Skip to the end of this post for the lesson part of this blog post. This email arrived in my inbox yesterday at about 10:00 PM: This is the backup script for my database dumps on my server at home. I immediately recognized it as the follow-on from a table I had just added. It was late, I was headed to bed. I forgot about it. Until this morning. This morning This morning, […]
Yesterday, I noticed this message in one of the “daily security run output” emails which FreeBSD host can send out. I’ve used net-mgmt/nrpe3 for several years. It checks remote hosts and runs any number of predetermined commands and returns the results. It’s stable, highly configurable, and just keeps running. I had a look at the replacement (net-mgmt/nrpe) and decided to build and install it. First, it went onto my poudriere package bulding host
Nagios 3: moving from nrpe 3 to nrpe 4 – what needs changing? Read More »
It was May 2021 when I tweeted about monitoring FreeBSD jails which had jail IP addresses only in the 127.0.0.0/8 range. Yesterday, nearly 6 months later, I did the first test of this. This came up because I’m getting a new FreshPorts node ready. I’ve created a file in the jail to be run from the host. That script runs in the jail but it initiated by a process on the host. In
Monitoring FreeBSD jails from the host Read More »
When you install a package, you want to know it’s still around to reinstall. You’ve probably never given this much thought. Neither had I, until I read this post on Reddit. In my case, I run my own poudriere server which allows me to run my own package server. Why run your own package server? build ports with non-default configuration settings: Want databases/mantis build for PostgreSQL, not MySQL? (and who wouldn’t?) – You
Are all installed packages available for reinstall? Read More »
It is time to replace my existing UPS with another one. I’m getting only 3 minutes of runtime with the existing batteries (and new batteries, after recalibration). It was suggested I buy an Eaton 5PX. I wasn’t convinced. This is the first of three articles about nut. The second is about testing the shutdown. The third will be about testing both shutdown and startup timings. Two days later, I’d purchased a new Eaton
Monitoring your UPS using nut on FreeBSD Read More »
I’ve been getting these messages in /var/log/messages on slocum for as long as I can remember. Today I found out why those errors are occurring. They are logged on the FreeBSD jail host for a Nagios instance I run. Nagios runs in a jail on that host. I’ve just been ignoring the messages, but today it got me. I was having trouble getting a new FreeBSD port to work, so I was easily
Oct 4 09:01:24 slocum kernel: pid 1409 (check_bacula), uid 181: exited on signal 11 Read More »
I have scripts for monitoring vulns in FreeBSD jails. They use third-party scripts. All I wrote was the Nagios part of the solution. I was preparing slides for my Why I prefer thick jails over thin jails talk at EuroBSDCon 2019. There is still time to register and attend. I was explaining my scripts and was providing links to gist.github.com … I realized I should create a repo: https://github.com/dlangille/freebsd-nagios-jail These scripts do the
scripts for monitoring vulns in FreeBSD jails Read More »
I started playing with /usr/local/etc/periodic/security/405.pkg-base-audit as part of a monitoring system. It works fine from the command line, but when I use Nagios plugins, I am getting unexpected results. By unexpected, I mean messages about FreeBSD 10.2. The host in question runs FreeBSD 12.0. The problem cannot be reproduced on the host, only from the Nagios monitoring host. Oh wait, the Nagios monitoring host is a jail on the host in question. That
Getting ‘FreeBSD-10.2 is vulnerable’ messages on a 12.0 host Read More »
This problem was difficult to figure out. The cause was simple, but not obvious. Messages such as this were appearing in emails From July: In August: I had no idea why. My initial suspicion was the /etc/newsyslog.conf configuration for that file: [dan@knew:~] $ grep auth /etc/newsyslog.conf /var/log/auth.log root:logcheck 640 7 * @T00 JC [dan@knew:~] $ That count is 7, so why is it complaining about 6? The files look ok: [dan@knew:~] $ ls
newsyslog: chmod(/var/log/auth.log.6.bz2) in change_attrs: No such file or directory Read More »
The solution Here is the solution. You can stop reading now: ./check_email_delivery –smtp-server smtp.example.org –mailto dan@example.org \ –mailfrom dan@example.org \ –body ‘test, please ignore’ –imapssl \ –imap-server imap.example.org –username deltest –password secret That will test both delivery and receipt. There. Be gone. You don’t need the rest of this article. Thanks. Background As pointed out, this isn’t testing for an email loop. This is testing delivery. I took the term from the phrase
Testing email delivery Read More »