How to install JavaScript tools for Nagios

September 24, 2012 · by nathan · in

Node

Install Node on the Nagios machine (My Nagios XI VM running CentOS… for other platforms see nodejs.org)

wget http://nodejs.tchol.org/repocfg/el/nodejs-stable-release.noarch.rpm
sudo yum localinstall --nogpgcheck nodejs-stable-release.noarch.rpm
sudo yum install nodejs-compat-symlinks npm
rm nodejs-stable-release.noarch.rpm

Install the “commander” package by TJ Holowaychuk for easier option processing.

$ sudo HTTP_PROXY=$HTTP_PROXY npm install -g commander
npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/commander
npm http 200 https://registry.npmjs.org/commander
npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/commander/-/commander-1.0.4.tgz
npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/keypress
npm http 200 https://registry.npmjs.org/keypress
npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/keypress/-/keypress-0.1.0.tgz
commander@1.0.4 /usr/lib/node_modules/commander
└── keypress@0.1.0

Install PhantomJS and CasperJS

Again on the NagiosXI VM:

# Get PhantomJS and install it in /opt/ with a symlink in /usr/local/bin/
#  http://phantomjs.org/download.html
wget http://phantomjs.googlecode.com/files/phantomjs-1.6.1-linux-x86_64-dynamic.tar.bz2
bunzip2 phantomjs-1.6.1-linux-x86_64-dynamic.tar.bz2
tar xf phantomjs-1.6.1-linux-x86_64-dynamic.tar
 
sudo mv phantomjs-1.6.1-linux-x86_64-dynamic /opt/
sudo ln -s /opt/phantomjs-1.6.1-linux-x86_64-dynamic/ /opt/phantomjs
sudo ln -s /opt/phantomjs/bin/phantomjs /usr/local/bin/
 
which phantomjs      # should return /usr/local/bin/phantomjs
phantomjs --version   # should return `1.6.1` with no errors
 
# Check out and install the latest CasperJS with Git
#   http://casperjs.org/installation.html
sudo yum install git -y
 
git clone https://github.com/n1k0/casperjs.git 
 
sudo mv casperjs/ /opt/casperjs
sudo ln -s /opt/casperjs/bin/casperjs  /usr/local/bin/
 
 
which casperjs    # should return /usr/local/bin/casperjs
casperjs --version  # should return `1.0.0-RC1`

Looking for innocence

August 3, 2012 · by nathan · in
I want programming computers to be like coloring with crayons and playing with duplo blocks… I just want to make computers suck less.

– Ryan Dahl, creator of Nodejs.

Toggling light/dark Solarized color theme in Emacs 23

May 4, 2012 · by nathan · in

I never write about Emacs because I’m such a n00b and most of my ELisp “programming” has consisted of pasting random code from the Internet into my ~/.emacs file and hoping it works. But finally today I wrote a lick of it and it worked!

I’ve been using Ethan Schoonover’s obsessively comfortable “Solarized” color scheme for a while now, but I’ve become annoyed how many keys I have to mash to switch from light to dark. So I set a global variable to track the current state and mapped Ctrl-c, d (which I at least wasn’t using) to a function to toggle between the two states.

(when window-system
 
  ;; ColorTheme - see http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/ColorTheme
  ;; and see gallery at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~maverick/GNUEmacsColorThemeTest/
  ;; try also M-x color-theme-select
 
  (message "loading color-theme")
  (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/color-theme-6.6.0")
 
  (require 'color-theme)
 
  ;; Ethan Schoonover's Solarized theme from
  ;; https://github.com/sellout/emacs-color-theme-solarized
  (load-file "~/.emacs.d/emacs-colors-solarized/color-theme-solarized.el")
 
  ;; Set initial theme to "dark"
  (setq dark-or-light 'dark)
  (color-theme-solarized dark-or-light)
 
  ;; Shortcut to toggle between light and dark
  (global-set-key (kbd "C-c d")
                    (lambda ()
                      (interactive)
		      (if (eq dark-or-light 'light)
			  (setq dark-or-light 'dark)
			  (setq dark-or-light 'light)
			)
                      (color-theme-solarized dark-or-light)))
  )

And ooh, I just found this awesome crash course on Elisp by Steve Yegge which I will certainly consult next time I have a reason to write my own (i.e., I can’t paste it from some random Internet).

And then after it was all over I finally found some instructions for doing it which would’ve been easy enough to paste. Ah well, I’ve learned something.

Escapism

March 27, 2012 · by nathan · in

PHPUnit for XAMPP on Windows with Cygwin

September 26, 2011 · by nathan · in

Steps to get PHPUnit to run on my XAMPP setup with Cygwin, so I can write and run Symfony2 unit tests.

1. Upgrade PEAR

  1. Download http://pear.php.net/go-pear.phar to C:\xampp\php\go-pear.phar

  2. Run this in cmd.exe (cygwin prompts hosed somehow), taking all defaults

c:\xampp\php>go-pear.bat
  1. Yay.
c:\xampp\php>pear version
PEAR Version: 1.9.4
PHP Version: 5.3.5
Zend Engine Version: 2.3.0
Running on: Windows NT FAI1046162 6.1 build 7600 (Unknow Windows version Enterpr
ise Edition) i586

2. Install/upgrade PHPUnit

Now we can use the cygwin shell. Not sure all these channels are needed, I did this out of order.

cd /cygdrive/c/xampp/php
pear update-channels
pear channel-discover components.ez.no
pear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com
pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de
 
pear install --alldeps phpunit/PHPUnit

3. Use it

XAMPP and/or PHPUnit come with a wrapper called phpunit.bat, which has now been upgraded, but you may need to set your PHPBIN environment var. Also I already have c:\xampp\php in my $PATH.

export PHPBIN=c:/xampp/php/php.exe
 
cd /path/to/mysf2project
phpunit.bat -c app

Now PHPUnit works. Make tests and make them work!

Sorting, deleting from a PropelObjectCollection

June 29, 2011 · by nathan · in

Propel 1.6 (and Propel 1.5 before it) is pretty sweet (thank you François!). I had some confusion with my model’s array of related objects though, thinking it was a regular PHP array. Actually it’s a Collection, specifically a PropelObjectCollection, which implements PHP 5′s ArrayObject interface. You can do a lot of cool things with them.

Sorting

Not immediately obvious, however, was how to sort them. This did the trick for my case (I have a Sequence field manually re-calculable through a jQueryUI sortable widget. Also note the cool inline anonymous function syntax available since PHP 5.3. Incidentally, I’m not sure the terms lambda or closure are helpful because they’re not quite like Lisp lambdas or JavaScript closures.

// Re-sort them by Sequence, numerically
$this->collSegments->uasort(function($a, $b) {
    return $a->getSequence() - $b->getSequence();
});
// Re-sort them as strings, case-insensitively.
$this->collSegments->uasort(function($a, $b) {
    return strnatcasecmp($a->__toString(), $b->__toString();
});

Deleting

Thanks to the PropelArrayCollection API Documentation

  /*
   * Remove the provided Segment object.
   *
   * @param Segment $s
   * @return Segment $s that was deleted.
   */
  public function deleteSegment(Segment $s) {
      $s->delete();
      $key = $this->collSegments->search($s);
      $ret = $this->collSegments->remove($key);
      return $s;
  }

So elsewhere,

	      $this->deleteSegment($s);

Relaunch the Mac OS X Dock

June 14, 2011 · by nathan · in

Problem

On my Snow Leopard machine this kept happening.

  • The “open” indicator (glowing silver ball under the app icon) in the Dock was flaky, only showing for a few apps though more were running.
  • The task switcher (which you see when you option-tab/alt-tab) didn’t show all running apps. That RUINS it for me. I always use option-tab.
  • I hate rebooting.

Workaround–Restart the Dock process.

Open Terminal† and use one command:

killall -HUP Dock

Don’t be afraid of “killall”. HUP means “Hang Up” and is the normal way of telling something to relaunch.

Thanks to AcmeTech’s old post.

† Terminal is located in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder. Or the quick Spotlight way is command-space, Terminal.

Integrating Nagios with Test Driven Development

June 8, 2011 · by nathan · in

A while back I realized something important:

Monitoring tools are to the sysadmin what testing tools are to the developer.

Recently I realized that there need to be more ways to bring both toolsets together. Here’s one, tying the Nagios monitoring toolset to anything that emits the popular Test Anything Protocol.

(more…)

Open files in Emacs from the Cygwin command line

May 27, 2011 · by nathan · in

I just got this working today. The weirdnesses of Cygwin’s half Unix-half Windows nature had stymied me before, but I’ve prevailed!

I’ve got Gnu Emacs 23.3 for Windows installed in c:/emacs, and a fairly recent install of Cygwin on Windows 7.

Saved this script in ~/cygemacs.sh

#!/usr/bin/bash
c:/emacs/bin/emacsclientw.exe -n -a "c:/emacs/bin/runemacs.exe" `cygpath -wa $@`

Then in my ~/.bashrc:

alias ec="~/cygemacs.sh"

Now I can be all like,

$ ec ~/.minttyrc

And it opens a new frame in my running Emacs (I have (server-start) in my ~/.emacs), or starts Emacs and opens the file if Emacs isn’t running yet.

See also: EmasClient at EmacsWiki.

Bonus tips

Yes I’m still using Subversion but also gitting going with Git.

And courtesy of The Lumber Room, in ~/.bashrc and others:

    export SVN_EDITOR='c:/emacs/bin/emacsclientw.exe -a c:/emacs/bin/runemacs.exe '

And silence that annoying “kill client buffer z0mgbbq?!?” warning:

  (remove-hook 'kill-buffer-query-functions 'server-kill-buffer-query-function)

sfPropel15Plugin error, “class ‘FooPeer’ does not have a method ‘getUniqueColumnNames’”

May 26, 2011 · by nathan · in

Stupid me made the same mistake twice in a row so I’m documenting it for humanity.

I’m updating an old Symfony project to use Symfony 1.3/1.4 and Propel 1.5 through François Zaninotto’s sfPropel15Plugin.

Problem:

I followed the README, right? But…

$ ./symfony propel:build --forms
>> schema    converting "C:/web/myproject/config/schema.yml" to XML
>> schema    putting C:/web/myproject/config/generated-schema.xml
>> propel    Running "om" phing task
>> file-     C:/web/myproject/config/generated-schema.xml
>> autoload  Resetting application autoloaders
>> autoload  Resetting CLI autoloader
>> propel    generating form classes
PHP Warning:  call_user_func() expects parameter 1 to be a valid callback, class 'FooPeer' does not have a method 'getUniqueColumnNames' in C:\web\myproject\plugins\sfPropel15Plugin\lib\generator\sfPropelFormGenerator.class.php on line 485
PHP Stack trace:
PHP   1. {main}() C:\web\myproject\symfony:0
PHP   2. include() C:\web\myproject\symfony:14
PHP   3. sfSymfonyCommandApplication->run() C:\symfony1.3\lib\command\cli.php:20
PHP   4. sfTask->runFromCLI() C:\symfony1.3\lib\command\sfSymfonyCommandApplication.class.php:76
PHP   5. sfBaseTask->doRun() C:\symfony1.3\lib\task\sfTask.class.php:97
PHP   6. sfPropelBuildTask->execute() C:\symfony1.3\lib\task\sfBaseTask.class.php:68
PHP   7. sfTask->run() C:\web\myproject\plugins\sfPropel15Plugin\lib\task\sfPropelBuildTask.class.php:135
PHP   8. sfBaseTask->doRun() C:\symfony1.3\lib\task\sfTask.class.php:173
PHP   9. sfPropelBuildFormsTask->execute() C:\symfony1.3\lib\task\sfBaseTask.class.php:68
PHP  10. sfGeneratorManager->generate() C:\web\myproject\plugins\sfPropel15Plugin\lib\task\sfPropelBuildFormsTask.class.php:72
PHP  11. sfPropelFormGenerator->generate() C:\symfony1.3\lib\generator\sfGeneratorManager.class.php:126
PHP  12. sfGenerator->evalTemplate() C:\web\myproject\plugins\sfPropel15Plugin\lib\generator\sfPropelFormGenerator.class.php:106
PHP  13. require() C:\symfony1.3\lib\generator\sfGenerator.class.php:84
PHP  14. sfPropelFormGenerator->getUniqueColumnNames() C:\web\myproject\plugins\sfPropel15Plugin\data\generator\sfPropelForm\default\template\sfPropelFormGeneratedTemplate.php:34
PHP  15. call_user_func() C:\web\myproject\plugins\sfPropel15Plugin\lib\generator\sfPropelFormGenerator.class.php:485
... etc ...

Solution

I removed too much of the default config in propel.ini..

Make sure this original line is still intact in propel.ini, even though you’ve removed/commented out all the propel.behavior lines that point to the old sfPropelPlugin:

propel.behavior.default                        = symfony,symfony_i18n