How to set up OTRS on Ubuntu

First, little info about OTRS taken from Wikipedia:
OTRS, an initialism for Open-source Ticket Request System, is a free and open-source trouble ticket system software package that a company, organization, or other entity can use to assign tickets to incoming queries and track further communications about them. It is a means of managing incoming inquiries, complaints, support requests, defect reports, and other communications. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OTRS

So my interest in OTRS started couple of months ago. We had been using a very outdated ticketing system in my workplace for years and were thinking of changing to a better one. So as I was working during the summer holidays, I had time to look for an alternative. Found OTRS, set it up on my test server, tested for a few weeks and then migrated it to our production environment. Now we’ve been using OTRS for a month. Works like a charm. Usually if something is not working right in OTRS, it’s only a misconfiguration and easily fixed with the web GUI. Now we were also able to replace an old Windows server with an Ubuntu server. Slowly migrating from Windows to Linux… 😉

Puppet with Windows clients

I was asked if I had configured Windows clients for a Puppet server running on Linux. I have, and I write everything down whenever I make some new configurations. So here’s my notes on configuring Windows Puppet clients for Ubuntu Puppet server. Don’t forget to check the official guides.

Fabfile for Puppet installations

I will try to automate everything I can, so even when configuring one automation system (Puppet), I’m using another one (Fabric) to do it. I’m using this fabfile always when I need to install another Puppet agent or if I need to install a Puppet server. Tested only with Ubuntu.

Test environment:
Ubuntu 12.10
Puppet 2.7.18
Fabric 1.4.2

Nagios email notifications & Puppet

I’ve been writing a bit about my Nagios configuration lately, but there was still at least one important part missing from my Nagios configuration: Email notifications. With email notifications configured there will be an email alert every time one of my nagios hosts or it’s services reaches warning or critical state.

Postfix will be used to send emails and I will include a Puppet module for the configuration as well.

Puppet: Nagios3 module

On my previous post I told how I got Windows monitoring working with Nagios. The post included a puppet module for the NSClient, which Nagios uses to communicate with Windows. The most important module in that setup is obviously the actual Nagios3 module. Which manages the Nagios server and all the hosts. I’ve been working on it for couple of days now and although it’s not complete, it works and is already available on our github.

You can find the module here:
https://github.com/awaseroot/awaseroot/blob/master/puppet/modules/nagios3/manifests/init.pp

Monitoring Windows with Nagios

I’m working in a Windows environment at my current job so I will be posting a little bit about Windows related topics in the future but the main focus will of course still stay in Linux. Setting up Nagios on Linux server to monitor Windows machines felt like a good way to introduce some Linux functionality to our Windows network.

Windows monitoring was fairly simple to set up but I did run into some small issues. All the guides and tutorials that I found were so outdated that they weren’t really much of a help. This guide is for the latest Nagios and nsclient versions (at least for now). Puppet module for the NSClient at the end of this post.

Improved Puppet LAMP module

I have done slight improvements to my old LAMP module. The new one can be found from our Github here. And the blog post about the old one is here.

The module has been tested on Ubuntu 12.04 and Centos 6.2. It might work on Redhat and Debian as well but I haven’t tested those yet. It installs and configures Apache, PHP and MySQL. At it’s present state it works quite fine, but I might still keep improving it.

Automating WLAN connection & logon

Slightly easier topic today 🙂

A while ago I had to set up an Ubuntu machine so that after a reboot it would automatically log in to Gnome and connect to WLAN with the correct wlan key. There’s propably many ways of doing this and it might be quite easy to do with GUI but here’s how to do it from the command line.

WLAN key configuration

For setting the wlan key we need to modify the Network Manager configuration.
The configuration files for all your known connections are here:
/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/
You need to add the key to the appropriate config. In my case it was Auto Wlan212. Sudo is needed for editing the file. There’s a lot of settings you can play with but the section for the wlan key is under
[802-11-wireless-security].
Before I modified anything these two lines were there already:

Ubuntu Release Upgrade – Fully automatic non-interactive upgrade

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS has been released and it’s time to upgrade! The do-release-upgrade is the recommended way and don’t worry! I will use it. The problem is this: do-release-upgrade asks a lot of questions during the install but I have to upgrade multiple machines and I don’t feel like answering those same questions on each machine. So how to automate this?
EASY!

There’s a way to answer those questions in advance and in a single command. You can pipe some of the answers with echo and then use DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractice for the rest of them. No preseeding needed at all. With this command you can automate a release upgrade completely.

Remember to take backups in case something goes wrong.