Tag Archives: Debian

Debian, Linux

The LCHost Debian package mirror

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As part of giving back to the community LCHost runs a Debian package mirror (including backports) (for i386 and amd64) which was recently added to the official mirrors list.

I spent a little time making it automatically detect changes at our source mirror within a couple of minutes and pull down, so at most it’ll never be more than 5 minutes behind the top-level mirrors.

To use our debian mirror, simply replace your regular mirror definition in /etc/apt/sources.list with:

deb http://mirror.lchost.net/debian/ stable main contrib
deb-src http://mirror.lchost.net/debian/ stable main contrib

(You may choose to use the release name in place of “stable” to ensure you never accidentally go between major releases – so for wheezy, simply replace the word stable with wheezy)

If you use backports, you can get those packages from us too, using something like:

deb http://mirror.lchost.net/debian/ wheezy-backports main
Debian, Linux, Nagios

Installing Nagios3 on Debian Wheezy

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It’s pretty straightforward to install Nagios on a Debian system but if you want to be able to use the web interface to control the nagios process a little more work is required.

Starting with a blank slate (apt/dpkg will ensure any required prerequisites will be installed):

# apt-get install nagios3 apache2-suexec

You’ll be asked to set a password for the nagiosadmin user for the web interface.

Enable check_external_commands in Nagios to enable the ability to mute alarms, make comments, restart the nagios process etc from the web interface (pretty much invaluable, but be aware of the inherent risks in enabling the ability to influence the process from “outside”)

# sed -i -e 's/check_external_commands=0/check_external_commands=1/' /etc/nagios3/nagios.cfg
# /etc/init.d/nagios3 restart

Edit the nagios3 apache2 config include to make the web interface scripts run as the nagios user so that the web interface can write to the nagios command pipe; inserting the following at the top of /etc/nagios3/apache2.conf:

User nagios
Group nagios

Restart apache..

# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

And you’re pretty much done! You can go to http://YOUR_HOST_NAME/nagios3/ and log in with your nagiosadmin password you set up when prompted at the start of this process.

Now, you can get started with creating host and service configuration files in /etc/nagios3/conf.d/ to monitor your servers/network/etc

Debian, Linux

Debian 6 (Debian Squeeze) & Debian 7 (Debian Wheezy) reboot… doesn’t.

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Someone made kexec-tools handle reboot requests by default seemingly. This allows the system to skip BIOS/POST etc and just drop to a minimal runlevel and start a kernel again.

This is great if you only have debian on your system and particularly great if you spend a lot of time changing kernels – when you issue reboot, or shutdown -r now (etc) kexec-tools intercepts the command and does a warm-restart rather than resetting the machine cold – if you don’t need to, why wait through all the BIOS checks, bootroms, etc, right?

Except some of us reboot because we want to change OS. I’d argue that it should perhaps be the default behaviour to cold-reboot (and the installer could, perhaps, ask!) or that KDE should have a button for “warm restart” and one for “cold reboot” or whatever, but anyway.

If you want to make reboot actually reboot the system you’ll want to:

# dpkg-reconfigure kexec-tools

And tell it to not use kexec-tools to handle reboots. If you’re never going to want kexec-tools, you can probably uninstall it using apt, but I just disabled it. It’s useful on the odd occasion I do want to just upgrade the kernel to enable it, reboot, and disable it again, I suppose.

Some SEO, perhaps?

Debian 6 Squeeze won’t reboot
Debian 6 Squeeze reboot doesn’t go to grub
Debian 6 Squeeze reboot dualboot
Debian 7 Wheezy won’t reboot
Debian 7 Wheezy reboot doesn’t go to bios

Debian, Linux

Debian 6 (Debian Squeeze) KDE4 Override Screen Resolution

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Everything you needed to know about manually overriding incorrectly probed screen resolutions but nobody thought to write down, seemingly:

$ xrandr -q
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 3600 x 1080, maximum 8192 x 8192
DVI-I-1 connected 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 477mm x 268mm
   1920x1080      60.0*+
   1600x1200      60.0  
   1680x1050      60.0  
   1400x1050      60.0  
   1280x1024      75.0     60.0  
   1440x900       59.9  
   1280x960       60.0  
   1152x864       75.0  
   1024x768       75.1     70.1     60.0  
   832x624        74.6  
   800x600        72.2     75.0     60.3     56.2  
   640x480        72.8     75.0     66.7     60.0  
   720x400        70.1  
DVI-I-2 connected 1680x1050+1920+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 0mm x 0mm
   1024x768       60.0  
   800x600        60.3     56.2  
   848x480        60.0  
   640x480        59.9  
   1680x1050      60.0*

This output shows what xrandr has detected. In my case, DVI-I-2 wasn’t showing the 1680×1050 resolution I needed. It’s there now because this output is from after I made my modifications.

$ xrandr --addmode DVI-I-2 "1680x1050"

Was all it took.

Sadly, of course, this is all lost on reboot, despite making changes in the System Settings/Display panel and saving them as default – because even though my screen alignment settings were saved in $HOME/.kde/share/config/krandrrc, the mode 1680×1050 isn’t remembered as being valid for my screen.

Because krandrrc contains a config element like this:

[Display]
ApplyOnStartup=true
StartupCommands=xrandr --output "DVI-I-1" --pos 0x0 --mode 1920x1080 --refresh 60\nxrandr --output "DVI-I-2" --pos 1920x0 --mode 1680x1050 --refresh 59.9543

I simply elected to try adding:

xrandr --addmode DVI-I-2 "1680x1050"

To the front end of StartupCommands, like so:

[Display]
ApplyOnStartup=true
StartupCommands=xrandr --addmode DVI-I-2 "1680x1050"\nxrandr --output "DVI-I-1" --pos 0x0 --mode 1920x1080 --refresh 60\nxrandr --output "DVI-I-2" --pos 1920x0 --mode 1680x1050 --refresh 59.9543

On reboot, my screen resolution is correctly set, and my dualhead config works as expected. Now I just need to remember never to change my screen settings again, or be prepared to make that change again.

Some SEO, hopefully:

KDE4 Manual Resolution
KDE4 Override Screen Resolution
KDE4 Incorrect Screen Resolution