-
As part of the work we do in NUUG
-to publish video recordings of our monthly presentations, we provide a
-page with embedded video for easy access to the recording. Putting a
-good set of HTML tags together to get working embedded video in all
-browsers and across all operating systems is not easy. I hope this
-will become easier when the <video> tag is implemented in all
-browsers, but I am not sure. We provide the recordings in several
-formats, MPEG1, Ogg Theora, H.264 and Quicktime, and want the
-browser/media plugin to pick one it support and use it to play the
-recording, using whatever embed mechanism the browser understand.
-There is at least four different tags to use for this, the new HTML5
-<video> tag, the <object> tag, the <embed> tag and
-the <applet> tag. All of these take a lot of options, and
-finding the best options is a major challenge.
-
-
I just tested the experimental Opera browser available from labs.opera.com, to see how it handled
-a <video> tag with a few video sources and no extra attributes.
-I was not very impressed. The browser start by fetching a picture
-from the video stream. Not sure if it is the first frame, but it is
-definitely very early in the recording. So far, so good. Next,
-instead of streaming the 76 MiB video file, it start to download all
-of it, but do not start to play the video. This mean I have to wait
-for several minutes for the downloading to finish. When the download
-is done, the playing of the video do not start! Waiting for the
-download, but I do not get to see the video? Some testing later, I
-discover that I have to add the controls="true" attribute to be able
-to get a play button to pres to start the video. Adding
-autoplay="true" did not help. I sure hope this is a misfeature of the
-test version of Opera, and that future implementations of the
-<video> tag will stream recordings by default, or at least start
-playing when the download is done.
-
-
The test page I used (since changed to add more attributes) is
-available
-from the nuug site. Will have to test it with the new Firefox
-too.
-
-
In the test process, I discovered a missing feature. I was unable
-to find a way to get the URL of the playing video out of Opera, so I
-am not quite sure it picked the Ogg Theora version of the video. I
-sure hope it was using the announced Ogg Theora support. :)
+
One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
+Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
+days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
+Nagios. The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
+analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
+further.
+
+
When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
+configured as a Munin and Nagios server. In addition, it is
+configured to be a server for the
+SiteSummary
+system I have written for use in Debian Edu. The SiteSummary
+system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
+work. In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
+information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
+computer submitting information to this collector. This allow for
+automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
+which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
+packages got etc. This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
+and Nagios configuration.
+
+
All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
+munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
+client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
+up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.
+
+
All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
+automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
+services detected). In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
+the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
+sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
+raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
+the machine.
+
+
The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
+based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
+with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
+keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.
+
+
The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
+is to set the password used to get access via HTTP. The system
+administrator need to run "htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
+nagiosadmin" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
+it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages. After that,
+everything is taken care of.