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Nagios/Icinga email alerts using AWS Simple Email Service (SES)

26/02/2016 juliogonzalez 0

The biggest problem with sending email from AWS EC2 instances is that -sooner or later- your instance’s IP will be added to a blacklist. It doesn’t matter how secure your MTA is. It doesn’t matter if it’s not reachable from the internet. And it doesn’t matter if you are not sending spam at all.

Sooner or later one of your neighbors using an IP on the same IP range your instance is, will send spam, Then one of the blacklists (such as Trendmicro’s) will add the whole range as spam sender.

In theory you could try setting up rDNS but that’s not always a warranty of staying out of the lists. And obviously what AWS recommends is using (and paying) Simple Email Service or SES. It’s pretty easy to setup and pretty easy to use (you can setup IAM accounts to use SMTP).

For some services the configuration will be easy: add the SES endpoint as SMTP server hostname, enable SSL, select TCP port 465, add your credentials, and ready to go.

But how to do it for Nagios or Icinga (version 1)? (more…)

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Automating the Tibco Spotfire Webplayer installer

21/02/2016 juliogonzalez 0

Tibco Spotfire is one of the commercial options for Business Intelligence Analytics, with several different components available to be installed.

Some of the components, such as Tibco Spotfire Server (which is the core of the Tibco Spotfire platform), are more or less easy to automate if you decided to go for the GNU/Linux version as it works on Red Hat, and you can use Oracle as DB, even as AWS RDS (I will create another post for this).

But some other components can be tricky, specially those running on Microsoft Windows.

(more…)

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Nexus on OpenShift using the official jetty bundle

14/02/2016 juliogonzalez 0

For the last two years, I was using Shekhar Gulati GitHub repository to manage my personal Sonatype Nexus service. Deploying to OpenShift was easy, and I could get Nexus running in less than five minutes.

However, this repository was using Nexus as a war file in Tomcat, something which is now deprecated by Sonatype, and won’t be provided for the upcoming 3.0 release. Besides that, the war doesn’t include support for NPM or Ruby gems, and uploading new war files to the repository was slow and inefficient.

(more…)

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Removing unwanted files from GIT repositories

13/01/2014 juliogonzalez 0

A lot of times you inherit a repository with several binaries which cause an exponential size growth if they’re modified. But a GIT repository should not host binaries. In fact no VCS should host those files.

Other times a developer (or yourself) uploads something mistake that shouldn’t be on the repository.

In either case you’ll want to delete those files.

I tried several guides but it never worked as supposed because they don’t update all the branches on the repository and therefore the file is never deleted.

So let’s go: (more…)

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ebs-changer: How to change between EBS volume types (or number of PIOPs) in a fast and reliable way

07/11/2013 juliogonzalez 0

NOTE: ebs-changer is no longer maintained, as is now included into EBS-Tools suite

Did you ever want to change standard EBS to io1 volumes on Amazon Web Services? Maybe io1 to standard? Did you want to increase the number of PIOPs your volumes are using? Did you performed this tedious job by hand?

In my current project (SmartSteps) at Telefonica R&D we needed to to this a lot of times on several environments using MongoDB replicasets and RAID0 on each mongo server.

So each time we needed to stop mongo services (or the instances), snapshot all the volumes, detach, delete old volumes, create new volumes from the snapshots and then reattach them using the same devices. That was more than 15 times the same set of operations.

And of course, it was likely possible to make mistakes in the process.

So, why should we do this by hand when it’s possible to automate and run the changes in parallel? (more…)

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How to check if a database exists on MongoDB

01/05/2013 juliogonzalez 2

Why do you need this?

Just suppose you want to backup a Mongo database using mongodump.

As backups for individual databases don’t support –oplog, you may want to make sure you get a consistent database and therefore you may decide to use fsyncLock() to flush any pending write operation, and to lock new writes until your task is finished (do this only over secondary nodes on replica sets)

But then you launch mongodump against the MongoDB node… and the task keeps waiting for something…

(more…)

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Epson Stylus SX430 bajo Debian GNU/Linux y Ubuntu

23/09/2012 juliogonzalez 0

Los siguientes pasos son las instrucciones para instalar una impresora multifunción Epson Stylus SX430 bajo Debian GNU/Linux o Ubuntu. No obstante serán aplicables para muchas otras multifución similares de Epson o incluso para distribuciones basadas en RPM ya que, por suerte, la empresa está distribuyendo controladores.

Mis instrucciones se dirigen a usuarios de consola (apt-get, dpkg…) porque es el entorno que encuentro más cómodo. Pero es perfectamente posible hacerlo usando Synaptic o cualquier otro gestor de paquetes para entorno gráfico. Ten en cuenta que si usas Ubuntu y quieres ejecutar los pasos vía consola, debes hacerlo a través de sudo.

(more…)

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Evaluación de mi cámara Canon IXUS 130 HS

25/08/2011 juliogonzalez 0

Como alguno ya sabéis, hace meses jubilé mi vieja cámara Pentax de 3.1MP y di el salto a una Canon IXUS 115 HS de 12,1MP. Sigo en el mundo de las compactas porque, honestamente, la mayor parte de las veces lo que quiero es hacer una fotografía sin pensarlo demasiado, y no tener que cargar con el peso de una reflex (a pesar de que, como es lógico, reconozco les reconozco mayor potencial).

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3com812: Como “flashear” el router y reinstalar el firmware desde cero

16/07/2011 juliogonzalez 0

Entrada recuperada del blog antiguo: Sáb, 17/05/2005

Nota importante: Aunque las indicaciones contenidas en este documento han funcionado adecuadamente en las ocasiones en que se ha necesitado, no me responsabilizo por los posibles daños y/o perjuicios que el uso que la información aquí contenida pueda causar. Usa este documento bajo tu propia responsabilidad y riesgo.

¿Problemas con tu router 3com 812? ¿Necesitas flashearlo? Es relativamente fácil si se siguen unos cuantos pasos en el orden adecuado. Los únicos requerimientos básicos son saber manejar mínimamente MS-DOS o la linea de comandos de los sistemas Windows NT, 200X o XP, saber configurar el router para conectarse a tu ISP y usar el sentido común.

(more…)