Config Fun

Finally I have managed to set up a monitoring of two PowerWare 9120 USPes with NUT (Network UPS Tools). The point is that the standard software which comes with this UPS sucks in all ways and I needed something to take data from UPSes and then pass it to Nagios. So here is how we go about it:

1. Install nut and (if you are going to read data about UPS from same machine, nut-client)

yum install nut nut-client

2. Connect UPS(es) with serial cables (I assume there is not optional networking module installed on UPSes)

3. Add your UPSes to /etc/ups/ups.conf file as follows:

[ups1]
driver = upscode2
port = /dev/ttyS0
baudrate = 9600
manufacturer = PowerWare
desc = "UPS 1"

4. Modify /etc/sysconfig/ups to contain these two lines

SERVER=yes
MODEL=upsdrvctl

5. If you don’t want upsmon to act in any ways corresponding to your UPS(es) state, disable it by putting the next line in /etc/ups/upsmon.conf (otherwise edit it as described in it)

MINSUPPLIES 0

6. Enable upsd to start automatically

chkconfig --level 2345 ups on

7. Start the service

service ups on

8. Check it up

upsc ups1@localhost

That’s it. Now you can get the data anytime with upsc command as in step 8.

Few days ago I had that nice experience setting up a server on (already installed not by me) Fedora 7. Among other things, this server should be a gateway for LAN running DHCPd, DNS, iptables and all those other services for service the LAN. One thing was just driving me crazy: I had static IP for LAN ethernet, but each time I was restarting either network service or dhcp, that ethernet was getting an IP from local dhcp (that sux). I checked almost everything to make sure I specified that the ethernet should use statically assigned IP and still had no luck.

After fighting for some time I found our that NetworkManager was running and watching all those network changes. Each time I was restarting network or dhcp, NetworkManager was ignoring all the bloody settings and just trying to find best solution for me screwing everything up

No, no way you can completely fix IE6 to be compatible with W3C standards, but at least you can fix some (a lot) of them very easy instead of killing yourself all the time something goes wrong in IE6 while it works fine in FF and even IE7.

Today I had to do some tricky web-design related things and I was mostly checking the results in FF2 and IE7. When I opened the page in IE6, I found out a lot of problems, especially with absolute positioning and overflowing of DIV elements. Luckelly I found the IE7 JavaScript library which fixes the IE6 just by including 3 lines in your page (linking to this lib).

Check it yourself if you are having similar problems.

Transparent background in Midnight Commander has been around for some time, but far too less people realize and use it. If you are one of those guys who just have to have everything transparent, then here is the quick fix for you.

Add these two lines to the end of your ~/.mc/ini file:


[Colors]
base_color=normal=,default:selected=,:marked=,default:markselect=,:menu=,:menuhot=,:menusel=,:menuhotsel=,:dnormal=,:dfocus=,:dhotnormal=,:dhotfocus=,:input=,:reverse=,:executable=,default:directory=,default:link=,default:device=,default:special=,:core=,:helpnormal=,:helplink=,:helpslink=,:


Now restart Midnight Commander, and you should be fine.

An extra tip for KDE users - edit your konsole settings and choose “Transparent for MC” schema.

That’s about it.

Found one (hopefully) nice project for desktop improvements under Linux: Metisse. In is a nice thing to be used along with Beryl or Compiz. See it in action in this video while I will try to install it on my laptop, check it and write some more here later on.