Barracuda Health Monitoring with Nagios

Ive written a few plugins that check the health of a Barracuda SPF appliance. They're in (bad) perl but seem to do the job pretty well

The first, to check the RPM of the CPU and System Fans has been accepted into the NagiosExchange site and is listed as:

http://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Plugins/Hardware/Others/check_barracuda_fans/details 

The others, which check the 3 mail queues, and the CPU temperature have been submitted but not yet approved.

I'll update here when they are released.

Changing default editor to vim

Run the command below: 

sudo update-alternatives --config editor

Then select vim.basic or vim.tiny from the menu presented

Copy SSH Key to Server in one command

Use this technique to copy the SSH key and add it to the authorized_keys file in one command

ssh-copy-id -i .ssh/id_dsa.pub username@remotehost

Pop in your password and you're done.

Sage Payroll 2011 Won't Start

Today I encountered a problem with Sage Payroll 2011 v17.00.029, when started, the program would display the splash screen and successfully run the first run wizard (asking for Company name, Address and Tax District to be used when creating defaults etc.)

Once this completed, the application appeared to close (which I assumed was normal). On next startup, it asked me to select the company I had created and login (using the default MANAGER account and no password), selecting this and the correct date for processing using the date picker, then clicking OK, the application then crashed out.

The solution to this was to change the region that the system was running under, I had accidentally set it to US using the unattended installation disc I created, setting this to UK and rebooting solved this problem and allowed the application to run successfully.

This can be diagnosed quite easily by inspecting the date format in the date picker textbox, i.e. today it should read 21/03/2011 but instead was reading 03/21/2011. I think this might be a design flaw in the Sage application as the date picker successfully calculated the week-end number (50 in this case) but was unable to execute the program. I believe that Sage have no intention to fix this as it would require a lot of effort for little reward so be careful if you are using a non-EU cloud service for your Infrastructure as a Service or if you have multiple geographic locations.