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.

Anyways, I had to pop in to Bob Slate Stationer today. On my own. I probably shouldn’t do this too often. I think at least 50% of the time I end up in a shop with pens, unsupervised, I come home with something. This time I escaped relatively cheaply with a new pen, a Pelikan “Pelikano Junior”. Here are some pics:

The pen was $10.35 and came in a variety of colors, at least green, orange a blue ones were available (I picked up a blue as well, but sent it straight off as a gift to someone). The pen is all plastic (except for the nib of course) and translucent in color, but seems quite sturdy. The yellow grip is somewhat rubbery. The nib has an “A” on it, the meaning of which I do not understand (I should have checked if the blue one was similar), and I would say it is roughly a medium size. Slightly larger than the medium on my LAMYs.

I like the pen. It is a sturdy little guy that I think I will be able to just throw in my bad without too many concerns. Fun and chunky with a simple design.

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.

So I have decided to go over to WordPress from Movable Type. It is GPL and all other sorts of good stuff, plus a friend of mine who uses his own blog far more frequently described it as moving from “Outhouse to Flush Toilet”. That seems like qualifications enough to me.