There is an appropriately titled “check_raid_amrstat – Dell AMR PERC4 FreeBSD” plugin already on Nagios Exchange and Monitoring Exchange, but as usual I can’t seem to be content with some other people’s code.

I cleaned up the code a bit. It is a bit more in sticking with the plugin writing guidelines. Presents a bit more info than the original in a more compact format, with output similar to my MegaRAID SAS plugin. Nothing radical at all, but I like it better and present it here in case you want to see an alternative.

So today we had a meeting at work and it was my big chance to show off how well this plan was work. I hook the iPad up to our projector with the VGA adapter. Oddly, I don’t get any mirrored display.

Change around inputs on the projector looking for signals. Still nada.

Go into iPad settings to see if any new option has popped up recognizing the attached bit of hardware. Also nada.

Google around a bit and… oh damn. According to Apple (Article HT4108):

The iPad Dock Connector to VGA Adapter can play content to a VGA display when using the following apps:

• Videos
• Photos—Slideshow playback only
• YouTube
• Keynote
• Safari—Video content on webpages

So until I actually start playing a video, photos, etc. I get no output at all from the VGA. I can’t browse websites in Safari over VGA, so I can’t, for example, use the iPad to go through our help desk ticketing system during the weekly group meeting. Can’t demonstrate application configuration on the big screen, etc etc. I generally like Apple hardware, and I really want to like this and for it to work, but it has just turned into a big failure and disappointment.

I understand that Apple might want to, under some circumstances, restrict your video output so you aren’t arbitrarily dumping licensed content out over a digital connection. Instead with this they are limiting you so tightly over what they will allow you to output, for no real explainable reason. Wouldn’t it be easier to just have the VGA output be universal and then restrict certain flagged content (which they already do) if you try to push it out over the adapter?

I can only come up with two possible explanations for why this is done this way:

1. The iPad is running an OS that is still fundamentally thinking it is dealing with something more along the lines of an iPod Touch, and that all that there really is worth displaying on a big screen is videos and photos.
2. If you were able to hook up the iPad to an external display and use a Bluetooth keyboard on it, you would pretty much kill some large percentage (lets just say 20%) of the market for notebooks like the MacBook Air. So cripple the iPad to force consumers to move further up the foodchain to get full video out capability.

Hopefully this is just the first case and things will improve with the next OS release. I really do like my iPad, but this feature has pretty much killed a large part of its intended functionality.

I have no clue about which of these two sites is going to end up being the de facto source for Nagios plugins, but I have claimed what is mine on the Nagios branded one and will probably maintain things in parallel for the time being. Here are the links there for my LSI MegaRAID SAS (Dell PERC5 & PERC6) plugin, check_megaraid_sas, and my Perforce license plugin, check_p4_license.

I have a server running Perforce at work and it seems that every other year I have managed to not realize the license needed renewing until someone said to me, “Hey, is there any reason Perforce isn’t working?”

This year my spider-senses started tickling earlier on and I caught it in time, but I told myself I needed to count on more than just an odd sense of doom and foreboding in April. So I wrote a quickly Perl script that calls the Perforce p4 CLI tool and looks at your server’s license info and gripes back to you if it is going to be expiring any time soon.

I have also placed this plugin up on NagiosExchange, because I have found that it is better for me to do so earlier on than to have someone else find my stuff and upload then abandon it.

The Problem: I have a user with a Filemaker database that they want to quickly share via the Internet, which is generally easy to do using the Instant Web Publishing (IWP). I don’t, however, want to have the Filemaker server exposed through the firewall. I want to be able to use an Apache server I have sitting on the edge of the network to proxy for it instead.

The (old) Solution: With the old Filemaker Server 7 we were able to using the basic Apache mod_proxy using the ProxyPass and ProxyPassReverse directives worked fine. There was a trick though, and that was that you had to proxy back to a specific port on the Filemaker server, port 16080, otherwise your request for http://external.server/fmi/iwp/ would keep redirecting to http://internal.server/fmi/iwp/. So in short our Apache conf would work with:
ProxyPass /fmi/iwp http://internal.server:16080/fmi/iwp
ProxyPassReverse /fmi/iwp http://internal.server:16080/fmi/iwp


Unfortunately this approach no longer worked when we installed a new Filemaker 10 Advanced Server system. The port 16080 solution no longer existed and the same problems with just doing a straight reverse proxy still existed.

The (new) Solution: So some simple digging in the Apache config on the Filemaker server showed that Filemaker is simply inserting their own version of mod_jk (they are calling it mod_jk_fm) into Apache and then talking back to their own Tomcat server they installed as part of the package. Right at the end of the httpd.conf they have:
Include '/Library/FileMaker Server/Admin/admin-helper/WEB-INF/conf/mod_jk.conf'

and said mod_jk.conf looks like:
LoadModule jk_fm_module '/Library/FileMaker Server/Web Publishing/publishing-engine/web-server-support/apache-2.2/mod_jk_fm.so'
JkFmWorkersFile '/Library/FileMaker Server/Admin/admin-helper/WEB-INF/conf/workers.properties'
JkFmLogFile '/Library/FileMaker Server/Logs/web_server_module_log.txt'
JkFmShmFile '/Library/FileMaker Server/Logs/mod_jk_shm.txt'
JkFmLogLevel error
JkFmLogStampFormat "[%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y]"
JkFmOptions +ForwardKeySize +ForwardURICompat -ForwardDirectories
JkFmRequestLogFormat "%w %V %T"
JkFmMount /fmi/config config
JkFmMount /fmi/config/* config
JkFmMount /fmi/iwp wpc
JkFmMount /fmi/iwp/* wpc
JkFmMount /fmi/xml/* wpc
JkFmMount /fmi/xsl/cnt/* cwpe
JkFmMount /fmi/xsl/relay/* cwpe
JkFmMount /fmi/xsl/*.xsl cwpe

and the workers.properties file is just:
worker.list=wpc,cwpe,config
worker.config1.host=127.0.0.1
worker.config1.type=ajp13
worker.config1.port=16018
worker.config1.lbfactor=1
worker.config2.host=127.0.0.1
worker.config2.type=ajp13
worker.config2.port=16018
worker.config2.lbfactor=1
worker.cwpe1.host=127.0.0.1
worker.cwpe1.type=ajp13
worker.cwpe1.port=16018
worker.cwpe1.lbfactor=1
worker.cwpe2.host=127.0.0.1
worker.cwpe2.type=ajp13
worker.cwpe2.port=16018
worker.cwpe2.lbfactor=1
worker.wpc1.host=127.0.0.1
worker.wpc1.type=ajp13
worker.wpc1.port=16016
worker.wpc1.lbfactor=1
worker.wpc1.retries=20
worker.wpc2.host=127.0.0.1
worker.wpc2.type=ajp13
worker.wpc2.port=16016
worker.wpc2.lbfactor=1
worker.wpc2.retries=20
worker.config.type=lb
worker.config.balance_workers=config1,config2
worker.cwpe.type=lb
worker.cwpe.balance_workers=cwpe1,cwpe2
worker.wpc.type=lb
worker.wpc.balance_workers=wpc1,wpc2


As it turns out, the naive approach/solution is the one that works. FM 10 Server’s instance of Tomcat is listening on all of the network interfaces, not just the localhost, and will happily accept AJP13 connections from other systems. What I did on my external (proxying) Apache server was to install my own copy of mod_jk and then include my own modified version of the the mod_jk.conf into the man httpd.conf:

I trimmed down my own workers.properties (using the IP adress of the internal FM server for the host field) to:
worker.list=wpc
worker.wpc1.host=###.###.###.###
worker.wpc1.type=ajp13
worker.wpc1.port=16016
worker.wpc1.lbfactor=1
worker.wpc1.retries=20
worker.wpc2.host=###.###.###.###
worker.wpc2.type=ajp13
worker.wpc2.port=16016
worker.wpc2.lbfactor=1
worker.wpc2.retries=20
worker.wpc.type=lb
worker.wpc.balance_workers=wpc1,wpc2

and then in my VirtualHost definition for the proxying site I have:
###
# Filemaker 10 server Instant Web Publishing Proxy
###

That was it. I think I spent far more time trying to Google an answer to the initial problem than I did in actually solving it once I finally decided to take my own look at things. I am sure there is some sort of life lesson in there, but for the sake of those who don’t want to learn them themselves, I have provided you with my solution.