Groundwork configuration

Groundwork is a tool used for infrastructure monitoring. It is based on Nagios but provide a graphical interface to configure services.

If you'd like to make some graph reports you have to create a new RRD configuration in Performance Configuration. Then in the Service configuration specify Extended Info Template to tell how the graph must drawn (percentage or just number). Don't forget to click on Apply Hosts and to make a commit to get the graphs working.

PS: putting $debug to value 2 in /usr/local/groundwork/nagios/eventhandlers/process_service_perf_db_file.pl will create a log file.

Debian Network configuration under ESX

If you try to install a Debian distribution on ESX 3.5 don't specify Linux other 32 bits. Instead use Ubuntu. Otherwise network won't work (i.e. DHCP).

MailScanner stops working after midnight

The MailScanner installed on our mail server suddenly stopped processing mails after midnight. After having a look at the log I noticed a file permission problem. Directory /var/spool/MailScanner/quarantine was owned by root instead of postfix. Why did the permission change ? Because to test our MailScanner installation I ran the following command MailScanner --lint --debug-sa. Obvisouly this command changed the owner of the directory. It seems to be a bug.

Default printer under Citrix

Yesterday one of our customers complains about the default printer in Citrix being not correct.
Via policy he forced to use client default printer is Citrix session. Unfortunately it did not work.
It's a known bug which is solved in RollUp5.

Slow Network Connection

One of my customerq just bought a new Dell 2950. The setup was succesful and everything seemed to ran perfectly ... except network perfmormances. Copying a file from this server to another one was very slow. After some search I finally found what did cause the issue : TOE (TCP Offload Engine). The purpose of TOE is to give some processing work to a chipset on the network card instead of using CPU cycles from the computer. In this case disabling the TOE gave me good network transfers.

How did I disable the TOE ? With the following Windows command netsh int ip set chimney disabled