One of the things you can do once you have this plugin installed and running on the host is have the guest perform a search to find it’s host and then save that information somewhere on the guest.  This is very convenient if you’re on a kvm guest and you want to know right away what it’s host is.

In you Chef code, just use something like this to find the current guest’s host:

parent_host = search(:node, "virtualization_kvm_guests:#{node[:hostname]}").first

This plugin uses the same naming scheme for listing guests as my Linux VServer Ohai plugin, so it’s easy to search for the host of a guest, regardless of virtualization type. I often find myself using knife to search for the host of a guest using this:

knife search node "virtualization_*_guests:<myguestname>"

I think of this as a poor man’s KVM management system.

It turns out it’s super easy to use the Nagios integration without enable_environment_macros being enabled.  Simply change your notify-service-by-pagerduty and notify-host-by-pagerduty notification commands to the following:

define command {
       command_name     notify-service-by-pagerduty
       command_line     /usr/local/bin/pagerduty_nagios.pl enqueue -f pd_nagios_object=service -f NOTIFICATIONTYPE="$NOTIFICATIONTYPE$" -f HOSTNAME="$HOSTNAME$" -f SERVICEDESC="$SERVICEDESC$" -f SERVICESTATE="$SERVICESTATE$" -f CONTACTPAGER="$CONTACTPAGER$"
}

define command {
       command_name     notify-host-by-pagerduty
       command_line     /usr/local/bin/pagerduty_nagios.pl enqueue -f pd_nagios_object=host -f NOTIFICATIONTYPE="$NOTIFICATIONTYPE$" -f HOSTNAME="$HOSTNAME$" -f HOSTSTATE="$HOSTSTATE$" -f CONTACTPAGER="$CONTACTPAGER$"
}

Once you change you notification commands, set enable_environment_macros = 0 and restart Nagios.  Making this one change lowered my overall server load by at least 30%!

#opschef

pianobar: error while loading shared libraries:
libao.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

The solution I’ve found is to make sure you have libao-dev installed and then run:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libao.so{.4.0.0,.2}

The easiest solution I’ve found is to simply install Ruby and it’s dependencies and then install RubyGems from source.

I’ve written a small script which installs Ruby and it’s dependencies.  It then grabs the RubyGems source tarball and installs Gems from source.  As I wrote this to get a working Chef install, it also adds an opscode gems source.

You can get the script here.

echo "hi" | mail -s "My Subject" to@someone.com -- -f from@someone.com

One thing that is really cool is you can visit the personas gallery and see a bunch of different personas and when you hover your cursor over a persona, your browser will temporarily use that persona.  If you want to use that persona now, just click on it and it’s your active persona.

Here’s a quick little clip that shows what Personas does.

If anyone else has this problem, just apply the following patch to the configure script:

*** configure.orig      Tue Nov 10 09:35:19 2009
--- configure   Tue Nov 10 10:11:59 2009
***************
*** 11670,11685 ****
 
 
  # Check whether --with-mysql was given.
! if test "${with_mysql+set}" = set; then :
    withval=$with_mysql;  if test "x$withval" != "xno" ; then
      if test "x$withval" != "x" && test "x$withval" != "xyes" ; then
        LD_RUN_PATH="${withval}/lib${LD_RUN_PATH:+:}${LD_RUN_PATH}"
        LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS -L${withval}/lib -L${withval}/lib/mysql -L${withval}/mysql/lib"
        CPPFLAGS="$CPPFLAGS -I${withval}/include -I${withval}/include/mysql -I${withval}/mysql/include"
      else
!       LD_RUN_PATH="/usr/local/mysql/lib:/usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql:/usr/lib/mysql:/usr/mysql/lib:/usr/mysql/lib/mysql:/usr/local/lib/mysql:${LD_RUN_PATH:+:}${LD_RUN_PATH}"
!       LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS -L/usr/local/mysql/lib -L/usr/lib/mysql -L/usr/mysql/lib -L/usr/local/lib/mysql -L/usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql -L/usr/mysql/lib/mysql"
!       CPPFLAGS="$CPPFLAGS -I/usr/local/mysql/include -I/usr/include/mysql -I/usr/mysql/include -I/usr/local/include/mysql -I/usr/local/mysql/include/mysql -I/usr/mysql/include/mysql"
      fi
      { $as_echo "$as_me:${as_lineno-$LINENO}: checking for floor in -lm" >&5
  $as_echo_n "checking for floor in -lm... " >&6; }
--- 11670,11685 ----
 
 
  # Check whether --with-mysql was given.
! if test "${with_mysql+set}" = set; then
    withval=$with_mysql;  if test "x$withval" != "xno" ; then
      if test "x$withval" != "x" && test "x$withval" != "xyes" ; then
        LD_RUN_PATH="${withval}/lib${LD_RUN_PATH:+:}${LD_RUN_PATH}"
        LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS -L${withval}/lib -L${withval}/lib/mysql -L${withval}/mysql/lib"
        CPPFLAGS="$CPPFLAGS -I${withval}/include -I${withval}/include/mysql -I${withval}/mysql/include"
      else
!       LD_RUN_PATH="`mysql_config --libs | egrep -o '\/[[:alnum:]\/]* ' | xargs | tr ' ' ':'`:${LD_RUN_PATH}"
!       LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS `mysql_config --libs | egrep -o '\-L\/[[:alnum:]\/]* ' | xargs`"
!       CPPFLAGS="$CPPFLAGS `mysql_config --include`"
      fi
      { $as_echo "$as_me:${as_lineno-$LINENO}: checking for floor in -lm" >&5
  $as_echo_n "checking for floor in -lm... " >&6; }

Wow, I wonder if any of our server have been bitten by this nasty Perl bug.  It’s hard to believe that RedHat has taken so long to provide a fix for this problem.

Just found this website tonight for playing music online for free.  It’s a community based service where you can have friends to share music with.  It’s kind of like Last.fm and Pandora, but with a much nicer interface.  It seems to load very quickly and the music seems like decent quality.