I can never remember how to output to a CSV file from postgres, and end up having to google it time and time again - so I'm making a note of it here mostly for my own use

\f ','
\a
\t
\o /tmp/moocow.csv
SELECT foo,bar FROM whatever;
\o
\q

If a field has newlines, this will break. You can do something like this instead.....

 SELECT foo, bar, '"' || REPLACE(REPLACE(field_with_newilne, '\n', '\\n'), '"', '""') || '"' FROM whatever;

The Dell PERC/5 shows like this under 'lspci'

07:08.0 SCSI storage controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS1068 PCI-X Fusion-MPT SAS (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Dell SAS 5/iR Adapter RAID Controller

The status of this RAID card can be read using mpt-status, in Gentoo this package is available as sys-block/mpt-status. Here's an example of the output:

# mpt-status
ioc0 vol_id 0 type IM, 2 phy, 148 GB, state OPTIMAL, flags ENABLED
ioc0 phy 1 scsi_id 32 ATA      WDC WD1600JS-75N 2E04, 149 GB, state ONLINE, flags NONE
ioc0 phy 0 scsi_id 1 ATA      WDC WD1600JS-75N 2E04, 149 GB, state ONLINE, flags NONE

The latest 'check_mpt' script can be found on Nagios Exchange. Download it and put it in your libexec folder, for me on gentoo its '/usr/nagios/libexec/'. Open the file, and make sure the 'use lib' line points to the correct place.

The script uses sudo to run mpt-status, so you'll need to modify your /etc/sudoers - adding a line like this:

%nagios ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/usr/sbin/mpt-status

Next, you need to configure nagios, your filenames might be different from the names I use below.

/etc/nagios/commands.cfg : Note, the -c param refers to the number of disks you expect to be active.

define command{
  command_name  check_mpt
  command_line  $USER1$/check_mpt -c 2
}

/etc/nagios/localhost.cfg

define service{
  use                  local-service
  host_name            localhost
  service_description  mpt - Dell Raid
  check_command        check_mpt
}

Reload nagios, on gentoo, it's /etc/init.d/nagios reload

Nagios can be pretty, and several people I've told this too seemed surprised, so I thought I'd put a quick note here. Here is a nice theme for nagios....

http://new.nagiosexchange.org/cgi-bin/page.cgi?g=Detailed%2F1723.html;d=1

Unfortunately, the underlying UI is still the same horrible interface, but.... this does make a big difference to the aesthetics

A few pointers for people trying to get Dell's PERC 6/i RAID monitoring working under Ubuntu, and any other linux for that matter. It also applies to PERC 5/i too, and... other stuff

First, visit Dells Linux site. Have a poke about, see what's there.

Next, we need to download a tool to get information from your array. Download LSI's MegaRAID CLI tool for linux. It comes as a .RPM, so if you're an ubuntu user, you can convert it to a .deb using alien, or convert it to a .tar.gz.

# alien --to-tgz MegaCli-1.01.39-0.i386.rpm

You then have a CLI tool you can use to get all your data now! For example:

# ./opt/MegaRAID/MegaCli/MegaCli64 -LDInfo -Lall -aALL | grep State State: Optimal

One thing I spent a while figuring out was how to get the rebuild progress, so here's how:

# ./opt/MegaRAID/MegaCli/MegaCli64 -PDRbld -ShowProg -PhysDrv \[32:1\] -aALL

There's also a really useful cheat sheet for common tasks

Don't forget to actually monitor this output with nagios, or your favorite monitoring tool!

Check out this blog post. Looks promising, PHP might finally get name spaces, and somehow, they have managed to use the '::' separator! Great news, but I'm not going to believe it till I see it released, even though it's been checked into SVN already

The symfony SVN is pretty unstable, and it's anoying

Here's a mirror!

http://symfony.pengus.net