PreshBlog

I’ve been updating my Nagios monitoring to make sure I’m carefully monitoring my server hardware, including temperature, fan speeds and hard drives, and I wanted to use S.M.A.R.T. monitoring to monitor drives on a 3ware RAID controller for signs of imminent failure.

I already monitor the status of the RAID array itself using my nagios_3ware_raid_check Nagios plugin (which I previously blogged about), but I wanted to use SMART monitoring to look for signs of imminent drive trouble, rather than simply finding out when a drive has just failed.

After installing smartmontools, I was able to edit /etc/smartd.conf, disabling the default of scanning for devices, and listing devices explicitly, as follows:

# Monitor the drives on our RAID array; schedule self tests for Sundays.
/dev/twa0 -d 3ware,0 -a -s L/../../7/02
/dev/twa0 -d 3ware,1 -a -s L/../../7/04

The above monitors both drives of a RAID-1 mirrored pair on a 3ware controller card; the -s option schedules a long self-test every Sunday, starting between 2-3am and 4-5am respectively.

I’m still looking for a good way to monitor via Nagios, though; the (poorly-named) check_ide_smart plugin doesn’t support the ability to monitor drives on other interfaces as far as I can see. I found a couple of Perl scripts such as Check-SMART-status-modified, but they had issues.

This afternoon there’s been a lot of speculation based on this pastebin post, which claims to be by LulzSec, and warns:

We have blissfully obtained records of every single citizen who gave their records to the security-illiterate UK government for the 2011 census

We’re keeping them under lock and key though… so don’t worry about your privacy (…until we finish re-formatting them for release)

Myself and the rest of my Lulz shipmates will then embark upon a trip to ThePirateBay with our beautiful records for your viewing pleasure!

It’s gathered a lot of attention, including a report on The Register, SC Magazine, V3, but with nothing to actually suggest it’s true.

LulzSec’s Twitter stream disclaims any knowledge:

Looks like someone decided to make up a rumour, and it’s been circulated widely by the media.

Of course, I wouldn’t have actually been at all surprised if it did turn out to be true; this is the UK Government and Lockheed Martin we’re talking about, and LulzSec have shown their ability to hit some pretty big targets in the past…

Whilst I don’t think much of the upcoming .xxx TLD (in particular the crazy prices), you can now get .xxx domain registration from UK2 (sunrise/landrush and general availability pre-registration).

I’ve been subscribed to the It Made My Day RSS feed for ages, but fairly recently they started adding pointless cutesy image macros as well as the text – I don’t want to see those in the feed as they’re generally hard to read and a waste of bandwidth.

So, Yahoo Pipes to the rescue – I created a simple pipe which fetches the IMMD feed, uses regexes to strip out the images, then subscribed to the result of that pipe.

Job done – if you’re interested, the pipe feed URL to subscribe to is http://pipes.yahoo.com/bigpresh/immdnoimages.

I’ve just been sending a phone number by SMS as a vCard to a friend’s iPhone, and after two attempts, both of which were successfully delivered to the phone, according to the delivery report, he didn’t receive them.

A bit of Googling would suggest that the iPhone just silently ignores incoming vCard contact details. Seriously, what the actual fuck?

Just installed the CPAN Auto Link Generator WordPress plugin, which automatically matches module names and provides links to the module’s documentation on CPAN. Very helpful for anyone blogging about Perl, so thought I’d give it a link here.

I’ve just released version 0.10 of Dancer::Plugin::SimpleCRUD, incorporating a new display_columns option to control which columns should be visible when listing records, kindly provided by saberworks in PR-9. Also included is a documentation fix for the editable_columns option, and implementing the not_editable_columns option, courtesy of Alberto Simões (ambs) – thanks!

Just a quick post to welcome my friend James Ronan to blogging – after many years of intending to build himself a site and failing, he’s finally given in and set up WordPress to just get blogging.

Much easier, isn’t it? Laziness++

WTF.

(via andrewducker)

(via Failblog)

(Likely to be fake, but made me chuckle anyway)