256. Briefly: Setting up ganglia on a debian beowulf cluster

On all your nodes (e.g. using clusterssh):
sudo apt-get install ganglia-monitor

On your front node only:
sudo apt-get install ganglia-webfrontend
sudo cp /etc/ganglia-webfrontend/apache.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/ganglia.conf
sudo service apache2 restart

Edit /etc/ganglia/gmetad.conf and at a minimum add

data_source "debiwolf" 10 beryllium tantalum boron neon

or

data_source "debiwolf" 10 192.168.1.1 192.168.1.131 192.168.1.150 192.168.1.120

You can also specify additional information

gridname "rupert"
authority "http://192.168.1.1/ganglia/"

Go to http://localhost/ganglia in your browser. If you get

There was an error collecting ganglia data (127.0.0.1:8652): fsockopen error: Connection refused

Then do
sudo service gmetad start

Otherwise you should see something like this:

On all your nodes:
You may want to do
sudo service ganglia-monitor restart

if some of your nodes aren't showing.

Customize:
Edit your /etc/ganglia/gmond.conf:

cluster {
        name = "Debiwolf"
        owner = "Me"
        latlong = "unspecified"
        url = "None"
}

255. Google Blogger Stats gone

Update: And...most of the stats are back. (03:19 GMT 15 October 2012)


02:30 GMT 15 October 2012
Did the google stats data just get reset/deleted?

Suddenly my stat counter shows just above 30 visitors -- all-time. That's a bit fewer than the 72k I was expecting. Oh well. I've at least got statcounter too keep me entertained.

It seems to have happened around 0:00 GMT 15 October 2012, although looking at the stats on blogger it may have happened around 9-10 am Eastern Aussie Daylight Savings time.

Update:
The angry posts are already beginning to appear: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/blogger/eOZyb9ws2IU
which bumps stuff in this direction:
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/blogger/dSFrwW2SWgE%5B1-25%5D
which has this statement from Blogger:

"We are aware of this issue and working to resolve it. "

And here's the official Blogger blog: http://knownissues.blogspot.com.au/

Not that I've ever had much use for the 'official' google stats much anyway -- although I obviously care enough about it to 1) notice that they're gone and 2) blog about it. But whatever.

254. Compiling Thunderbird 16 on Debian Wheezy

I've posted how to compile thunderbird (12 and 13) in the past. Here's v 16.0.1:

First you need to sort out the dependencies:

sudo apt-get install libdbus-glib-1-dev gir1.2-notify-0.7 libnotify-dev yasm checkinstall libzip-dev zip libgtk2.0-dev

As usual, I prefer to do the building in ~/tmp
If you have a ~/tmp/comm-release directory, make sure to delete it first:

rm ~/tmp/comm-release -rf

Now download the new source (106 Mb):

cd ~/tmp
wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/16.0.1/source/thunderbird-16.0.1.source.tar.bz2

Untar it, and create a new directory for out-of-tree building:

tar xvf thunderbird-16.0.1.source.tar.bz2
mkdir thunderbird16

cd thunderbird16/

Time to configure:

../comm-release/./configure --disable-necko-wifi

And build (40 minutes on a triple core AMD II)

make -j4

where -j4 indicates that it's built in parallel on a 3 core (3+1=4) processor. Note that this has nothing to do with running the finished binaries in parallel -- it's just a way of speeding up the compilation.


Make sure that you don't have an older version of thunderbird install via dpkg i.e.

aptitude search thunderbird|grep ^i

should come up blank. If not, uninstall that package.

Finally, install your new binaries:

sudo make install

And you're done.