Centreon 1.4.1 for Gentoo

Some days ago, i stumbled across Centreon (previously Oreon), a very nice web frontend for displaying nagios monitoring data, but also – even more important – it supports service and host configuration. Although the installation is poorly designed and not FHS compatible, the webapp is very nice and the generated nagios configuration looks very clean and sane.

I have created a centreon-1.4.1.ebuild with a (rather huge) patch for FHS compatibility in my overlay. I’d recommend it for every nagios user frustrated with editing tons of files for adding a host or service 😀

Apache 2.2 already stable on some archs / New baselayout-2 stages

After having enjoyed a wonderful vacation in turkey, i have finally found time to resolve the remaining issues with apache and opened bug 190331 for stabilizing apache-2.0.59-r5 — which contains fixes for the CVEs mentioned on httpd.apache.org — and apache-2.2.4-r12.

We encourage everyone to upgrade to apache 2.2, there are some changes in the configuration though. We have split much of the configuration for modules bundled with apache to their own files in /etc/apache2/modules.d/. This creates a lean httpd.conf on the one hand, but also eases configuration updates in the future. Additionally, some third-party authentication modules may not work with apache 2.2 (yet), since the internal structure has changed since 2.2. For details see New features of 2.2.

The apache herd will support apache 2.0 until Dec 31 2007, so there should be enough room for migration.

Being quite busy with apache since my return from vacation i haven’t touched the experimental qmail ebuilds again yet, but i will catch up on that over the weekend and make a seperate post later on.

Last but not least, i have built new stages with baselayout-2 for vserver usage available at http://people.linux-vserver.org/~hollow/stages/. Stages for i686 are already online, amd64 is still compiling, but should be finished during this evening.

experimental qmail ebuilds

Due to the huge amount of code duplication and open bugs i have started to clean up several qmail related ebuilds. The most important change is the qmail.eclass which simplifies installation of different qmail variants (netqmail, qmail-ldap, qmail-mysql, mini-qmail) and provides some functions and variables for qmail add-ons.

Some updated ebuilds can be found in my overlay until they are ready for the live portage tree.

The following bugs have been adressed:

  • daemontools
    – the daemontools.eclass provides standardized installation for supervise scripts for the daemontools package. supervise scripts are installed to /var/lib/supervise now. You have to change your symlinks
  • qmailadmin/vqadmin
    – the qmailadmin and vqadmin ebuilds have been updated to work with webapp-config.

  • 47668,
    83606,
    152503

    – ezmlm-idx-mysql and ezmlm-idx-pgsql have been updated and integrated to ezmlm-idx and can be enabled with use flags now.
  • 97267
    – a new virtual/checkpassword has been introduced to combine all checkpwd compatible applications
  • 123897
    – you can now use qmail’s pop3d with ssl support using ucspi-ssl
  • 135571
    – man-pages are now installed by ucspi-tcp directly
  • 137207
    – qmail does not install man-pages related to internal libraries anymore
  • 140488
    – vpopmail has been updated to the latest version and a supervise script has been provided for vpopmaild

  • 95184,
    141880,
    164215

If you feel like testing, checkout my overlay (yes, it is in layman-global.txt), and report any problems directly to me via IRC or mail.

Enjoy.

qmail fixups and new howto

Following my previous post about new qmail ebuilds, i have started a clean install for one of our mail servers at work and already fixed some bugs, mainly in the webapp integration for vqadmin and the dovecot-dspam plugin that has been added to portage recently. Again, these updated ebuilds can be found in my overlay.

During the installation i have also rewritten most parts of the old netqmail/vpopmail guide. It now uses dovecot instead of courier, has a section aboult spam filtering with RBL, ClamAV, DSpam and SpamAssassin and explains howto setup vqadmin/qmailadmin.

The first draft of the qmail guide can be found here.

qmail-ldap revival and simscan-1.3.1

A short notice from the qmail side of life:

After like 3 years, the qmail-ldap ebuild has been updated:

  • Now in sync with netqmail-1.05 ebuild
  • Updated qmail-ldap patch to 20060201
  • Includes QmailLDAP/Controls patch (let’s you store control/ files in LDAP attributes)
  • Includes the queue-custom-error.patch (return custom bounce messages from queue programs)
  • Includes qmail-spp
  • Sane Makefile options handling

A little testing wouldn’t hurt, though.

On a sidenote, i have added simscan-1.3.1 to the tree, after successfull testing on my production mail server for a while, enjoy.

Gentoo User Meeting / Installation Party in Berlin

Hi Community,

this is just a quick note, that i’m planning to organise a Gentoo user meeting (probably including an installation party) in Berlin, Germany. It will probably take place in the Newthinking Store in Berlin-Mitte or Berlin-Kreuzberg if we can get enough participants.

There is no date scheduled yet, though my suggestion would be to do it in april/may.

So, please, if you are interested in joining, please send me an e-mail (hollow at gentoo org) or contact me on Freenode (nick: Hollow).

Cheers!

baselayout-vserver is dead!

To make it short: during the last months I have worked together with Roy to get baselayout-1.13 working within Linux-VServer and OpenVZ guests, and since 1.13.0_alpha5 it seems to work quite fine now … baselayout-vserver is dead! 88|

Now the long version: Since many things are not allowed inside virtual servers, the Gentoo VPS team has “forked” baselayout and stripped all delicate parts. Since maintaining an up-to-date baselayout-vserver (read: synced to original baselayout) is a PITA we have finally decided to make baselayout working in virtual servers.

Being able to check whether we are inside a virtual server or not, we made all delicate parts (e.g. mounting, sulogin, fsck, etc.) conditional, i.e. they will be skipped inside a virtual server. Additionally, baselayout-1.13 being more modular, previously needed init scripts can be punted from the default runlevels (e.g. modules, clock, hdparm, etc).

Summa summarum, it will enable you to use a normal baselayout within virtual servers.

In case you thought this is the only advantage: wrong! Additionally baselayout-vserver implied the ugliness of an extra portage profile and, being quite an essential package, also a set of extra stages. These are dead now as well! 88|

On a sidenote, a lot of Gentoo support patches have been merged into util-vserver trunk.

  • You can now use vserver ... build together with the template build method and the gentoo distribution target using a stage3 tarball! Hence, vserver-new is dead!
  • The gentoo init style has been reimplemented to work the same way as it would with an init process. This will bring back output of the boot process .. 😀
  • All emerge wrappers (vemerge, vesync, vupdateworld, vdispatch-conf) have been merged!
  • The init scripts have been split into vprocunhide and vservers.default again. You can now use vservers.default like the net init scripts. To start vservers of type MARK, just do ln -s vservers.default vservers.MARK and you’re done!

If you want to test all this new stuff, you have to follow these steps:

  • emerge util-vserver-svn – you can find the live svn ebuild in our overlay.
  • In case you didn’t do it with old init scripts: /etc/init.d/vprocunhide start
  • To build a new virtual server use one of these commands (depending on the init style you want):
    • vserver myguest build \
      --context 42 \
      --initstyle plain \
      -m template -- \
      -d gentoo \
      -t /vservers/stage3-i686-20061103.tar.bz2
    • vserver myguest build \
      --context 42 \
      --initstyle gentoo \
      -m template -- \
      -d gentoo \
      -t /vservers/stage3-i686-20061103.tar.bz2

A prepared stage3 with baselayout-1.13.0_alpha5 can be downloaded from here.

It should look something like this if you use my baselayout-1.13.0_alpha5 stage3:

zeus vservers # vserver myguest build \
> --context 42 \
> --initstyle gentoo \
> -m template -- \
> -d gentoo \
> -t /vservers/stage3-i686-20061103.tar.bz2
>>> Adding shared /usr/portage to fstab ...
>>> Checking init-style ... gentoo
>>> Installing special init-style magic ...
!!!
!!! You have to install a service (e.g. syslog-ng) and add it to the
!!! default runlevel before you start the guest the first time!
!!! Otherwise the guest will die as soon as it has finished booting.
!!!
!!! Consult the Gentoo Handbook on how to chroot and install
!!! packages into the guest environment.
!!!
>>> Found baselayout-1.13.0_alpha5
>>> Fixing inittab ...
>>> Fixing default runlevel scripts ...
>>> Fixing fstab ...
zeus vservers # vserver myguest start

Gentoo/Linux 1.13.0_alpha5; http://www.gentoo.org/
 Copyright 1999-2006 Gentoo Foundation; Distributed under the GPLv2

Press I to enter interactive boot mode

 * Using existing device nodes in /dev ...                  [ ok ]
 * Checking all filesystems ...                             [ ok ]
 * Mounting local filesystems ...                           [ ok ]
 * Activating (possible) swap ...                           [ ok ]
 * Setting hostname to localhost ...                        [ ok ]
 * Initializing random number generator ...                 [ ok ]
 * Starting local ...                                       [ ok ]
 * Setting system clock using the hardware clock [VPS] ...  [ ok ]
 * Starting syslog-ng ...                                   [ ok ]

If you downloaded my prepared stage, just ignore the warning about installing a service, i have already done this for you 😉

Report any difficulties to hollow[at]gentoo.org please ..