Upon rebooting the laptop with its new fresh clone things appeared to be working but I soon discovered (upon starting Mail.app) that the machine was failing to get a kerberos ticket which was normally issued upon login.  I fired up the CLI and tried getting a ticket manually with kinit and got a strange permission denied, so I then tried the GUI Kerberos.app and received a similar permission denied message.  As I tinkered with it some more trying to get a ticket I eventually got one, at least I thought I did, I could see a ticket with klist and it showed up in Kerberos.app but the ticket didn’t work for any services.  Next I tried to destroy the ticket with kdestroy to see if I could get a ticket again, but that too failed with a ‘Permission denied’ error - now things are getting really weird.

Next up came some heavy googling, reading about Leopards new local KDC, and trying kinit in other accounts on the computer to verify the clone was good (they all worked).  

Out of options I figured I would try doing an strace on the failing programs only to learn that OS X doesn’t have strace, so some more googling I learn that OS X has ktrace, pulling my hair out trying to figure out why I can’t find ktrace I learn that ktrace got replaced with dtrace and dtruss (which is simlar to (s|k)trace) in leopard.  So now on the right path with dtruss I did a trace on (or is that a ‘truss’ ??) on kinit and found that the last files and directories it was stat’ing was in ‘/var/folders’, a directory that I have never heard of.  Doing some more searching around it appears this is some kind of cache folder for OS X and the permissions differed from what was on my leopard machine.  My computer had /var/folders with the directories underneath it being root:root, 755 - however my boss’s computer had some other groups.

So I just went for it and rm -rf’ed the directory that dtruss revealed while logged in as another local user, after all I did have a backup of the 10.4 install and the 10.5 on the FW drive.

Low and behold, upon logging in with my boss’s account after the cleanup the computer was able to get it’s tickets properly and authorize to all the services that I couldn’t before.

What and why this happened, I just don’t know - that just may be a little more than I know about OS X’s BSD sub-system.  I can only hope this post may find someone out there that was in the same situation as I was and help them to a speedy recovery.

Added in this version is if a service has a history of going up and down there will be a toggle link to display the history of the services states.  All the HTML that is loaded is pre-rendered and the js lib only does a GET and append to the DOM (there is no JSON or real AJAX going on here), so there is still no additional requirement of any kind of dynamic web programing language such as PHP or mod_perl to query a DB and generate the page dynamically.  Also, to keep with the one file philosophy I have used the Google javascript CDN to load jquery rather than distributing the library in a separate file.

Here is a sample of the HTML output http://black.kracknet.net/~stickystyle/servermonitor/

Next step will be to look at the code I wrote and possibly refractor a few bits just to make sure I’m not duplicating code anywhere or doing things in a manner that is not as efficient as it could be, since really most of this script was written on a saturday afternoon while I was board.

servermonitor.py

There are ideal solutions to this such as signing up for a paging service so your servers have some kind of Out-Of-Band alerting or paid external monitoring but for very small shops that may not have the extra equipment or funds to install such hardware or pay for a service and the situation of having an externaly facing server go down is still a big deal I offer this script.

It’s purpose is to use one of the many free online shell accounts to provide you with additonal external monitoring to you already existing internal system for no cost.  It would also work great for all the home server folks out there that may have one box hosting there domain and want a simple monitor to know if there site, internet, or mail service has stopped working.

Here is an example of the status page the script generates script running at on of my free shells http://black.kracknet.net/~stickystyle/servermonitor

So here is v 0.1 of my script whose goal is to rely on nothing standard built-in python modules, and keep everything in one file.  It has an MIT license so everyone should be able to use it without worry of “GPL contamination”, also if you do use it, drop me a comment let me know how it works for you, that may inspire me to put some more work into it  (patches are ALWAYS welcome)

servermonitor.py

TODO: Need to add a function to update the hash on ConnectAndVerify, right now you need to delete the service and re-add it if your banner or web page changes.

To get a free account ssh on over, with the username and password of new/new…
$ssh -l new shell.kracknet.net

kracknet.net

case "$1" in
start)
start
;;
stop)
stop
;;
*)
echo "Usage $0 {start|stop}"
exit 1
esac


 
ryanparrishscomputer:~ rparrish$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5d\t%s\n”,a[i],i}}’|sort -rn|head
  57 ls
  51 cd
  45 svn
  22 ssh
  19 paster
  13 sudo
  11 vi
  9 python
  6 ps
  3 whois

This is on a week old OS 10.5 system, so I’m still getting things setup and haven’t got into the swing of things yet.  Although you can see I have been doing most of my work with pylons this past week.

So now on top of that I have added wp-openid for your commenting pleasure.

I also do not have any plugins on this site so perhaps if I did (http://gallery.menalto.com/node/67933) this would have been a lot more painful.