ImperialViolet

Valenti's speech is quite good. Apart from the file that he's wrong in almost every important point, he speaks very well. I don't know if he gets things wrong because he really doesn't understand, or that he's just trying to find an acceptable cover for his clients' greed.

He simply (seemingly) doesn't get that there is something fundamentally different about my physically depriving you of something and taking a copy. Of course, it's profitable to ignore that. He also asserts (unquestioned) that there are no alternate business models. Of course, it's profitable to ignore them (for the moment). He also doesn't get the difference between information and the physical expression of that information. Of course, it's profitable to treat information as a product.

He just fundamentally doesn't get it. I wish I had a transcript of his answer to a question about DVD Region Encoding where he just assumes that the legal system is there to uphold whatever he deems best. It's just breathtaking arrogance.

Nagios looks like a really good status monitoring tool. Have a look at the demo. I hope to get it going in DoC, but it requires a heck of a lot of installing. Thankfully there are (nearly) wonderful Gentoo ebuilds which do everything needed. (Only nearly wonderful because the ebuild had a bug; patch mailed to the maintainer. On the same note, the prelink ebuild also has a missing dependency to libc6-2.3.2; patch send to, and acked by, the maintainer).

Unfortunately, DoC servers don't run Gentoo (or Debian I'm afraid) so it looks like I'm going to be doing it by hand.

Nagios has quite a nasty configuration I'm afraid. So here's a Python script to do some of it for you.

The input is a series of lines. The first character determines the type of line and they go like this:

• Hhost name,service 1[,service 2...]
• Ggroup name,group alias,member 1[,member 2...]
• Sservice name,service alias,service comment

Example:

Sping,Ping,check_ping!100.0,20%!500.0,60%
Shttp,HTTP,check_http
Sssh,SSH,check_ssh
Ssmtp,SMTP,check_smtp
Snntp,NNTP,check_nntp
Snfs,NFS,check_rpc!nfs
Hbulbul,ssh
Hsax,ssh
Hsparrow
Gservers,Servers,bulbul,sax,sparrow