Thank you to Ofcom who have actually stated: ‘ It’s not about technology, technology can always be circumvented. It’s about incentives, we put the technologist back in the box and started to look at why people do it. It’s about how you change the incentive structure, It’s not a technological thing.’ Absolutely spot on.

Now, I have in the past downloaded movies, music & TV Shows, and I will continue to do this out of ease. Let me put it this way. for me to download a film legally, I have a couple of options, in which I can watch the film only once (or a set number of times) – let’s not get started on the fact that most of them that do this don’t even work on my operating system of choice [Linux]. This is also expensive, costing about 50% of actually buying a DVD or Bluray, so, why not do that, and watch as many times as I want? well, I don’t want to goto the shop, I have fast Internet, I can download a bluray in fairly short time (faster than going to the shop, buying it and coming home). Now, let’s look at P2P or even other methods that might not be legal. there’s a single page where I can go to find the movies, the music and the TV Shows, which is a huge benefit, now this could be split into 3 different pages / sites / whatever. sticking with Movies, we have a page for those, I can see very easily which ones are popular (how many people downloaded it), which ones are new (generally they’re dated) and I probably already have an idea as to what I want to watch. One click and I’m done an hour or 2 later, I can watch the film. in some instances, I can watch the film while it’s being downloaded too, just to make life even easier.

The quote from an audience member from Warner argued; just because it’s hard to enforce the law didn’t mean you shouldn’t try to enforce it.

Well, they can arrest me, they can take me to court, they can sue me, but let me say one thing before they try, I buy a LOT of movies, should they try this, then what incentive do I have to ever hand my money to them ever again? I used to download a LOT of music, and equally I purchased a LOT of music, too. since I stopped downloading it, I don’t buy it either. my collection has just stopped some years ago and hasn’t been updated since. so, they’re not getting any money of me anymore, but it’s ok, because I’m not downloading any, either.

I’m not saying that it was right to download the music, but me downloading 5 tracks for every 30 I purchased is surely better than purchasing none, right? and now with movies the same is happening.

Warner, Sony and all you other movie producers, are you listening? I will HAPPILY pay money every month to LEGALLY download your movies. without protection on them so I can only watch them a set number of times. I download movies because it’s convenient, it’s on my system ready to watch on my TV, I don’t have to go buy a disk, I don’t have to wait days for a disk to arrive from purchasing online. Instead of trying to STOP people from downloading movies, why not LET them download movies from your own sources, this means the person downloading knows the movie is what it says, it also means YOU make more money (that’s what it’s all about, right) make it easy, make it convenient people will do it. piss people off, we’ll take our money else where. it’s not the downloaders that are losing you money it’s your own head-up-your-own-arse way of thinking. stop doing it, there is money to be made, open your eyes and you’ll see it.

End of rant – work to be done!

The plug-in can be found here:

http://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Plugins/Telephony/Asterisk/check_asterisk_ami/details

and any feedback is welcome.

I already have a few people using this with success, Inspiration for this plug-in came from our asterisk system being hacked and calls routed through our server; fortunately I managed to catch it before it got too bad, and this is now on 24hour SMS support.

Let me explain what the final straw was. A friend & I were in town, I needed to go and change my address to my new address, so I handed my friend my card, and told him the address. he went into the bank, and came out 5 minutes later with the address changed.

OK, So it didn’t quite happen like that, I went into the bank, and I changed it, however, anyone could have done it, to any address. I handed over my card, I told the clerk I wanted to change my address, told them what the address is, and that was it. They did not ask me to confirm my old address, they did not ask me to enter the PIN for my card on the machine, they didn’t ask for me to confirm my name, D.O.B. they didn’t ask for any proof of the new address at all, No driving license or passport. So they did not confirm in any way what-so-ever that I was in-fact the legal holder of said card.

On their web-site under changing address, there’s a form which you fill in, and take to your branch – well, I didn’t do this, apparently that would be too much effort, and as I just proved, you don’t need it, anyway. here’s what the site says: “Please don’t forget to sign the form as we can’t carry out your request without a signature.  We use the signature to verify your identity against signatures we hold for you. Please take along one government issued document and one additional supporting document to confirm your details.  Please refer to the personal information and your identity leaflet for details of which documents are acceptable.”

None of this was followed at all in the local branch, I’m absolutely amazed that I managed to change my details, without any form of ID, and nothing with the new or old address’s on. If anyone can suggest a bank to use, at this point my ears are open. – This bank was the Halifax, by the way – at top of town in Basingstoke, Opposite the Sony Centre.

Next Management want to see some nice graphs, so I threw something up with RRD and it was OK, I looked at a few graphing solutions for Nagios, including Cacti, nagiosgrapher, and nagiosgraph, I’ve also looked at swapping out the Nagios install for something else, of which I have tried Groundwork Open Source, Centreon, and more recently thanks to a recommendation, Opsview.

All of these tools appear very good, and are all built around Nagios, but each have their own issues, but also advantages. I’m going to go through a few of them here.

NAGIOS

Ok, First up, Pure Nagios, this is configured from text files, and the way you arrange them is really up to you, so for me I had directories of “Servers”, “Development”, “Switches”, etc. within these I had a file for each host, that contained the host information and services associated with it. for me this made it very easy to add a new host as I just created a new file for the host, and added the information. There’s no Web configuration on Nagios (though there are 3rd party ones that I didn’t really look into), and there’s no graphing, without 3rd party apps to do that too, though, there’s nothing wrong with doing one yourself with RRD and linking to the graphs from within Nagios.

Groundwork Open Source

Next I tried Groundwork, This is a very good application, and has a very nice web interface for configuring hosts, including a “Auto Discovery” tool that will go and find all hosts within a range of IP address’s, Limitations of this are that it only does IPv4 address’s, though at least it gives you a start point on your network. Adding hosts and services on this is manually also very easy, it sets a few graphs up for you, and creating more or customizing the graphs is also very easy. Unfortunately, it seems the Groundwork team are not doing any work on their Open-Source version anymore, which is a little disheartening as they’re using Open-Source software under the hood to do most of it, it’s also very heavily orientated with Java, and requires a bit of CPU grunt to do a lot of the processing.

Centreon

Next I tried Centreon, again this is a very good tool, with very nice web GUI for configuring hosts, it lacks an Auto-Discovery, but it does allow you to import your configuration from Nagios, and for me that worked perfectly, I didn’t have to configure much outside of that other than the graphing data. Adding new hosts and services is very easy with the web GUI, and Nagios is still accessible along-side Centreon so you can still access the views that Nagios has should you wish to. The downside I have found with Centreon is the graphing data. For the most part, ping times, etc it’s absolutely fine, however, when it comes to network traffic, that’s a whole different ball-game, Here’s what it does with Network Statistics.

As you can see, that’s not the most useful data one could get. this is due to settings within RRD tool, and I have not managed to yet find out a way to change this within Centreon, Keep in mind, I don’t want to change scripts, this should be do able from within the web interface. MRTG is very good at these, and I don’t mind plugging the MRTG graphs into this, however, it would be nice if there was a single point to get all of this data. The graphs that are in-place also appear to show far more information than they need to, and again I’ve not yet worked out how to solve this. Everything else works well, but the graphing seems to feel somewhat unfinished.

Opsview

The last few days I’ve been playing with Opsview thanks to a recommendation from a fellow geek. The first stumble I hit was the fact that in Nagios I’m monitoring upwards of 100 hosts and around 1500 services including CPU Load, Memory usage, HTTP Response times, etc, each network service is on both IPv4 and IPv6, and the entire config can be a bit of a nightmare. Opsview does have a tool to import Nagios configurations, however, this was not easy, it complained about custom plug-ins that I have written and it didn’t know about, easy fix for that, just copy them in-place, it complained about a few other things, too, and eventually I bailed out of doing this and just started to add hosts manually. Opsview have taken a very different approach to your plug-ins or commands, instead of having a service, that points to a command, that points to the actual script, you have a service that points to the script with the arguments assigned, well, I use things like $USER7$ for my SNMP Community, could I work out where you can set these? no. it also means you can’t have say a single command with 2 services assigned for things like “local-ping” and “long-distance-ping”, though you can still do this, it’s a different way of doing it, and this is what broke a lot of my Nagios importing, and why I took the Manual route. It does make sense the way they’ve chosen to do it, it’s just a knot in the head when you’re used to the other way. As for the Graphing, it plugs into MRTG for the network interface stats, which is good, though currently mine is saying “No Data” – I’ll look into this at some point, I know how to configure MRTG, so it might involve a small amount of tinkering under the hood, the rest of the graphs are great, clean and tidy, only display the information that you want, and does what it says on the tin. Other than the learning curve of differences and things that are not quite working out of the box (MRTG) it’s looking good. I’ll stick with it for a while and see if I can make sense of the broken bits. I also need to import my XMPP and SMS notification scripts, this should be fun, as the notification system is rather different too, I’ll have to do some working out on this.

Conclusion

The conclusion I’ve come up with, is Nagios is very very good at monitoring your network, it does exactly what you tell it to do, but if you want easier configurations, graphing, etc, there’s a lot of options, and I’m still yet to find one that ticks all the boxes, Hopefully once I’ve configured Opsview a little more it will tick those missing boxes. Groundwork did in-fact tick all the boxes, but the fact that they’re not publishing the Open-Source version anymore bothers me. I understand companies have to make money, and I’m happy to support them, but don’t call yourself “Open-Source” when you’re not.

Hopefully with Opsview, other than the initial configuration of devices, the search will be over, Maybe I’m just attacking it wrong and should have Nagios for the monitoring and something else for the graphing (Cacti?) and leave it be, let each do their own job, We’ll see when I’ve played with Opsview a little more.

So, on to my rant about RPM systems, why do I hate them? Well, I run monitoring software called Nagios, this has a remote package called NRPE, this allows me to run scripts on remote systems for monitoring and works very well. This package is found in the repository called “EPEL” (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) hosted by the folks at Fedora.

I am unable to update my system because RPM system is broken. I commonly have an issue with installing something like webmin on a fresh Debian install, it would be nice if it was a little better, but it’s ok, I do the following:

dpkg -i install webmin*.deb

This results in an error that I do not have packages installed that it requires, no problem, the following command is what I want (and it tells me!)

apt-get install -f

This downloads and installs the packages required, and then installs my webmin package, great.

Now, lets see about RHEL, we have YUM, ok, I want to update my system, so I run “yum update” this chugs away and eventually comes back with:

Error: Missing Dependency: nagios-plugins = 1.4.15-2.el5 is needed by package nagios-plugins-disk
Error: Missing Dependency: nagios-plugins = 1.4.15-2.el5 is needed by package nagios-plugins-load
Error: Missing Dependency: nagios-plugins = 1.4.15-2.el5 is needed by package nagios-plugins-users
Error: Missing Dependency: nagios-plugins = 1.4.15-2.el5 is needed by package nagios-plugins-procs

Here, I grumble. but ok, quick search for nagios-plugins 1.4.15-2.el5 on google and I find the package, but interestingly the package I downloaded was from the EPEL repository, so, it’s there! why did it not find it? Anyway, ignoring that issue, I try installing it, I alerady have an older nagios-plugins installed, so I run the following:

rpm -Uvh nagios-plugins-1.4.15-2.el5.x86_64.rpm

This results in the following:

nagios-common is needed by nagios-plugins-1.4.15-2.el5.x86_64

Was it not by the older package? or does it mean I have an older version? who knows. Anyway, I run “yum install nagios-common” and that’s now installed, from EPEL, great. So we try rpm -Uvh nagios-plugins-1.4.15-2.el5.x86_64.rpm again, and this time I get the follwing:

error: Failed dependencies:
nagios-plugins = 1.4.13-11.el5 is needed by (installed) nagios-plugins-disk-1.4.13-11.el5.x86_64
nagios-plugins = 1.4.13-11.el5 is needed by (installed) nagios-plugins-load-1.4.13-11.el5.x86_64
nagios-plugins = 1.4.13-11.el5 is needed by (installed) nagios-plugins-users-1.4.13-11.el5.x86_64
nagios-plugins = 1.4.13-11.el5 is needed by (installed) nagios-plugins-procs-1.4.13-11.el5.x86_64

But, wait I was trying to update those packages, it just couldn’t find the one I’m trying to install here. Despite it being in the same place in the repositories! By this time I can feel my blood pressure starting to rise, which is never a good thing. I also keep saying to myself “on Debian, I just run apt-get install … and it does it” anyway, I have to run RHEL for work purposes, all my servers at work are actually running Debian, however, for building we run RHEL to be “compatible” with our customers. Except, we can’t be because it won’t update! So now I have to download the other packages manually, and install them, manually, because it can’t find them.

I’m starting to get annoyed with this, and if it was my own system that I did not need for work, it would have been changed to Debian long ago.

All I can say, is that I feel for anyone that “Tries” Linux and goes for an RPM solution. This is not the first time I have had this issue, and I have even had the issue within the main repositories with packages. It’s annoying, It’s frustrating, and I can’t get rid of it. I just HATE it!

Given a choice of package managers, I would opt for Portage followed by Apt, both are incredibly good and I have very few issues with them.

When it comes to servers however, it’s a whole new ballpark. The software written by the company I work for deals with incredibly large computational arrays requiring a fair amount if memory at times. While I write this I am waiting for a pre-boot memory check to complete do I can get on and check the system is working, it’s taking a while, and here’s a extensor as to why…

That’s 96GB Memory in this system, What’s even more interesting about a system with this much memory, is that it will be used. and this is not a virtualised system, this is a single OS (though dual-boot) and is used for testing…. oh yeah, not to mention the fact that it has 2 quad-core CPU’s…. this system really is a beast. and I would quite like it to be my desktop machine, though, I might have to invest in some ear protectors, as the cooling is rather loud :-)

So, firstly work, that’s definitely been keeping me busy, but all is well there, and I don’t think there is much I would change about it. well, other than buying more toys, that’s always fun!

As for the new hobby, I have taken up ice skating, no not the namby-pamby dancing, more freestyle, it’s good exercise, this incidentally is where I met the girl I am now seeing.

I still fly most weekends, I have bought myself a blitz avro, this is the roles royce of helicopters. I’m scared to throw it around too much, but it really is a dream to fly. It’s smooth, accurate and does exactly what I tell it to. I’m also throwing my raptor around a lot more, to the extent that parts are wearing out quickly, and I caught the ground while doing tick-tocks, oh well, that was only around £40 and was incredibly fun.

Oh yeah, I also bought a new phone, I bought a HTC desire HD. Running cyanogenmod, and really like it. This also means I can update my blog while the girlfriend is trying on clothes while out shopping (yes that really is what I’m doing). I think it also makes phone-calls, but really, who does that these days?

Anyway, I will try and update my blogs more often, I’ve been meaning to for a while, but laziness is bliss (as is ignorance).

Apologies for any odd random words, I’m doing this on my phone between telling the girlfriend she looks good.  :)

IANA have handed out the last /8′s of IPv4. and it couldn’t come sooner in my opinion. I’ve been using IPv6 for many years now, have IPv6 when I’m at home, this is native. I have it at work, this is currently tunnelled, but only because of Mikrotik ROS not supporting native IPv6 over PPPoE on 4.x builds. I even have it on my laptop when I’m sat in a pub. I have helped friends and family get IPv6, and everything on it just works.

Why is it, then, that ISP’s “have no plans” to implement IPv6 still. stop complaining that IPv4′s have run out and you don’t know what to do, IPv6 has been around since 1996, it works well and I have systems that _only_ have IPv6 address’s. Don’t use “there’s no routers on the market that do it” because there is. Billion have one, ZyXEL have one, Comtrend have one. they’re all priced at or under £50. what’s not consumer about them? if you want more, then OpenWRT and DD-WRT DO have IPv6 support, and can be flashed onto many routers, if you want to put the boat out a little, Cisco support IPv6, as do Routerboard.

it is of my opinion that there is absolutely no excuse for not offering IPv6 to consumers, if the consumers don’t want to use it, that’s up to them. Ipv4 is LEGACY it is the OLD Internet. IPv6 is the CURRENTLY used Internet Protocol. so, come-on people, pull your fingers out and get it done. I will not be buying any devices that do not support IPv6 anymore. this includes Routers, VOIP Phones, Printers and even Set-Top Boxes – yes, they have ethernet for their “Interactive” services. if they don’t do IPv6, they will not be used.

For now, back to work…

Here’s a screenshot of what I got when I tried to put IE8 on the system:

If Microsoft don’t class Windows XP x64 as a Windows Operating system, should everyone else do the same?
well, I guess we’ll use a standards-compliant browser instead on this system… now, where can I get one of those :-)

What really ticks me off, is when and email comes to my real email address and is a “marketing email” from a company I have never given my email address to. I have dealt with the company, but only in cash and in person. However, the owner of this company is also a member of a club that I attend. This makes me think that he has taken my email from the confidential systems that are part of that club. I have asked politely that he removes me from his mailing list to no avail and today received yet another SPAM email from him.

At this point, I decided to take things a little further than a polite note asking to be removed, and have sent an email quoting The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 (No. 2426) Section 22 to him. I have also quoted Data Protection Act 1998 (c. 29) Section 7 and Section 11, demanding that he removes me from his list, and informs me as to where he retrieved my details from. I’ll be honest, I’m a little fed up with this particular individual, and I’m not too fused about pissing him off a little. However, as he is running a business, and part of my grudge is personal, He and his company will remain anonymous on here.

My problem with this is I take Spam coming in quite seriously, I work hard with companies to reduce the amount of spam they receive, I help out various networks to identify where spam is coming from and where email lists are obtained, so for someone that I know to be doing it I find Very frustrating.