Tech Chorus

Amazon Simple Storage Service or Amazon S3 is a storage service with a web API. I use Amazon S3 to store backups of my blog and other sites. I made a simple python script to handle file uploads to S3.

In order to use Amazon S3, first create a bucket using your Amazon AWS account. As the name suggests, bucket is a container. You can create buckets using the AWS management console.

The script we're going to write will take two input parameters

1. Path to file, local
2. Target S3 path

Nagios is a popular networking monitoring software. Nagios lets you monitor your IT infrastructure, be it servers, routers, switches or other devices. In this post, I will walk you through the steps of installing and configuring a basic setup of Nagios on CentOS.

At the end of the tutorial you will be have a working Nagios setup to monitor

• local disk space usage
• local system load
• an external website

Whenever there is a problem or recovery with any of the above, Nagios will alert you via email.

Unless you have a strong reason to compile Nagios yourself, you should use the binary packages available for your Linux distribution.

RPMForge provides packages that are not included in CentOS repositories. We will use the Nagios packages from RPMForge.

Enabling RPMForge repository

For 32 bit machines use these commands:

wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.1-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh rpmforge-release-0.5.1-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

For 64 bit machines use these commands:

wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.1-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh rpmforge-release-0.5.1-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm

Installing And Configuring Nagios

Broadcom provides Linux drivers for most of its wireless chipsets. Prior to the release of official drivers from Broadcom, the open source software community had various workarounds. Some people used Windows drivers through ndiswrapper. Others used fwcutter.

The RPM Fusion Repository for Fedora offers the Broadcom wireless drivers from its repositories. You can install them using yum.

Step 1: Enable the RPM Fusion repositories

 
rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm

How to play music and video(MP3, MPEG, AVI, FLV and other multimedia files) in Fedora 12?

Due to patent encumbrance codecs required to play some proprietary file formats are not shipped with Fedora. Codecs are the programs that encode and decode digital data. These codecs are available in the rpmfusion repository for Fedora. You will be able to play mpeg, mp3, avi, flv and other commonly used file formats for music and video. You will require an Internet connection to download and install these packages on your computer.

Let us get started. Are you ready?

How to configure keyboard short cut to minimze all windows on KDE 4.3.3 on Fedora

Having the Show Desktop button on the panel is something everyone would want. If you are unable to find the settings follow the instructions below.

1. Install the kdeplasma-addons package.

# yum install kdeplasma-addons -y

2. Add the Show Desktop widget to the panel.

• Click the Cashew button on the panel - the rightmost corner button
• Click Add Widgets
• Click Show Desktop
• Click Add Widget

MySQL has a query logging feature. In order to use it you have to first enable it.

Enabling the general query log

Step 1: Set your log file in /etc/my.cnf

vi /etc/my.cnf

In the [mysqld] section specify the general log file name:

log=/var/log/mysqld.general.log

Step 2: Create the file and make sure it is owned by the system user mysql

touch /var/log/mysqld.general.log
chown mysql.mysql /var/log/mysqld.general.lo

In a previous article we discussed how toinstall, remove, update and search for software packages using yum. In this post we discuss how to install only security updates using yum.

Apache HTTP server is capable of hosting multiple websites on the same server. The feature is popularly known as virtual host.

The term Virtual Host refers to the practice of running more than one web site (such as www.company1.com and www.company2.com) on a single machine. When you configure virtual hosts your web server runs many websites at any given instance. You don't need to edit Apache configuration file and restart Apache every time you switch to a different website.

Follow the instructions below to configure virtual hosts in Apache.

Have you fallen in love with the command line? Do you use a graphical browser to visit dictionary sites like wiktionary.org?

Use dictd.

What does dictd do?

[sudheer@localhost ~]$ yum info dictd
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, refresh-packagekit
Installed Packages
Name       : dictd
Arch       : i386
Version    : 1.10.11
Release    : 3
Size       : 728 k
Repo       : installed
Summary    : DICT protocol (RFC 2229) command-line client
URL        : http://www.dict.org/
License    : GPL+ and zlib and MIT

Many of us have suffered from failing package repository mirrors. Some are slow, some won't have updated content, etc. You might want to remove/blacklist a particular mirror in your yum configuration.

Before trying to remove a mirror, install the fastest mirror plugin.

yum install yum-fastestmirror -y

The fastest mirror plugin is capable of determining mirror speeds and cache it. If that works for you well and good.