• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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  Unless otherwise stated, the content on this site is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works 3.0 License

  

One of my current projects in work is to set up a Nagios install to monitor our network. We have been monitoring with the free version of BigBrother for a while now but BB isn’t as good so we’re switching to Nagios. I had plenty of problems getting Nagios running on RHEL 4 because in work we try to do as much as possible using only RPMs. I’m working on simple how-to for setting up Nagios on RHEL4 which I’ll publish here soon but the base install does not give you DHCP monitoring. I tried to look for RHEL rpms that provide check_dhcp but I couldn’t find any. There were lots for Fedora but they don’t work on RHEL (I tried FC4 and 5 rpms). I tried to manually build the latest version of the Nagios plugins which do contain a check_dhcp binary but there is a problem with that binary that results in it always showing your DHCP server as down. I know the problem is with the binary because if I watch the logs on the DHCP server I see it issuing an offer and tcpdump on my Nagios server shows the offer arriving, yet the plugin still insists that the service is down. The solution is to use this Perl script. However, if you follow the instructions on that page it won’t work on RHEL. I spent an entire day beating this script into submission but in the end I got it working.

[tags]Nagios, RedHat Enterprise Linux, RHEL, RHEL4, DHCP[/tags]

Read more

Tagged with: open source • Linux • tutorial • RHEL • DHCP

On OS X you can run a JARed Java App by simply double clicking the .jar file. This works but it has a few downsides. For a start you can’t keep the app in your dock so you can launch it easily and you also can’t easily launch it with things like HimmelBar. Secondly it will always have the Java JAR icon and if you’re running a few Java JARs this can get very confusing. What you really want is the same Java App but wrapped inside an OS X App. Examples of this would be the OS X version of jEdit. If you have the Developer Tools (XCode) installed on OS X this is trivial to do. If you don’t have the developer tools installed you’ll find and installer for them on your OS X DVD.

[tags]OS X, Java, Application[/tags] Read more

Tagged with: OS X • Java • tutorial

Something you have to do from time to time is assemble a PDF out of pages from other PDFs or images. I had to do this today. I was writing a report in Open Office. I exported the report to PDF to send it but then wanted to attach a few appendices to that PDF file so I would only have to email one file rather than a collection of files. TBH I expected to be able to do this kind of thing very easily with Preview by just dragging and dropping things around but no, not happening. So, off to Google I went and I found a simply excellent freeware App that lets you do this in a really simple and easy way.

[tags]OS X, PDF, Freeware[/tags] Read more

Tagged with: OS X • tutorial

This is a follow-on to the article iTunes 7 – Not The Success It Could and SHOULD Have Been

I’ve spent quite a big of time trying to solve my iTunes 7 problems and a lot of time on the Apple discussion boards and I’ve now got solutions to most (obviously no movement on the reverse-sync thing).

First, an update on album art which is a reply to Des’ comment that they have too few covers. They seem to have added many more over the last day or so, because I just got covers for about 20 albums which they didn’t have covers for on the first day iTunes 7 came out.

Now, on to the meat and bones, my most serious problem, not being able to download my purchased items, has been solved. Though not by Apple support. As well as lodging a support call I also started a thread on their forms and that’s where the solution came from: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=643636&tstart=0. I did get a response from Apple but it was massively disappointing. It was a stock answer that simply ignored the information I had given in my message to them pointing out that I had already tried what they just gave me as a ‘solution’. They got a very grumpy reply from me!

Next, onto not being able to move items from Music to Audiobooks. I mentioned that I had tried iTunify and that it had not worked. Well it had sort of worked. What the program did not tell you what that you have to remove the items from your library (being sure to click ‘keep files’ when asked) and then re-add them. When you re-add them they will go into the right place. Again this solution is courtesy of the Apple forums: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=640125&tstart=0

Just one more follow-up, my problems with iTunes 7 constantly re-starting itself when I closed it have not come back. I guess it was just a glitch that was sorted out by a reboot (how Windows like!).

Although my big problems with iTunes 7 have now been solved I shouldn’t have to spend hours getting up and going when I update a program. Apple took their eye off the ball on this one. Lets hope this is not the way things will be from now on with Apple software updates.

[tags]iTunes, iTunes 7, Apple, Audiobooks[/tags]

Tagged with: OS X • iTunes • software • tutorial

I'm a huge fan of ImageMagick . I think it's great but I'm constantly and continuously disappointed by their lack of proper support for the Mac. It took them ages to get a binary release out for the Mac at all and even now, a year after the announcement of the Intel Macs and after Apple have compltely stopped selling PPC Macs the only binary release available for the Mac on the image Magic site is still for PPC. You can of course get the source and build it yourself but that's a bit of a mine-field because of the amount of libraries that you need first if you're to end up with a useful ImageMagick install. In the past I've wasted a lot of time and effort getting ImageMagick compiled properly on OS X. When I had to install it on an Intel Mac for the first time today I nearly cried when I saw that there was no binary release! However, my prayers were answered when I cam across this blog entry. I still had to build the lot myself but this took all the pain out of it!

[tags]ImageMagick, Intel Mac[/tags] 

Tagged with: OS X • software • Image Processing • open source • tutorial

Having recently discussed running MySQL on the Mac I’d now like to tackle PostgreSQL. I’m sorry to say things are not quite as rosy just yet. PostgreSQL don’t provide us with a binary distribution for the Mac nor do they provide a nice Panel for the System Preferences App. There are also less choices when it comes to GUIs for manipulating and designing your database but there are still options and things are still a lot better than they could be. Read more

Tagged with: tutorial • OS X • databases • PostgreSQL

I’ve just released the first episode of a podcast I’ve stared to do for the Irish Federation of Astronomical Societies (IFAS) and thought I’d share some of my experiences in making it. First thing to note is that I had zero experience in anything audio related on computers apart from listening to stuff. Hence, I think it is fair to consider myself a total newbie at this stuff and you should judge the result based on that! I also decided to do a little experiment. Apple have a name for making really intuitive software that lets you do really powerful things with no training and a minimal learning curve, basically their apps are supposed to be a usability dream. So, could a complete noob like me, having never used iLife (or any audio software of any kind for that matter), manage to make a podcast and publish it in reasonable time and to a reasonable standard? You can judge the results for yourself here: www.minds.nuim.ie/~ifas/podcast/

Lets start by setting the scene, the machine I did this on was a first generation G4 Mac Mini (1.42GHz and 1GB RAM) running OS X 10.4.5. This machine pre-dates the whole iLife thing so although I had some of the apps that are now bundled as iLife they were old versions and I didn’t have iWeb at all. As I mentioned before the first generation Mac Mini’s don’t actually have an audio in port so I would have to spend some money before I could go anywhere. The following are the things I bought and connected/installed before I started:

1. Trust Headset (www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=108145)
2. iMic (www.griffintechnology.com/products/imic2/)
3. iLife 06 (www.apple.com/ilife/)

So, with my shopping all done I’d spent about 140 Euro and for that I had a mic to record with, a way of connecting my mic to my Mac Mini via USB, and the software to record, edit and publish my Podcast. The question is, now that I had everything I needed, how easy would I actually find it to produce something decent?

Recording the Audio

The hardest part of this was to get over feeling like a complete idiot sitting in my room by myself talking out loud to my computer! I used the Podcast Studio in GarageBand to do the recording and I have to say it was trivially simple to use. I had the hang of it and was recording away in literally a few minutes. Initially I did the entire podcast as one recording in one go but when I played it back I realised that I’d made a mess of some bits and left out some important things I should have said in the middle etc so then it was time to start really using the software and breaking my big long track up into bits, naming them, deleting the bits I messed up, re-recording bits and then splicing it all together. I even got a 5 minute piece contributed by someone else that I now also had to include. This is the hard stuff so how did I find Garage Band for that? TBH I found it excellent. I had it all nailed in no time at all and in no more than 2 hours work I’d gone from nothing to a fully edited 23 minute podcast that was ready to go out into the big bad world.

Exporting the Audio Out of Garage Band

This is where things got a bit more interesting. In theory I should just go to the Share menu and select Send Podcast to iWeb and it should just happen. Well it did, kinda, but not perfectly. Firstly, because my Mac Mini is not exactly a PowerMac it took an annoyingly long time to first merge the various tracks in my podcast down to a single master track and then transcode this track into a format for publishing. This is not really a big deal. Had I started it and then gone and gotten myself a cup of tea, it would have been done well before I got back, but since I was sitting there watching it I found it annoyingly slow. The second problem however is a much more serious one. GarageBand will not export a podcast in MP3 format, it insists on using AAC. This is fine for iTunes users and users of some other players but is a serious problem for users of WinAmp and other free players. Since I have a real issue with people forcing me to use certain software for things when there is a perfectly good open alternative I just couldn’t go ahead and publish my podcast as AAC only. I go mad at people who mail me Word documents instead of PDFs, just think of how much of a hypocrite I’d be if I started going round publishing just AAC files and telling everyone go get iTunes! So, using iTunes (somewhat ironically) I converted the AAC file to an MP3. The MP3 file was smaller but I have to say I noticed a difference in Quality between the AAC and the MP3 so I decided I would publish both and have two RSS feeds for my podcast, an AAC one and an MP3 one.

Publishing my Podcast

So, I had now exported my podcast to iWeb for publishing, how did I find that? TBH I found iWeb immensely easy to use. It did all the hard stuff automatically and generated a nice, clean looking page that works well and looks good and it did all that in literally a few minutes. It even let me add in the second feed with minimal efford. Right up to the point I went to actually publish to the web I was absolutely delighted with iWeb.

The publishing though is where I got grumpy with iWeb. If you forked out on a pointless .mac account it would publish straight to the web for you but if you haven’t it won’t. This annoyed me because, firstly, FTP and SFTP are hardly difficult things to incorporate into your web software and secondly, considering .mac uses WebDAV, not letting you publish to your own WebDAV server is even more ridiculous. Basically iWeb is actively trying to pressure users into getting a .mac account and IMO that is just not acceptable behavior from software that you have BOUGHT! The fact that iWeb will not publish directly over anything but .mac is a real black mark against it in my book. Having said that it was not that big a deal to publish it really. All you do is tell iWeb to publish to a folder on your hard drive and then upload that folder to your server with what ever software you like.

Conclusions

At no point did the software make me feel stupid and at no point did it confuse or scare me. It worked and it worked well, so, from a usability standpoint I’d give it full marks. However, iLife did two things to annoy me and they are very symptomatic of Apple’s obsession with trying to get everyone to use their software and nothing else. Honestly, there are some things Apple could teach MicroSoft about railroading people into a particular piece of software! Anyhow, I digress, the things that annoyed me were GarageBand’s refusal to export as anything but AAC and iWeb’s refusal to publish directly to anything but .mac. All in all though I’m very happy and feel that the software deserves it’s reputation for being easy to use and powerful because it really is both. Bottom line is that I consider iLife to be excellent value for money and would recommend it to anyone interested in starting to play with podcasting and multimedia in general.

Tagged with: OS X • software • podcasting • tutorial

Burning a CD on OS X is trivial and involves no more software than finder. You stick in the blank CD, it shows up in finder, you drag the files you want to burn onto it and then click the little radioactive icon to burn the CD. Simple. However, if you go looking in finder to copy a CD you will be disappointed. Does this mean you need to install 3rd party software like Roxio Toast? Nope. The key lies in knowing how to use the Disk Utility app that comes with OS X.

Lets say you’ve just purchased a copy of a software app, for example, MS Office X, and you want to make a backup copy for when you inevitably loose or damage your disk, here is how you would do it, step by step.

First you need to stick the original CD into the drive and then launch Disk Utility which you will find in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder. The icon is shown below:

When you have it open you will see all your hard disks in a tab down the left hand side as well as your CD/DVD drives and what ever CDs are in them. Select the disk you want to copy (shown below):

Then go to File -> New -> <Your Disk> (as shown below) and select a place on your hard disk to save this file. This will generate a ‘disk image’ from the CD you want to copy which you can then burn to a blank CD (as often as you want in fact, though not that you’d do such a thing with a copyrighted disk of course!).

This will take a while to complete but when it is done your saved disk image will show up in the bottom section of the left hand panel. To burn this image to a new CD eject the original CD and insert a blank one (if a window pops up asking you what to do with the blank disk click Ignore). When you have the CD inserted select the saved disk image as shown below and then click the Burn icon (yellow and black icon that looks like a radioactive sign at the top left) and away you go!

Tagged with: OS X • tutorial • operating system

I’m sure you know the feeling, you’re on a server, some form of excrement has just hit some kind of spinning thing and know that netstat will do what you want if only you could remember the bloody set of options you needed. Well, from now on I’m adding all those commands to this Blog entry so next time that happens I’ll know here to look!

This page will be continually updated but I’m gonna start with a few of those commands I’ve needed in the last few days that are currently stuck to my display in little yellow PostIt Notes.

What Processes are Listening on What TCP Ports

When you need to easily see what a server is serving in a hurry use:

netstat -lntp

Creating and Extracting tar.gz Files Just Using tar

I used to always create and extract tar.gz files by using both tar and gzip and sticking them together with a pipe (I’m sure that nasty Sun E450 was in some way to blame for me getting into that habit). This command was always long and I never remembered the syntax. So here’s the easy way to create a tar.gz archive:

tar -pczf name_of_your_archive.tar.gz /path/to/directory

(You should leave out the p if you don’t want to preserve the file permissions). And here is how to extract one:

tar -xzf file.tar.gz

Tagged with: command-line • open source • Linux • tutorial

This is a step-by-step guide to installing Tomcat 5.0.x onto OS X 1.4.x. Note that this is the Tomcat branch for the 1.4 JDK and not for the 1.5 JDK. I know the latest versions of OS X now have Java 5 as part of the OS but my work is not yet ready to migrate to Java 5 so I’m staying with Tomcat 5.0 for now. The chances are that these instructions with only tiny and obvious alterations will work for Tomcat 5.5 with Java 5 but I’m not making any promises. Read more

Tagged with: OS X • open source • Java • web server • Apache Tomcat • tutorial

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