Bacula - testing excludes

I've been having some trouble getting my Bacula jobs to exclude certain directories. To test which files will be included (or excluded) you can get a listing of the files that Bacula would include for a particular job from bconsole:

root@rm-bac-1:~# bconsole
Connecting to Director localhost:9101
1000 OK: rm-bac-1-dir Version: 5.0.1 (24 February 2010)
Enter a period to cancel a command.
*estimate job=ep-server-user-shares listing
[listing follows]


Handy! Beats waiting for the job to run to find out what will get backed up.

In my case, the culprit was incorrect case for the directory to exclude.

ldapsearch - exporting photos to named files

Simple requirement: export all staff photos from our LDAP repository. That bit is easy:

ldapsearch -h ldap -x -t -b "ou=People,dc=example,dc=com,dc=au"

But the files end up being called things like file:///tmp/ldapsearch-jpegPhoto-G4hm3V - not quite what we're after here. We want the pictures with the user ID as part of the name - e.g. pyarra.jpeg

After a bit of experimentation, I came up with this simple, elegant one-liner. OK, it's not all that simple, or elegant, but it is one-line. One long, ugly line:

ldapsearch -h ldap -t -x -b 'ou=People,dc=example,dc=com,dc=au'  uid | awk '$1 ~ /uid:/ {print $2}' | while read LUID; do ldapsearch -h ldap -t -x -b 'ou=People,dc=example,dc=com,dc=au' "uid=$LUID" jpegPhoto | (FILENAME=$(awk '$1 ~ /jpegPhoto:</ {print $2}' | sed -e 's/file:\/\///'); mv "$FILENAME" "/tmp/mugshots/$LUID.jpeg"); done

I probably should have bitten the bullet and done it as a Perl script. But that's the lure of the one-liner, eh? If I just go a little further, I'll have it!

Nagios, check_openmanage and the dreaded out-of-date firmware

I started to add some nagios monitoring for one of our Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers, but was a bit puzzled when I got this response:

nagios# /usr/local/libexec/nagios/check_openmanage -s -H mq-citrix-4
WARNING: Controller 0 [PERC 6/i Integrated]: Firmware '6.1.1-0047' is out of date

Hmmm... I'm not sure I want to start dropping production servers to upgrade firmware, just to make the monitoring system happy. Luckily, the check_openmanage script is intelligently written, and offers lots of options to blacklist checks of some items. Cool!

So for us, I can simply do this:

nagios# /usr/local/libexec/nagios/check_openmanage -H mq-citrix-4 -b ctrl_fw=0
OK - System: 'PowerEdge 1950 III', SN: 'FW86Y1S', 16 GB ram (4 dimms), 1 logical drives, 2 physical drives

To make this work in the config file for Nagios, I added the highlighted bit to the host definition:

 define host{
        use                     windows-server

        host_name               mq-citrix-4
        _openmanage_options     -b ctrl_fw=0
        }


Now I'm wondering if it's a little bit wrong to hide warnings about out-dated firmware. Oh well...