Full disk is a lousy reason to wake up in a middle of the night

In my last post I wrote about Laconi.ca and mentioned that we have many bots updating Laconi.ca too. The bots are made active when some condition has met.

Example: Make server running out of disk space to post an update to Laconi.ca

This is actually quite useful. Sure, you can tell every service to send an email when something not wanted is happening but then you will have to read that mailbox too. Sending email to someone else doesn’t solve the problem. Hmm, updating to Laconi.ca doesn’t solve the problem either but it makes servers easier follow and to subscribe.

So here is a simple shell script:

#!/bin/sh
fs=`mount|egrep '^/dev'|grep -iv cdrom| awk '{print $3}'`
typeset -i thresh="96"
typeset -i warn="98"
for i in $fs
do
skip=0
typeset -i used=`df -k $i|tail -n 1|awk '{print $5}'|cut -d "%" -f 1`
if [ "$used" -ge "$warn" ]; then
laconica.sh "1.2.3.4 server CRITICAL: filesystem $i is $used% full"
fi
if [ "$used" -ge "$thresh" -a "$used" -le "$warn" ]; then
laconica.sh "1.2.3.4 server WARNING: filesystem $i is $used %full"
fi
done

I didn’t want to use cURL directly to talk to Laconi.ca so I downloaded laconica.sh from http://downloads.guillermoamaral.com/misc/laconica. Sure it uses cURL, but if I change a password no I can change it to this wrapper instead.

I saved the script as diskfull.sh. So lets first chmod it and then try it:

chmod 755 diskfull.sh
./diskfull.sh

Laconi.ca gets an update as follows:

Screenshot of Laconi.ca

You would need schedule Cron to run the script. To do so, edit the /etc/crontab and add the following line:

31 8 * * * root /opt/diskfull.sh

This line will run it daily on 08:31 as root. You might want to change it. If you are not familiar with Cron here is some help.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.
Twitter page on Wikipedia

This post covers:

• Why I like Laconi.ca as our internal Micro-Blogging-service
• How to configure Laconi.ca behind password without breaking up the API functionality
• How to set up Twitterific to work with custom Laconi.ca installation

Laconi.ca in a browser & Twitterific

Ok, Twitter is sweet, even a bit addictive, but not that useful in internal use of your business for couple of reasons:

• Privacy concerns; I know you don’t have to tweet everything in public but still; You might not want to trust any third parties
• It is useful to have a possibility to customize your micro-blogging application, make backups and so on

At first, Micro-blogging is like wiki in a way that it does not implement any kind of process. In Twitter the idea is “it’s a tool, use it as you like” This works well with Twitter.com, where all the users have their own reasons to use the service. In business however, the business has a goal and people are working to meet this goal for their common reason. Therefore a process, as loose as it might be, must be implemented.

How and why it should be used

We got Laconi.ca running to our office a few weeks ago. In our case we have two offices with a distance of 600 km to each other. Some people in our staff are working from home and someone is always on the road. We use Laconi.ca to keep on track where people are on what are they working with.

So we have two rules on how to use it:

• When you start to work, tell what you are going to work with
• When you finish the day, tell when you are going to be back

Nothing too complicated just two easy rules. In my opinion it works just great. Before getting Laconi.ca I made far more phone calls to people asking for these same basic questions.

We also have many bots updating to Laconi.ca from our project management systems, internal blog and errors & warnings from servers. Generally I think you should not be worried about the amount of data because everyone doesn’t have to subscribe everything and everything does not have to be read by everyone. Still, having a possibility to subscribe a bot when needed is great.

How to install Laconi.ca on Ubuntu and get it behind a password

Laconi.ca installation guide can be found at http://laconi.ca/trac/wiki/Installation

Getting Laconi.ca behind password is actually the simplest thing:

1) Just create .htaccess and .htpasswd file. If don’t know how here is some help.

2) Create the same users with the same passwords as you have in your Laconi.ca installation.

How to make Twitterific to work with Laconi.ca

Get Twitterific

Open terminal and run:

defaults write com.iconfactory.Twitterrific baseUrl -string 'your-hostname/path-to-laconica/api'

The command to switch back is the following:

defaults write com.iconfactory.Twitterrific baseUrl -string 'twitter.com'

I found this tip from Leslie Michael Orchard’s blog, thank you Leslie!