing), which supports ZFS’s new block-level deduplication. I’m delighted with the update – it’s reasonably fast (a small office server probably won’t notice the load increase at all) and it does exactly what it’s supposed to – only storing one copy of the blocks in a file, even when the blocks are present in different files. It’s a great way to save space on disk, especially if you are running backups of multiple computers, as there will be significant overlap between them.

This opens the way for me to get serious about rebuilding my two Solaris file servers, as there is no upgrade path from the Nevada builds to the OpenSolaris platform. I’ve already reinstalled the smaller of the two boxes, as it’s only remaining tasks had been running a backup DNS server and processing my network logs. I’m going to have to be much more careful when it comes to moving the larger server, as it hosts all my digital media, including my Aperture photo library. So, it’s time to test extensively on the new box and make sure any initial gotchas are ironed out.

The first interesting test was opening up all of my tar’ed and gz’ed home directory backups and dumping them into a dedup-enabled filesystem on the new system. It looks very promising – it’s a much more efficient way to store files as %90 of the data between backups hasn’t changed. Once I move all the old files off the zfs pool, I’ll be able to report the difference in space, and the reported dedup ratio.

This morning as I was going through my work email, the claimed number of unread messages made me chuckle:

Something tells me I haven’t received 4 billion emails in my life – including all the SPAM I get. So, take a screen grab, save it, and move on.

Panama.

My grandfather was a sailor his whole working life. Starting out as a deck hand, he worked his way up to be a harbor pilot for Port Canaveral in Florida. Along the way he commanded tugboats for Moran Towing, served in the Merchant Marine in World War II, and traveled across the world by sea. My father was born in Colón, Panama, and soon after moved to Venezuela.

Recently, I was browsing the internet, and came across a series of posts that said that like the US, anyone born in Panama or the Canal Zone, regardless of parentage, is a birthright citizen of Panama. As a birthright citizen, this extends to descendants – my brother and myself, and our children. It’s strange to think that all my life I’ve been a Panamanian national, and never known it. I am currently working with the Consulate of Panama to get paperwork in order to get myself and my son a Panamanian passport. I would like to invest in Panama, and possibly retire there.

I’ve started up writing for Shufflegazine again – the pace of my personal projects and personal life has finally relented enough to start posting again. So, look for more of my content, coming soon.