It's an item that I feel hasn't got much press, at least in the limited RSS entries I've had time to scan lately: Nagios has been forked. I've been using Nagios long enough that I actually used NetSaint for a bit, so I have some mixed feelings about Icinga. In general, I'm all for forks when they are indeed needed - FOSWiki is a great example. But forks shouldn't be taken lightly, in many ways they are like a divorce - they should be a last resort, not a quick way out. Personally, I think that the fork will ultimately either fail or merge back into Nagios, but read on for why I think the Icinga fork is a case of two wrongs making a right.

I'm not for sure when they did it, but the RHEL folks made it a bunch easier to setup simple source policy routing. By using source policy routing, we fix the issue of firewalls freaking out when the reply packet to a host leaves a multihomed host on a different interface than what the request came in on. In prior versions, you had to setup some custom scripts, but that's no longer the case - all the hooks are there in the OS now.

I found this over at the Ubuntu Forums, but since it took me forever to find, I'm dropping notes here.

In RPM-based distros, you can do 'rpm -qa > somefile.txt'. In Debian/Ubuntu, do this:

dpkg --get-selections > machineA.txt

In true apt fashion, if you then want to have machine B have all the software machine A has, do this:

dpkg --set-selections < machineA.txt && dselect

Enjoy!

RHEL/CentOS has had support for LVM in setup for quite some time now, but for whatever reason, Ubuntu has been slow at adopting support for LVM at installation. Usually, I just grumble and move on with ext3 -- not today. Convinced that I couldn't be the only person wanting LVM support, I set out to do just that. Luckily, it wasn't hard at all!