If you are a user of Big Brother, you may know that by default, your reporting dates cut off on the year 2010. To extend this capability to the current year, you just need to edit bb-rep.html, found at /usr/local/bb/www/help/bb-rep.html. Simply add the following options to your start-yr and end-yr:
So you have a planned outage, and you don’t want the damn thing setting off alarms while it’s down? Easy enough. If you prefer to hold on to the entry in your bb-hosts file for later testing then this is for you. Simply enable this feature by editing /usr/local/bb/etc/bbdef-server.sh. Search the file for RUNOPTS. Around this line you will see other options we can add to RUNOPTS for different features:
RUNOPTS=”DATAMSG EMBEDHTML ENABLE_DISABLE”
export RUNOPTS
You can see that I already have test disabling, enabled here, by including ENABLE_DISABLE to the RUNOPTS line. Save and close and restart BB. Now that it's done, perform the following to disable a single test:
/usr/local/bb/bin/bb 192.168.0.10(your BB server IP) “disable server.mycompany.com.conn 2h”
This will disable the connection ping test for 2 hours. The following will disable all tests on the same server for 24 days:
/usr/local/bb/bin/bb 192.168.0.10 “disable server.mycompany.com* 24d”
To re-enable the server after repairs or maintenance are done:
/usr/local/bb/bin/bb 192.168.0.10 “enable server.mycompany.com*”
Blocking web site access is easy with squid proxy. In this example, we have configured a squid proxy with transparent authentication for the sake of reporting only. I am not using an actual authentication method such as LDAP, in order to lock down user’s surfing bandwidth by the use of caps or limiting hours based on AD group or anything like that, however, I would like to use a reporting tool to be able to tell which users have been to what websites.
So K2 has had some issues when building the cached images on K2 items. When you add an image, either from the server or from your PC, it is converted to .jpg instead of the original, transparent .png.
Let’s give credit where credit is due, special thanks to Stephen Austin over on the K2 forums and to David Goode and the dev team over on the Rockettheme forums. Thanks a lot for your assist with this fix guys!
What a pain, let’s fix it:
I am using K2 2.4.1 as well as RokStories 2.0. Here are the edits I made, I will provide downloadable copies of these files soon.
I have not yet written about Joomla!, but it’s time I do. It’s one of my deep held secrets because it works, and it works well as a CMS. I won’t go into it here, just keep an eye open for more articles on the subject. This one is about a backup utility for Joomla! that you can use to move Joomla! powered sites around. Even from your local computer’s WAMP or LAMP lab, out to a live site on the internet.
I have always followed CookIT services guide on installing Big Brother as a guideline, and it has worked very well. It’s intended use is for Solaris, but it gives you what you need for a successful installation. Regarding the section to install RRDTool and LARRD, there are some differences and things to note.
Just had to do this again recently and was having issues. Here is the script you need to create.
Make the client automatically start on boot
If you wish to start BB automatically at startup, create a file called bbc and put it in your /etc/init.d dir:
# vi /etc/init.d/bbc
Copy the c:\bbnt\ folder, binary included, from another server, and then from a command prompt:
c:
cd \bbnt
bbnt -y -install 137.238.1.200 Y
The IP 137.238.1.200 should be the same as your BBDISPLAY server. Now, in Server 2008, make sure that you command prompt window was launched with administrative privileges.
So there are a few tweaks I need to jot down so they don’t get lost. When installing a Big Brother (BB) client on a Linux or Solaris platform, there are a couple of things you may run into:
This is a reprint of a PDF I found online regarding resizing LVM volumes with ESX server for Linux distros. Credit belongs to the author, David Maphis who wrote this article on 4/29/2008:
In this example I will changed the size of my root partition without
affecting any data. Since this is a VM, I can extend my vmdk with the
“vmkfstools” command. To do this I will have to shutdown the VM to release the lock on the file then resize it. Power up when complete.
Once this is done, make a partition that uses the available space you wish to add to the LVM volume using “parted”. It has an interactive shell, so just enter “parted” in a shell: