In the world of web, sometimes the web just isn’t convenient!  This is true when you are *forced* to use the web to check email.  My latest job only allows me to check email using Outlook Web Access or OWA.  Even worse, they removed the ability to forward emails and IMAP/POP access.

There are a couple of solutions out there but I couldn’t get any of them to work … in comes msfetch ( http://www.isrcomputing.com/msfetch/).

When I initially installed the tool for (outlook 2007) on my linux machine, I had issues getting it working.  Huge thanks to Paul (owner) for working with me.

In these examples I will be using the variables:

• username: myusername
• email: myuser.name@mydomain.com

Take note that the username and email is different!  This will be the root of our issues below.

First thing I had to do was download and install the scripts (took all of 5 seconds).  Then we need to edit the .msfetchrc file.  Here is an example of a WORKING copy … not the one that gave me problems.

turn on DEBUG within the msfetchrc script.  This was easy to do.  Simply uncomment out the DEBUG line near the top.

Once this was done I executed and got these errors near the bottom:

Again, working with the author, he was able to try a couple of tricks and it turns out that my login name “myusername” in this example is different than my email “myemail.name”.  The real example is dmauro -vs- douglas.mauro.  This was screwing up the WebDav and some changes needed to be made in the msfetchrc script

Line:61 – I commented out the original and inserted the new line above

You could also modify the line 62 to get Sent items (I didn’t in this example).

It works! Here is a run (no emails):

Of course I couldn’t leave well enough alone. I wanted a way to notify me via pop/imap when I get email on this account. I turned to setting up mutt to use gmail and ran a *crude* 1 liner to send emails to my account

Line:463

Going into my douglasmauro account on the system reveals a .muttrc of:

and a simple entry into cron

[cce]
[root@localhost ~]# crontab -l
*/5 * * * * /root/msfetch 2>&1 > /dev/null # Fetch OWA Mail
[root@localhost ~]#
[\cce]

Now every 5 minutes, it’ll check this OWA account and forward an EMPTY msg to the email I listed with the subject = $web_header.

yes, yes, I could find a way to forward the whole msg but this is soo much easier

More thanks to Paul for helping me get this working!

Simple way to grab some files out of a RPM

Wanna learn Git … watch some of these: http://www.gitcasts.com/episodes

or some reading: http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git-core/docs/v1.2.6/tutorial.html

While researching some issues I’m having with iostat, I found an interesting command called ‘watch’

Instead of running the usual command (up arrow, return, up arrow, return)

…or writing a never ending while loop. You can issue “watch” which will run your program (clearing the screen each time) and even show you (highlighted) the diffs between each call … pretty nice:

would show in a new screen:

The NRPE command for checking procs simply returns

Using some code off the net, we can create a little wrapper to print the Nagios Performance Data way (if that’s even a sentence)

Running this by hand gives us:

Create a newline in the config file

Using the name “total_procs_wp” in the nrpe call, we’ll get the total procs running AND with op5, it’ll start auto graphing that for us.

Well … not kills but many systems and applications go crazy when the system clock drifts too far.

In this post we’ll focus on adding a new service check or plugin to the op5 Monitor software.  If you’re using Nagios, this will work for you as well but you’ll have to make all the changes in the txt files by hand … sorry.

Be sure to read the op5 walk-through of writing your own plugin for more.

Let’s first talk about time .. NTP is used by many sites and seems to work well.  The issue is that if the clock becomes WAY out of wack, it will not sync the clock (this is by design).  This means if your clock jumps 1 day off (as an example), it will never get sync’ed by NTP without someone stepping in.

One way we can combat this and proactively check the drift is by installing the check_time plugin.  I’ve used Nagios for many years (and love it) but you’ll see below how much easier it is (in a few mouse clicks) to add a new check and automagically graph  the perf data!

Be sure to install and run NTP on your op5 server.

There’s a time service installed (but not usually activated) on *nix boxes called daytime.  Check to see if yours is running by issuing the command:

(BTW you’ll want to install this service on the nodes you’re checking.  We set ours up on the op5 server / localhost as an example)

You can turn these daytime ones on with the following commands:

Once that is done, you should be able to telnet to localhost port 13

Now that we have the time service up and running, let’s move onto the check program….

There are 1000s of plugins avail to download and use for free.  We’ll be using the check_time plugin.  Go find and download this onto your op5 Monitor server:

http://www.nagioswiki.org/wiki/Plugin:check_time

Install the perl program in a safe place.  We picked:

As with any program you download from the net … be sure to look it over before running it on your prod boxes!

Run the program by hand to see if you have everything you need

You might have to install a few perl modules to get this rolling.  In our case, we had to install the TimeDate:

As with most (well written) plugins, there’s a useful help when run with -h

With the check command and time service working, let’s setup op5 now.  Click on ‘Configure’ and then ‘Commands’

Now enter in the following information info the correct lines:

• command_name: check_time (you can pick any name here you like)
• command_line: /opt/local/tpt/op5_custom_plugins/check_time.pl -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -Pdaytime -w $ARG1$ -c $ARG2$ -f
• FILE: etc/checkcommand.cfg (DEFAULT DONT CHANGE)

• $HOSTADDRESS$ will get replaced with the address of the device you are checking.
• -p specifies the protocol to use.  In this case, daytime.
• -w number of seconds we will WARN if time drifts beyond (1st passed argument)
• -c number of seconds we will CRITICAL if time drifts beyond (2nd passed argument)
• -f spits out some performance numbers that op5 will auto graph on (nice!)

Once you hit ‘Apply Changes’ we can go into a host and add this new check as a new service.

If not already there, click ‘Configure’ -> Select host and then click Go.  Top right click ‘Services for host XYZ’

Here’s where we’ll add the new service.

• service_description: We picked Check Clock Time (this appears in the Service Details section)
• check_command: here’s where we want to select the new check command we created above
• check_command_args: This specifies $ARG1$ (no spaces) !  (no spaces) $ARG2$ that we want to pass.  5!60
• Once you have this click on ‘Test this service’ to see if you got it right

Click ‘Apply Changes’ when you are finished.