Google – Chris' Site

msmtp + Zabbix + Gmail!

My company uses Gmail for all our email accounts. We’ve found that with the limited IT budget and staffing it’s easiest for us to use google to manage all our corporate email.

I’ve been trying to get Zabbix to send emails using Gmail, of course since gmail only uses TLS it’s been a bit of a problem since Zabbix does not support this out of the box. I decided to use msmtp and a Zabbix script to handle it all.

Note: We’re using VZ servers so some commands may be different.

First thing to do was to install all the correct packages:
vzyum 103 install gnutls gnutls-devel cyrus-sasl Libidn fetchmail

After those were installed I had to download MSMTP from the sourceforge page here.

Configure, make, make install with your options. I used:
./configure --with-ssl=gnutls

Next I created an msmtp_wrapper.conf file in the Zabbix bin directory like the following:
defaults syslog LOG_MAIL account default host smtp.gmail.com port 587 tls on auth on user helpdesk@mydomain.net password MYPASSWORD auto_from on

Next I created the msmtp_wrapper file in the Zabbix bin directory :
#!/bin/bash echo "Subject:$2+$3" | tr "+" "\n"> /tmp/message.zabbix /usr/local/bin/msmtp -t -C /home/zabbix/bin/msmtp_wrapper.conf --tls-certcheck=off -- $1 < /tmp/message.zabbix rm /tmp/message.zabbix

Change the owner and permissions on these files as such:
chown zabbix:zabbix msmtp_wrapper* chmod a+x 700 msmtp_wrapper*

Next create a media type in Zabbix with the script name you used.

Lastly, setup some triggers to use it!

That should be all that you need to get started.

Video Chat for AdiumX

I love Adium. I’ve been using it since June of 2005, it has the chat history of 582 contacts, and over 10,700 transcripts! (Yeah I chat a lot!). It lets me sign into all my AIM Screen names, my ICQ, MSN, Yahoo!, Google Chat and many more. It’s got a great ability to create custom actions, and tons of other features. If you haven’t used it. I highly suggest downloading it.

But there’s always been one thing missing from Adium. Video Chat! Well yesterday they released a new update for it and I was frustrated at work so I took a minute to go check out all the AdiumXtras. Ive checked them out before but never really dug into what all was there. I found tons of neat things there, of course. But one of them was called MeBeam Integration. This is an amazing little plug in. It lets you start a video and voice chat with pretty much anyone who has Flash!

I’ve been playing with it a little bit today and it works really well. There’s a little playing around you have to do to get it to work, but once you do it’s amazing for video. The voice is horrible tons of feedback if you don’t use headphones, but once you do it gets much better.

If you are missing your video chat, go check it out. It’s not as nice as a fully integrated solution, but it’ll work for now!

Old LA Zoo – Griffith Park

This past weekend, Constantine and I set out to go exploring a few different abandoned areas of Los Angeles, we started out with the one we thought would be the easiest to find and sure enough it was.

The Old LA Zoo first opened in Griffith Park in 1913, the zoo didn’t do very good and had many animal escapes and was poorly funded, during world war I many of the animals died due to food rationing. In 1965, the zoo was moved to it’s present location just south of where this one is located. This past year during the Griffith park fires, the old zoo was nearly destroyed, thankfully it survived the fires and is still amazingly well kept.

We headed up the I-5 early Saturday morning and got off at the first Griffith park exit and parked in the Merry-Go-Round parking lot. Head back across the street and up the road (away from the merry-go-round). Here you will find a trail that heads to the right along the ridge and through some trees. Go up the trail just a little ways and you will find the first group of buildings. It’s really very easy to get too. This is the back side of what appeared to be the Lion cages. There were plenty of holes in the fence that you can get through to climb around. In fact the day we were there there was some group filming a movie, which included a large fake tiger!

We continued to hike around for a while and found a few different ways to get there. In fact if you don’t want to go through the hiking part, you can actually get to the front of the zoo by going around the Merry-Go-Round to the right of the parking lot and then just follow the larger parking lot to the left.

You can download or tracks for Google Earth here, and see just how easy it is to see. You could easily spend 30 minutes or a few hours exploring this old compound and the areas around it.

Our pictures of the Old LA Zoo are here. Or you can view the GoogleEarth GeoTagged photos here. Lastly you can view the other hard data from the weekend here.

Here’s some more references:
Marilyn Carolyn
Boing Boing
Zoo Zoo Zoo

On the way home we saw this cute little PokeMan bug… Crazy LA people:

(Notice the mini one on the dashboard!)

New Theme

Last week, one of the guys at my office introduced me to WPRemix. I downloaded it and played with it some. Then, I got a client who wants to use it and change it for the site they are developing. So I had to learn all about it.

In the process, I came up with a new theme for my site. I was able to put this together in 3 days, and even with some very interesting/fun javascript/css to create the curve around the bike wheel.

The theme is a little WIDE for most people I’m guessing. So I’m thinking of ways to shrink that down as it’s currently 1100px wide. I really shouldn’t cause too many issues though because based on Google Analytics most of my visitors are using 1280×1024 screen resolutions.

Anyways, I hope everyone likes it… I hadn’t really been feeling very designy lately, but this surprised me.

Let me know if you see anything broken!

Royality

What an excellent weekend!

Let’s see, Friday we were going to go to GGB. But Jason talked me out of it because he said that the line was going to be too long. Either way, Constantine and I ended up staying in and watching a movie called Driving Lessons. It was pretty entertaining.

Saturday we got up and went shopping. I spent the last of my Best Buy gift card. I really hate that store. Such over priced Crap. Constantine bought a new Apple Macbook! Yay for him! I also got a new mouse for my computer and bought the new Futurama Movie. We watched it on Sunday and it was pretty good.

After that we headed to Inglewood to look at an apartment complex that was for sale. Sooo ghetto. That night we had a dinner party at Jason’s, his cousin was there and we played Catch Phrase. I came up with the word “Royality” and to answer “Dime a dozen” I said, “Hookers!” Very funny times!

Sunday Constantine and I went hiking looking for this Nazi camp called Murphys Ranch where some crazy lady built a hige mansion with tons of neat underground stuff. We never did find it. Googled it when we got home and found out that we were on the wrong side of the canyon. Stopped at El Burrito on the way home and ran into Jason and his cousin again.