The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Yet another Day 10

It was a crazier day at The Office and I wasn't even at The Office; I was working at home.

And it's official—Ihate sendmail, dovecot and saslauth.

I think the pinnacle of the mess was this lovely bit of sendmail—from the configuration file /etc/mail/access on the server as installed:

# Check the /usr/share/doc/sendmail/README.cf file for a description
# of the format of this file. (search for access_db in that file)
# The /usr/share/doc/sendmail/README.cf is part of the sendmail-doc
# package.
#
# by default we allow relaying from localhost...
localhost.localdomain RELAY
localhost             RELAY
127.0.0.1             RELAY

And the format of said file from /usr/share/doc/sendmail/README.cf:

The table itself uses e-mail addresses, domain names, and network
numbers as keys.  Note that IPv6 addresses must be prefaced with "IPv6:".
For example,

        From:spammer@aol.com                    REJECT
        From:cyberspammer.com                   REJECT
        Connect:cyberspammer.com                REJECT
        Connect:TLD                             REJECT
        Connect:192.168.212                     REJECT
        Connect:IPv6:2002:c0a8:02c7             RELAY
        Connect:IPv6:2002:c0a8:51d2::23f4       REJECT

Notice anything … different … about the two?

Hmmmm?

Yeah.

XXX XXXXXX XXXXXXX piece of XXXX!

I think I got it working (the reason I think I have it working is that I have no easy way of actually testing this crap! All my email (both work and personal) is checked on the respective email servers locally, using mutt since I find it faster that way. I don't use POP or IMAP. While POP is pretty easy to test using telnet, IMAP isn't. Toss in SMTP AUTH (which goes from difficult to downright impossible to test via telnet) and I'm practically forced to use some bloated piece of XXXX like Lookout Outlook. Or Thunderbird, which makes me pine for the days of checking my email as 1200 baud).

(Can you tell this stuff makes me rather cranky?)


My head es splode

One last bit of unfinished business from yesterday's switch installation—setting up Cacti to monitor the network usage.

But I should know better than to use a package manager to install required packages, but hey, I was a bit frazzled at this point.

I know that Cacti requires the use of RRDTool, and knowing that just doing the straightforward yum install rrd would never work, I did the next best thing:

[root@netmon ~]# yum search rrd
Searching Packages: 
Setting up repositories
update                    100% |=========================|  951 B    00:00     
base                      100% |=========================| 1.1 kB    00:00     
addons                    100% |=========================|  951 B    00:00     
extras                    100% |=========================| 1.1 kB    00:00     
Reading repository metadata in from local files


gpg-pubkey.None                          443e1821-421f218f      installed       
Matched from:
—–BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–
Version: rpm-4.3.3 (beecrypt-3.0.0)

mQGiBEIfIY8RBACIjFavOQNbs4bjTtOblq4X5/oxuTJtv41nfqSFNeUAQke0qoxxAUlBesWx
DsOXp5VppgNEA07hGjPvzoxabLAsTccQplvHMNzmRezyukYrSTVR/F7gywpvlhaAFkL9jZxo
dXzWKk2cmBLVWvuyzlLEUBeijm2amyEHcIGAczxPawCgmVcM9WpA6SOKivd9qTXK2XP+9BUD
/2xV4OR4L7q8CSiaDMwPLo6P6D6VDc9LpVy16WmuiYPFJIcIpp309biKZhGZgd+gHDhld9EJ
cZ3A2v43GY/xCdJqZ7Uh5QIGDafnil872AbMIBYpcOpvAshTM10S3Qj06pIQE47oONZT5A80
O/hn+Yd8ySCEswpbWCmtAxnciNw3A/0Qk/bKrhT6J9Um2JhMfxx/nB80mM+Jlsn58B8i4sjr
IVdzc3b45Y2wbXN3uVGuvvAFolAco3cpVy3oY1wMVuh8UlJFNESmxZL/Z7BXyKhiKUZrNxEv
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PQurRD4YIXC1AKCF3t5xKJnEXJfgvhvldOzDIFjajwCgkX/MZI0O0SxYQAc2hEQJqCI/LJV=
=Qsai
—–END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–

[root@netmon ~]# 

What the—

Okay, try a more focused search:

[root@netmon ~]# yum search rrdtool
Searching Packages: 
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
No Matches found
[root@netmon ~]# 

Why did I even bother with the package manager?

So it's off to manually track down dependencies.

About an hour later, I finally get around to installing Cacti 0.8.6h (yes yes, I know they're up to 0.8.6i but I had the 0.8.6h tarball handy). It goes pretty smoothly, except that it's not generating any graphs. I run the cron job by hand, and yes, it's polling data from the network devices. Everything else is running smoothly.

Just no pretty pictures of network usage.

A few hours of pointless activity go by (I even inlist the help of Wlofie to see if I may have overlooked something) when I check the instance of Cacti we're running at The Office against the one I installed. We're running 0.8.6g. I happen to have the tarball of that handy.

I install that.

It works. I get pretty pictures.

A blood vessel in my brain explodes.

I'm found lying in a pool of my own blood, dead.

Oh wait! This isn't for NaNoWriMo

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