After rebooting kraken to take a photo, I found nagios was displaying an error for my smartmon checks: NRPE: Unable to read output.
Running the command by hand on the nagios server, I found:

$ /usr/local/libexec/nagios/check_nrpe2 -H kraken -c check_smartmon_ad24
NRPE: Unable to read output

But from the remote server I got:

# /usr/local/libexec/nagios/check_smartmon -d /dev/ad24
OK: device is functional and […]

The smartmon bug I mentioned a few days ago has a patch. It was submitted 24 Jan 2010 but was closed after the maintainer said he would release a new distfile soon.
It hasn’t arrived. I sent him and email tonight as a follow up the PR.
In the meantime, I’ve applied the patch to […]

NewEgg has received and processed my returned purchases. I’m impressed. I mailed them on Thursday (I think) and here it is, Wednesday. I should expect to see the refunds on my credit card within 2-3 days.

I do like CoolDrives.com.
I was shown this quick swap drive tray and started hunting around. This spare parts page is interesting and reminds me that I want to buy different cables for the file server.
Also neat are these hard drive cases for when your HDD is not in use.

The smartmontools package contains two utility programs (smartctl and smartd) to control and monitor storage systems using the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System (SMART) built into most modern ATA and SCSI harddisks. In many cases, these utilities will provide advanced warning of disk degradation and failure. (The above shamelessly taken from the supplied URL).
I […]

These are the shipments I’m expecting this week:

Tuesday - RAM and two HDD to be returned
Wednesday - the case
Thursday - two SATA drives for the, RAM, and new PSU

I recently wrote about a tower case solution which sliced $500 off the cost. Last night we found an ASUS m/b for a Phenom II which supports ECC. This will be a cheaper faster solution. I will, however, have to buy a NIC. This NIC runs a Realtek chipset. No […]

I’ve started seeing these messages recently:

openvpn[2688]: latens.example.org/10.99.36.17:60467 Authenticate/Decrypt packet error: bad packet ID (may be a replay): [ #999 ] — see the man page entry for –no-replay and –replay-window for more info or silence this warning with –mute-replay-warnings

After reading the man page, I decided to add the following and restart openvpn:

replay-window 64 20

We’ll see….

Bacula is a backup system with three different retention periods:

Volume
Job
File

I set all three to the same value.
It is important to note that these values affect only the Catalog. It determines how long a given record is held in the database. For example, if you set File Retention to be 45 days, it means […]

I’m thinking about creating a storage box. One with a lot of disk space. It will be used for backups and stuff. I will continue to backup to tape as well.
I’m considering this case, which has 8xSATA hot-swap bays:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811192058

If I was buying a RAID card, I’d buy this one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816131002&Tpk=areca%201120

But I may go with […]