Niels Horn's Blog

One more update before wrapping up: Zabbix released version 1.8.1

As suggested by upstream, I do not offer pre-built packages for the server, so I suggest you all wait for the SlackBuild to get out of the pending queue.

Packages for the new agent can be downloaded from my site already.

If you are upgrading from a previous version of Zabbix (like 1.6.x) do not forget to run the update script that is provided with the sources. Enter all normal mysql parameters (like hostname, user, password, database) after the “upgrade” command like this:

upgrade -h <hostname_of_mysql_server>  -u <zabbix_user>  -p<password_of_zabbix_user> <database_name>

Pay special attention to the fact that there is no space between the -p and your password!

The defaults for the zabbix_user, password_of_zabbix_user and database_name are “zabbix”, but you might have changed that during the original installation.

Another package has been updated, this time for ldglite version 1.2.4

It’s a simple version update that corrects some small bugs.
As always, packages can be downloaded from my site while the SlackBuild is in the pending queue.

The parts library for LeoCAD has been updated and now contains 3.299 pieces.

The updated Slackware package (~ 14MB) can be downloaded from my site.

A new version of HerculesStudio, the Hercules GUI front-end for Linux, has been released. It has some nice new features like editing your devices directly, and several new icons:

The updated SlackBuild is in the pending queue, but for those who cannot wait, pre-built packages for Slackware can be downloaded from my site.

I built a new package with LDraw_data for Slackware, containing the latest (200903) library from ldraw.org. Check my site for the pre-built while the SlackBuild is in pending.

Sometimes you want to share some pictures from an event with your friends, family, etc. With modern cameras the files are simply too big to send them all by e-mail. There are several free sites available, like photobucket, flickr and picasa where I have accounts that I have used in the past.
But all have their drawbacks and did not completely satisfy me.

So I wrote my own software in PHP a while back to publish my pictures on the web, HN-Photo, that runs on my own server. It is quite crude, but does the job. Is has very basic access-control so that I can decide who can see which pictures, etc.

But recently I have been experimenting with Gallery, a free, open source package also written in PHP. It has some very nice features like:

• Tree structure of albums (Like “Work” / “Events” / “2009″ / “Party” – etc.)
• Several “Themes” to choose from, that can afterwards be adapted to your own liking
• Automatic scaling to several sizes – from fast showing 640×480 to the maximum that was uploaded (10Mpixels in my case)
• Several ways to upload pictures, from single pictures to bulk-upload, rsync, etc.
• Functions to move pictures between albums, rename, create tags, etc.
• Impressive permissions structure, with groups and users per album, etc.
• Lots of plugins available, including e-commerce
• Integration with many programs, including WordPress

There are many things I’m still discovering and experimenting with, but it seems I will be migrating my >20GB collection in the near future. I will have to try out that bulk-upload feature…

After some DNS troubles, the new blog is up & running

Something went wrong when I canceled the “CNAME” entry in the DNS server that pointed “blog.nielshorn.net” to the old blogspot site. When I created the new “blog.nielshorn.net” subdomain I couldn’t get it to point at my own server. :-/

But with a little help from my hosting provider everything is OK now.

Feel free to look around and to comment on any errors or broken links!

As you probably noticed, I changed my blog a bit. The biggest change is not in the visible part, but in the software that runs this blog.
After just over a year on Google’s Blogspot, I decided to run my blog on my own site instead of redirecting it. And since I am a strong believer in free, open software, I installed WordPress. This software is extremely flexible, can be adapted completely to my wishes (as it is written in PHP, using MySQL) and still very easy to use.

I imported all posts from the previous blog, but some links might fail. If you find any inconsistencies, please write a comment or send me a mail, so that I can correct it.

The old blog will stay online as long as Google allows it, since there are several sites with deep links to the posts, but it is closed for new posts or comments.

2009 is gone, 2010 has started.

Lots of sad news here in Rio, after all the rain that has fallen here over the last few days, but life goes on

In just a few days I will officially be on vacation, so I might not have too much time to write here, but I still have some raw material I want to publish, like some experiences with nagios (working very fine here), ntop, cacti, zabbix, etc.

And I’m working on some lay-out changes for my blog, so be prepared to see some novelties here

Happy New Year!

When Slackware released its first test version of Slackware64, I installed it on a separate partition to try it out. I was immediately impressed by the performance boost of some programs, especially some graphic programs I use.

Since I compile most programs that are not available on a standard Slackware installation from source, I didn’t have too much trouble switching completely from 32-bits to 64-bits when the official release came out.
But for some programs the source code is not available. The original author / site may have disappeared, or it might simply be “closed” software.
I had this problem with some older programs I still used and they simply would not run on Slackware64. The error they normally return is:

<program_name>: No such file or directory

This error actually means that the binary file is looking for some (32-bits) library it cannot find, simply because they do not exist on pure 64-bits Linux installations.

One option was to go “multi-lib” – install the 32-bits libraries on my Slackware64 box. But I did not want to go that way, as I preferred to keep my installation as “pure” as possible.

So I started looking for another solution, and on the LinuxQuestions.org forum someone pointed me to statifier.

Statifier simply combines the binary executable with all the libraries it needs into one (big!) executable “semi-static” file. I won’t go into the details how it does that (because I also do not understand all the details…), so if you want to know more, check out the site of the author.

The only problem is that you will need a 32-bits machine where your binary works fine, to “statify” it. I still had my 32-bits Slackware partition, so no problem for me here.

Statifier is open source software, so you can build it yourself, or get my package for Slackware on my site.

After installing or building Statifier on your 32-bits machine, you can use it to “statify” your 32-bits binary like this:

$ statifier <binary> <new_binary>

Remember that the result will be a lot bigger than the original, as it includes all the libraries that are normally loaded dynamically. As an example, I used it on “l3p”, a small program to convert LDraw files to POV-Ray files, only available in a 32-bits version.
The original file was 140K, the statified version is 2.7M
But it solved my problem and I can use l3p on my 64-bits Slackware64 installation!

If you want to use l3p on Slackware64 as well but this is all too technical for you, you can get the statified version of l3p as a Slackware package from my site.