Buggy Xfce xkb applet looses keyboard layout config

I have been hit by a nasty Xfce xkb applet bug, which is widely known in several bloody bugzillas (of RH/CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian,...) but it seems unresolved yet. The backround of the bug is, that the applet looses it's configuration, especially configured keyboard layouts and shortcut for switching them while for while which may seem to be random or it may seem to have some coincidence with suspending/wakeups of the computer. Well it is not random, it resolves to connections and disconnections of external (or even internal) USB keyboard, which may of course be triggered by suspend/wakeup.

So it seems I have the reason isolated. Now what is the solution? Well the applet is part of so-called Xfce-goodies, which is sort of external project. I did not find corresponding bugzilla nor some mailinglist etc. But I think that author is perhaps aware of this behavior, so there is no need to shout at him. But I needed the workaround and I think I have found one. It is simple and it is Linux-like: Just configure all your keyboards in xorg.xonf file in InputClass section and then use the applet as an indicator and switcher.

I am using following snippet of xorg.conf on my ThinkPad X301 which I am connecting and disconnecting to a USB keyboard:

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "keyboard defaults"
    MatchIsKeyboard "on"
    Option "XkbLayout" "us, cz"
    Option "XkbVariant" ", qwerty_bksl"
    Option "XKbOptions" "grp:alt_shift_toggle, terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp"
EndSection

Desktop hell

Well after some time I am back with my reckless criticism of insane (but OpenSource) desktops. Basically what can you choose when you want a Linux desktop? Well, of course plenty of things but when you need getting things done and you do not want to play with own xrandr, xkb, xinput scripting or with printing, keybindings for multimedia keys etc. you would probably need some desktop environment. And there are quite a lot of such projects (look at Wikipedia). KDE. Gnome3. Xfce, LXDE, Unity to name some.

Well what you can find is that there is a huge hare-core of Gnome3 and Unity. People just hate them because these desktops are everything but useful and intuitive. The both are resembling some of iPad madness and with Unity there are rumors on the web that it is actually designed for tablet computers and its usage on desktop is some sort of side-effect of development in the meantime when Canonical (author of Unity & Ubuntu) is negotiating deals with tablet manufacturers. Pity. In fact these desktops forces you to do things by their ways (different from what we all are used to from previous generations of desktops starting from Win 3.11 up to Gnome 2.32) and they are putting obstacles between you and your productivity apps. And I concur with all these objections against particularly these two desktops.

There is of course KDE. KDE is way long from what is my idea of a decent desktop. I like some aspects of it but it lacks what I need - really fast desktop (with or rather without eye-candy but really fast!), easy-to used virtual desktops, app panel and good application switcher and support for docking/undocking (which means changing screen resolution, switching on/off the LVDS etc. It takes me to the remaining Xfce.

But current stable Xfce (on Debian Wheezy) to be specific is fare from being easy to use. I had to tweak it deeply to become usable. I had 4 most severe problems I had to cope with. NetworkManager (+ NM Applet) was unable to connect to set network. (Solved). There are nasty sounds in different applications set. The most annoying are terminal bell in gnome-terminal and gdm3 greeter sound (turned off easily). Two problems are more complicated and I am still working on them. First is Xfce xkb applet which looses it's configuration (I mean set layouts, layout-switcher keyboard shortcut etc.) each and every time you connect or disconnect USB keyboard. Which effectively means it looses the configuration each time you dock or undock your laptop. And the last problem is automatic switching of desktop resolution and putting LVDS to on/off state according to presence of another screen connected via Display Port. I have done some scripting workarounds to switch this semi-automatically but I am not proud of it at all.

Next time I am going to put here mentioned Debian tweaks for the two already-solved problems on my Debian Wheezy + Xfce desktop.

hpacucli: Error: No controllers detected. with hpsa and SmartArray P410i

I have encountered a fucking weird problem with hpacucli (HP utility for their RAID controllers) on ProLiant DL360 G7 or whatever. The controller was HP SmartArray P410i and the problem was simple:

root@XYZ:~# hpacucli 
HP Array Configuration Utility CLI 8.70-8.0
Detecting Controllers...Done.
Type "help" for a list of supported commands.
Type "exit" to close the console.

=> ctrl all show

Error: No controllers detected.

The solution is: Load the sg driver and that's it:

root@XYZ:~# modprobe sg
root@XYZ:~# hpacucli 
HP Array Configuration Utility CLI 8.70-8.0
Detecting Controllers...Done.
Type "help" for a list of supported commands.
Type "exit" to close the console.

=> ctrl all show

Smart Array P410i in Slot 0 (Embedded)    (sn: 500143801630C980)

Moose (a postmodern thing in Perl, or whatever) and circular reference+inheritence

Now speaking of Moose, the postmodern object system in Perl 5, taken from Perl 6, chewed, digested and... Whatever:-) Let's assume I have a class Animal like that:

package Animal;
use Moose;
use Animal::Dog;
use Animal::Cat;

has 'type' => (is=>'ro', isa=>'Str');

sub make_noise { print "Making noise."; }

sub specify {
  my $self = shift;

  return Animal::Dog->new({type=>$self->type()}) if($self->type() eq 'dog');
  return Animal::Cat->new({type=>$self->type()}) if($self->type() eq 'cat');
  return $self;
}

And two subclasses:

package Animal::Dog;
use Moose;
extends 'Animal';

override 'make_noise' => sub { print "Wuf!"; }



package Animal::Cat;
use Moose;
extends 'Animal';

override 'make_noise' => sub { print "Meow!"; }

It simply does not work. You will get some fucking strange message that the first override in the Animal::Cat failed (TODO: Add here the real message...) and I can understand why: In order to compile the Animal class it has to use (=load and compile) the Animal::Dog and Animal::Cat.

Any way around it? To use something like Factory design pattern known from Java. But, does it really mean I can not use any subclass in a superclass with Moose? Is it a feature or a bug?:-)

Build environment for OpenIndiana

Just a quick post - I wanted to build few things like Nagios NRPE, few Perl modules with C bindings etc. So I needed to install toolchain, compiler (rather Sun Studio than gcc) etc.

The easy way is:

pkg install SUNWcvs SUNWsvn SUNWarc SUNWj6dmo SUNWj6dev SUNWj6dmx SUNWj6dvx \
SUNWj6cfg SUNWj6rtx SUNWj6man SUNWgnu-automake-19 SUNWgnu-automake-110 SUNWaconf \
SUNWmercurial SUNWlibtool ss-dev SUNWsfwhea SUNWhea SUNWxwinc SUNWxorg-headers \
SUNWi2cs SUNWgpch SUNWgnome-common-devel SUNWgmake SUNWbison SUNWflexlex

pkg install SUNWcvs SUNWsvn SUNWarc SUNWj6dmo SUNWj6dev SUNWj6dmx SUNWj6dvx \
SUNWj6cfg SUNWj6rtx SUNWj6man SUNWgnu-automake-19 SUNWgnu-automake-110 SUNWaconf \
SUNWmercurial SUNWlibtool ss-dev SUNWsfwhea SUNWhea SUNWxorg-headers SUNWi2cs \
SUNWgpch SUNWgnome-common-devel SUNWgmake SUNWbison SUNWflexlex

pkg install developer/sunstudio12u1

Test driven service operation vs. Nagios et al.

I am constantly thinking about network and server outages handling. This was my focus few years ago, I worked as an admin/op in a small hosting company and I was bombarded by SMSes from our home-brewed server/service monitoring system written in Perl. The system has bunch of drawbacks so we decided to replace it by Nagios (3 dot something). It has drawbacks as well, and I would say that even more serious in some cases.

I was responsible for the Nagios migration but I am not an op anymore so I have less experience with that. From my point of view, being aware of my limited insight, I can describe some drawbacks in Nagios 3 (= Nagios Core, simply the OSS version you get when apt-get install Nagios3 on top of Debian...).

The first one and probably the most severe: The configuration is complicated by nature. In addition Debian forces/strongly suggest some ideas about how you should write the config files. And when you try to do so, you have to read manual which does not give answers to all questions. For example: Are  multiple parents in dependency tree of hosts/services in AND, OR or whatever relation? You can find lots of small questions and eventually Google some answers, dig into documentation or whatever, but it takes time. Anyway, writing Nagios configs takes time and one should ask himself: Why? Of course you can use Swiss-made NConf to convert writing config into clicking configs in web interface, but it is not a real improvement. Why can't it be automatic? Let's say the system can auto-discover hosts and test-run all yet-know service tests. If some of tests results to OK, it can suggest that test. It should be able to clone hosts, categorize hosts, make exceptions etc. but on the other hand I prefer text config files over some sophisticated database schema...

The another thing is that sending alarms should be smarter than only triggering scripts like send mail to contacts and send messages to pagers or cell phones in modern days. Well, I like the idea of master alarm. I would like to have a possibility to set some alarms as not crucial for business/system operation and have them listed in web interface/reports and alarmed by less aggressive way to ops. I would like to have a possibility to have some threshold for sounding master alarm and then sending this master alarm (once or N-times but not overflowing ops with hundreds of different and probably correlated errors). And I would like to have a permissive and easy to use system, not a system which does not allow to acknowledge all reported errors and when not acknowledged, it bothers by SMSes over and over. I would like the system to accept my input and respect what I want or want not to save, not like Nagios->Acknowledge->Error: You have to write a comment. Wtf.? I have major network problem, I want to investigate what is going on and not writing stupid comments, especially in situation I do not know what to say, I just want to stop SMSes from bothering me.

I would like to have a monitoring cluster, able to monitor network/servers/services from more locations and give me a overall report. I would like to have a possibility to write own triggers on errors/warnings, to report more complex situations. Let's say that I have a cluster of 10 servers with loadbalancing and I know that 5 servers would be sufficient. I would make sense not to send alarm during nighttime when one of these 10 servers went down. But it make sense to send alarm if only 6 or less servers remains operational. Event more complex situations could be described and it would be nice to set this triggers easily.

And I would like to have a overview on my system. I want to see what is going on, what happened in past and write afterwards how did I solved the problem to have op's log and tip for next time.

I think that technically it should be relatively easy to run few thousands of test each minute on a decent Intel server. Not speaking about parallelization. Then it comes an idea: We have a paradigm/style/philosophy of test driven development. Why not to have a test driven system operation? I think there are two "contras": ComplexNess of configuration and complications with data acquisition and interpretation - i.e. people fears that it would be more complicated to answer a question "what is broken?". But I believe that both "con's" a only drawbacks of current software. Discussion will be appreciated.

Nagios NRPE @OpenIndiana

I tried to install $title and I have found excellent howto for (Open?)Solaris 10 here: http://www.utahsysadmin.com/2008/03/14/configuring-nagios-plugins-nrpe-on-solaris-10/

There is as catch which demonstrates itself by a fucking compilation error:

root@spagetka:/usr/src/nrpe-2.12# make
cd ./src/; make ; cd ..
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/share/src/nrpe-2.12/src'
cc -g -I/usr/include/openssl -I/usr/include -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -o nrpe nrpe.c utils.c -L/usr/lib  -lssl -lcrypto -lnsl -lsocket   
nrpe.c:
"nrpe.c", line 616: invalid source character: <0xffffffe2>
"nrpe.c", line 616: invalid source character: <0xffffff80>
"nrpe.c", line 616: invalid source character: <0xffffff9d>
"nrpe.c", line 616: invalid source character: <0xffffffe2>
"nrpe.c", line 616: invalid source character: <0xffffff80>
"nrpe.c", line 616: invalid source character: <0xffffff9d>
"nrpe.c", line 616: undefined symbol: authpriv
"nrpe.c", line 616: warning: improper pointer/integer combination: arg #2
"nrpe.c", line 618: invalid source character: <0xffffffe2>
"nrpe.c", line 618: invalid source character: <0xffffff80>
"nrpe.c", line 618: invalid source character: <0xffffff9d>
"nrpe.c", line 618: invalid source character: <0xffffffe2>
"nrpe.c", line 618: invalid source character: <0xffffff80>
"nrpe.c", line 618: invalid source character: <0xffffff9d>
"nrpe.c", line 618: undefined symbol: ftp
"nrpe.c", line 618: warning: improper pointer/integer combination: arg #2
"nrpe.c", line 1505: warning: initializer will be sign-extended: -1
"nrpe.c", line 1506: warning: initializer will be sign-extended: -1
"nrpe.c", line 1652: warning: initializer will be sign-extended: -1
"nrpe.c", line 1653: warning: initializer will be sign-extended: -1
cc: acomp failed for nrpe.c
utils.c:
make[1]: *** [nrpe] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/share/src/nrpe-2.12/src'

*** Compile finished ***

So you have to edit the nrpe.c according to linked howto.