Things I’ve dealt with this week:
- Apache 2.4.6/2.4.7 Authn Issues
- Writing ‘proper’ SQL for PHP.
- GovDeals Auctions
Rant: Check Your Orders
Sigh.
It’s been a week. I was going to follow-up on a previous post about Zabbix API and getting a working status display going, but either Dell or Pitt-Ohio threw a wrench in the works today. We’re not sure who mucked it up, but someone mucked it up and we’ve spent the last two days cleaning it up.
Zabbix: Getting To Data You Can’t Easily Get To Via API
So, Zabbix has a lot of cool functionality in it. One of my favorite features is the API.
The API allows you to pull data like graphs, status of hosts, and active triggers.
Franken-Switch
About a week before we were slated to replace a Cisco 3560G switch in the Middle School, we had a catastrophic pipe failure above one of our racks. The failure was so bad that water flooded the floor above the rack, seeped into the cracks, and eventually found it’s way through a light fixture into the rack.
What followed was incredibly unfortunate and predictable:
Yep. The switch is down. Crap. Crappy crap. Crappity crap.
A Word on The Division & Coding
Someone on Reddit made an interesting discovery yesterday, regarding a key stat in The Division: Protection from Elites. The end-game of The Division involves killing lots of Blue (or maybe Purple) and Gold-tier mobs (elites). There is a stat on high-end gear called “Protection From Elites.”
One would understand that this means damage from Elites would be decreased.
Well, someone dug through the code on Reddit and… Well suffice it to say that it might not be accurate nor working as intended. The two relevant snippets of code (thanks to u/AlCalzone89 for digging through it) are:
Filler Post Two
Sorry, I’ve been tied up with Statewide Mandated PARCC testing this week, and haven’t had time to write a post (let alone do ANYTHING worthy of posting).
So here’s a video of an asshole driver from NJ.
<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/UZUN02Jj1SE” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>
My upcoming to-do list includes:
- Writing some templates for Zabbix
- Testing Confluence
- Making a page to determine the amount of coffee grind to use based on how much water you want (and how much coffee you want) based on the type of brewer you’re using.
Zabbix: More On Dependencies
After a week of struggling with Zabbix and getting trigger dependencies done, I figured I was all set. Everything was set to be dependent on something else (usually ping checks to indicate that something is down).
Then we lost connectivity to a school. My email LIT UP with alerts. Almost every single device behind those switches reported that they were down. ARGH!
After doing some more research on it, I found the culprit: how often the data is checked.
Zabbix: Trigger Dependency
I’ve been talking a lot about Zabbix lately (mostly because it’s a lot of what is on my plate at work) and I keep finding little gotcha points that I understand but are very frustrating. Last week (and into this week) I’ve been setting up trigger dependency. Here’s an example, just as a hypothetical situation.
Upgrading Zabbix to Version 3.0.1 (from 2.4.7)
This guide modified from 2DayGeek’s post available here. Some of the steps (namely 7) didn’t work, so I wanted to publish my own step-by-step guide because Zabbix’s provided instructions of build from soure and hope for the best were found lacking in my view.
For your information, this guide is written for upgrading Zabbix 2.4.7 to 3.0.1 on an Ubuntu installation. The steps will be slightly different for different flavors of Linux/Unix and completely different for Windows. If you’re doing a Windows Zabbix box you should already know how to manage it because .exe is simpler than this.
Comcastic Driving
On 3/17 I was driving home from work and I got cut off by a Comcast van.
I sent a request in to their support company to let them know (I’m not a customer so I didn’t expect to hear anything back). I did get a reply, but it was a boilerplate response.