Tuesday, December 9, 2008
ESX Madness
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
GoDaddy issues
Friday, August 22, 2008
E911 and ANI/ALI tagging
Friday, July 25, 2008
Advice on use of Nessus
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Using Nagios to watch PRI usage
Here is a really quick (and even dirtier) way to quickly determine if you are overextending your PRI usage.
This is a really simple script for Nagios to run and report how many concurrent calls you have.
Fill in the blanks for NAMEOFHOST (CallManager hostname), COMMUNITYNAME (snmp read only community name for CallManager Express) and ifnums. ifnums are the integer values for IF-MIB::ifIndex.** where ** is the interface number for your PRI. you will have to do some snmpwalking to figure this out. I left some values in the script to show how to format your entries.
This script requires the check_ifoperstatus Nagios plugin to work. I will clean this up soon and re-post.
This script throws a critical warning if the PRI usage is 7 or more concurrent calls
#!/bin/sh
# SNMP test for number of interfaces up in a particular range
#
export NAG_PLUG_PATH=/usr/lib/nagios/plugins
export IF_STAT_PLUG=check_ifoperstatus
export NAMEOFHOST=_____________
export COMMUNITY_NAME=____________
ifnums=( 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 )
CTR1=0
for interface in ${ifnums[@]}
do
VAR1=`$NAG_PLUG_PATH/$IF_STAT_PLUG -k $interface -H $NAMEOFHOST -C $COMMUNITY_NAME`
if [ "${VAR1%*\:*\:*}" = "CRITICAL" ]; then
VAR2=0
else
CTR1=`expr $CTR1 + 1`
fi
done
if [ "$CTR1" -ge "7" ];
then
STATUSCODE=CRITICAL
else
STATUSCODE=OK
fi
echo "PRI $STATUSCODE - $CTR1 calls currently"
Liferay and Active Directory integration
Google Dropping Emails?
I have had a bunch of trouble with script-generated emails timing out and not being sent through Google Apps. Not really sure why this is happening, but this is how I am fixing it... and it seems to work so far.
If you are using the article I wrote in Linux Pro Magazine a month or so ago to deploy Liferay, do not set up Liferay to connect to Google directly to send mail.
Instead:Set up Sendmail as a relay on your Liferay application server (only accessible to localhost) and use the mail settings in Liferay (ROOT.xml) to send all outbound email through localhost. No password should be necessary (depending on how you set Sendmail up), but make sure that the username you are using does, in fact, exist in your Google Apps account.
In Google Applications mail control panel, be sure to allow the public IP address your mail will be relayed from.
Next, publish your SPF record if you have not already done so. see openspf.org for details. If your DNS provider does not offer txt records for your domain, move to someone who does or host your own public authoritative DNS.
SPF adoption is growing and if you are not onboard you will be left behind with your communication being dropped into spam folders or altogether rejected. As of a few days ago, Network Solutions does not offer that service and do not have an ETA for when they will.
- Here is the hard part: if you consider these emails to be of critical importance you must contact Google (but only if you are a paying customer) and ask them nicely to remove spam filtering from the address you are using to send emails from Liferay.
Why does this work? Instead of having Liferay connect directly to Google's SMTP (meant for clients like Outlook), the messages are sent through a local relay that does not send to smtp.gmail.com. The relay looks up the MX records for your organization which should be pointed to Google's MXes (aspmxl.google.com etc...) to forward email. When you whitelisted the IP address in the GApps control panel, you were telling Google that you would be intentionally relaying email from that address. The SPF record essentially does the same thing for other mail servers. If there is a timeout situation getting the email from the relay to Google, the relay should continue to attempt to resend.
This documentation also goes for other technologies like Nagios that may generate a quantity of critically important email.
Best of luck... -Ash