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Nagios/Icinga email alerts using AWS Simple Email Service (SES)

26/02/2016 juliogonzalez 0

The biggest problem with sending email from AWS EC2 instances is that -sooner or later- your instance’s IP will be added to a blacklist. It doesn’t matter how secure your MTA is. It doesn’t matter if it’s not reachable from the internet. And it doesn’t matter if you are not sending spam at all.

Sooner or later one of your neighbors using an IP on the same IP range your instance is, will send spam, Then one of the blacklists (such as Trendmicro’s) will add the whole range as spam sender.

In theory you could try setting up rDNS but that’s not always a warranty of staying out of the lists. And obviously what AWS recommends is using (and paying) Simple Email Service or SES. It’s pretty easy to setup and pretty easy to use (you can setup IAM accounts to use SMTP).

For some services the configuration will be easy: add the SES endpoint as SMTP server hostname, enable SSL, select TCP port 465, add your credentials, and ready to go.

But how to do it for Nagios or Icinga (version 1)? (more…)

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Automating the Tibco Spotfire Webplayer installer

21/02/2016 juliogonzalez 0

Tibco Spotfire is one of the commercial options for Business Intelligence Analytics, with several different components available to be installed.

Some of the components, such as Tibco Spotfire Server (which is the core of the Tibco Spotfire platform), are more or less easy to automate if you decided to go for the GNU/Linux version as it works on Red Hat, and you can use Oracle as DB, even as AWS RDS (I will create another post for this).

But some other components can be tricky, specially those running on Microsoft Windows.

(more…)

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Nexus on OpenShift using the official jetty bundle

14/02/2016 juliogonzalez 0

For the last two years, I was using Shekhar Gulati GitHub repository to manage my personal Sonatype Nexus service. Deploying to OpenShift was easy, and I could get Nexus running in less than five minutes.

However, this repository was using Nexus as a war file in Tomcat, something which is now deprecated by Sonatype, and won’t be provided for the upcoming 3.0 release. Besides that, the war doesn’t include support for NPM or Ruby gems, and uploading new war files to the repository was slow and inefficient.

(more…)

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Removing unwanted files from GIT repositories

13/01/2014 juliogonzalez 0

A lot of times you inherit a repository with several binaries which cause an exponential size growth if they’re modified. But a GIT repository should not host binaries. In fact no VCS should host those files.

Other times a developer (or yourself) uploads something mistake that shouldn’t be on the repository.

In either case you’ll want to delete those files.

I tried several guides but it never worked as supposed because they don’t update all the branches on the repository and therefore the file is never deleted.

So let’s go: (more…)