Click to Make Big

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I’m Back!

It’s been 3 years and 4 months since I last completed a race where bling was involved.  It’s also been 2 years and 1 month since I had knee surgery.  Even 9 months ago I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to run anymore.  Ben Marx (@marxbj) and a rolling pin got me past the first hump of atrophied muscles around my knee and the rest has just been trying to keep a schedule with the rest of life’s happenings.

It was a great race to come back to.  700 runners and a concert (Blues Traveller) with beer waiting at the finish (video below).   I totally can’t wait to do this one again next year.  Absolutely perfect weather, 7am start and about 58 degrees.

Video:

Video Note: Don’t get distracted by the bald guy,  you’re supposed to be watching the music.

Kansas City Blues and Brews (Blues Traveller)

Bling:

The Run:

 
Next stop is The North Face half in KC! 11/16/12

1.) Installing GIT

- Download the correct version of GIT from here

- Run the pkg you downloaded

- From the terminal navigate to /Volumes/Git 1.7.8.3 Snow Leopard Intel Universal

- Run the install script: setup git PATH for non-terminal programs.sh

- Open a new terminal and you’re good to go.

2.) Installing MAMP

- Download MAMP from here (Be patient, it’s big).

- Open the .zip and double click the MAMP.pkg in the following window.

- Walk through the MAMP install screens.

- You’ll find the program in Applications in it’s own folder, I usually dock it.

- When you click the icon it will open a control program as well as a web page with some good MAMP detail on it.

- The control panel will let you start and stop MySQL and Apache, though it’s not always perfect.

3.) Adding a virtual host to your MAMP config.

- Add an entry to your local hosts file for the domain you want to work with

127.0.0.1 me2.com www.me2.com

- Navigate to: /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache

- Edit the httpd.conf file in this directory

- At the bottom of the file add the following:

NameVirtualHost *

<VirtualHost * >
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/me2.com
    ServerName me2.com
    ServerAlias www.me2.com
    <Directory /var/www/html/me.com>
        Allow from all
        Options -MultiViews
    </Directory>
    ErrorLog /Applications/MAMP/logs/me2.com-errors
    CustomLog /Applications/MAMP/logs/me2.com-access combined
</VirtualHost>

You'd change all the 'me2.com' instances to whatever you want them to be, and the ErrorLog and CustomLog to
wherever you want them to go.

- Next you'd need to make the directories above to hold your web files. In my case it would look like this:

mkdir -p /var/www/html/me2.com

- This should do it go back to your MAMP control panel and stop/start your servers.

4.) Troubleshooting

- Start/Stop Servers button is doing nothing on my MAMP control panel

If this happens you gotta get medieval on your box from the CLI.  Typically what I've found is there is a
config error somewhere and one service starts.. the other doesn't and the control panel thingy says neither
are running. So you have to manually kill each, find your error and try again.

Killing MySQL:

from the CLI do this:

ps -ef | grep mysqld | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9

Killing Apache:

from the CLI do this:

ps -ef | grep httpd | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9

- Apache won't start and there is nothing in the error logs

The apache default log is in /Applications/MAMP/logs/apache_error.log .. Always check it first.

If there is nothing useful there, run the binary on it's own and it will typically tell you why it's
not starting:

/Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/httpd

- I want Apache to run on port 80 in MAMP

To make this happen open your httpd.conf and search for "Listen". You'll see an entry that says "Listen 8888"
Add a second entry that says "Listen 80" directly under it.

Next you need to modify your virtual hosts config to look like the following:

NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/me2.com
    ServerName me2.com
    ServerAlias www.me2.com
    <Directory /var/www/html/me.com>
        Allow from all
        Options -MultiViews
    </Directory>
    ErrorLog /Applications/MAMP/logs/me2.com-errors
    CustomLog /Applications/MAMP/logs/me2.com-access combined
</VirtualHost>

Setting IRC up with Nagios is super easy, as somebody else has already done all the hard work.  There’s several apps out there but the one we’ve chosen and stuck with is NagIRCBot.  The configuration is as simple as installing it on your nagios server and sending the bot some parameters:

In the example above we’ve pointed the bot to status.dat for it’s data (-f), set the server and port to connect to (-s), named our bot (-n), give it the IRC password (-p), told it which channel to live in (-c), set it to check every 5 seconds (-i), set a global status interval (-I) and given it a pid (-P).

Another option for one off monitors is using a raw PHP socket connection to scavenge for messages.  I used this recently in conjunction with a scrape of the AWS RSS status feeds.  Basically I scrape the feed and deposit new messages in a text file.  The PHP bot spins by every 10 seconds to check for new data and post to #monitor.  The PHP bot looks like this:

$socket = fsockopen("192.168.195.99", 6668);fputs($socket,"USER CM example.com CM :CM \n");
fputs($socket,"PASS *PASSWORD*\n");
fputs($socket,"NICK MSGBOT\n");
fputs($socket,"JOIN #monitor\n");
$count = 0;while(1) {
sleep(10);
fputs($socket, "PONG ".$ex[1]."\n");
$real_message = system("cat $alert_file");
$line_count = system("cat $alert_file | wc -l");
if($line_count > 0){
$message = explode("\n", $real_message);
foreach ($message as $line){
fputs($socket, "PRIVMSG #monitor :$line\n");
sleep(2);
}
system("cp /dev/null $alert_file");}
}

That’s a hot little script, you can imagine the potential. Basically anything you can stick in the alert file gets dropped off in your IRC channel. At any rate, let your imagination run wild and I hope it helps you keep your systems up.

You can download the Monit source from here

I chose to take the sissy route with my CentOS 5.5 loads and add a repo where I knew a good package lives.  So I ran this:

Once you load up that repo, just run a yum to install Monit:

Monit will install an init script, and a monit.conf file that is packed full of instructions for getting started. Some quick config options to start with:

Next we need to configure a service. First I want to check Apache memory usage after a fresh restart to get a baseline. Here’s a handy little one liner to do that:

In my case, I’m using about 130MB. I’m going to set my threshold at 150MB. There will be plenty of time after setup to tweak these numbers. Next we’ll configure a basic process in Monit that will tell it to restart Apache if we cross the 150MB mark. Here’s what it will look like:

This is a very very simple configuration for Monit, it does much more, but this is where we’ll start. Basically I’ve given monit the pid file for my Apache process, my start and stop commands, and I’ve told it that if Apache’s total memory consumption is greater than 150MB for 10 minutes, that it needs a restart.

Once this is set, fire up Monit from init.d:

Once it’s up, you can start watching from the web interface: http://yourserverip:2812.
Login with the credentials you set in the configuration file. Mine looks like this:

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So you can see, Monit is doing exactly what we told it to do. I’m going to stop here for now, but again, there is a whole lot more you can do with this app. From CPU utilization per process, to overall load, to alerts on file permissions. It’s really more functional than I remembered it being. The sad thing is, I’m only using it right now to compensate for other issues, duct tape if you will. Oh well, tomorrow I’ll be looking at linux mssql driver solutions. MS Evil.