06
Nov
2018

Querying Zookeeper from Python

python

Install the prerequisites. Below works for Debian-based distros such as Ubuntu/Mint: Install python libraries: Example code below shows making a connection, getting the names of some child nodes and pulling info from each of those child... » More

05
Nov
2018

Install check_mk on Ubuntu 18.04

nagios

Ubuntu 18.04 includes check-mk in the repository version but it is an older version 1.2.8 (at the time of writing). Download check mk raw (get the latest stable URL from the website) : Try installing it: You may get dependency issues which can... » More

30
Oct
2018

iDRAC 9 Set Physical Disk to Non-RAID

Uncategorized

In the update from iDRAC 8 to iDRAC 9 it has been infuriating searching the 'Storage' menu only to discover that the storage is managed under 'Configuration > Storage Configuration'  I'm convinced the user experience could be better! At the very... » More
01
Oct
2018

Clearing old Journald Logs

Uncategorized

Journald logs can be cleared by timescale or size as follows. Keep only 5 days worth of logs journalctl --vacuum-time=5d Retain only the past 500 MB: journalctl --vacuum-size=500M

01
Oct
2018

Checking if Puppet is Disabled

puppet

The puppet agent can be disabled from running with: And it can be re-enabled with: But to check if puppet is currently disabled there is no check command. Instead look for the existence of the agent_disabled.lock file under: For the systems I... » More

29
Aug
2018

Exclude Directories for Disk Usage (du)

linux, shell

ncdu I sometimes want to omit directories from my disk usage (du -sh *) checks. This includes virtual files systems such as proc / dev and also mounts to other filesystems (data in the example below). This is what works for me: The equals sign appears to... » More

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31
Jul
2018

Joining Multi-line Output with Paste

shell

Shell I was checking the memory on approximately 140 servers using ansible: but the output appears over several lines e.g. but what I wanted was the server name and the total memory available. So I first grepped the output to remove the lines I didn't... » More
29
Jun
2018

Datanode denied communication with namenode

hadoop

In a Cloudera cluster we had a few nodes reporting the following error message in the logs under hadoop-cmf-hdfs-DATANODE-whatever.com.log.out The error included: Datanode denied communication with namenode because the host is not in the... » More

05
Jun
2018

Set NTP Server on Windows Domain Controller

wordpress

On the Windows Domain Controller I checked the current NTP settings with:   I tried a few alternative commands and got errors such as "the rpc server is unavailable". The command that worked was: After issuing that command I could see... » More
29
May
2018

Windows Nagios Checks using NSClient

nagios

Munin Alternative Template I wanted to add some checks to a Windows server and the methods seem to have changed a little over the years. At the moment I have amended the nsclient.ini file on the Windows box with: Then from the Nagios box I can check CPU with a threshold as... » More