First of all you need to have account at some SIP voip service provider like www.voiptalk.org or similar (Skype is not an option so far). Once registered you will get SIP username/password and SIP gateway’s IP address which will be used to make outgoing calls by Nagios.

1. Download and install pjsua console caller from pjsip.

cd /usr/src/
wget http://www.pjsip.org/release/1.10/pjproject-1.10.tar.bz2
tar -xvjf pjproject-1.10.tar.bz2
cd /usr/src/pjproject-1.10
./configure --disable-sound
make
sudo cp pjsip-apps/bin/pjsua-i686-pc-linux-gnu /usr/bin/pjsua

2. Configure pjsua.

Create /etc/pjsuarc configuration file with the following contents (depends on details provided by SIP provider):

--null-audio
--registrar sip::5060
--realm=*
--id sip:<username>@<SIP gateway IP>:5060
--username <username>
--password <password>

From that point you can try calling yourself by command:

/usr/bin/pjsua --config-file=/etc/pjsuarc sip:<your phone number>@<SIP gateway IP>

3. Configure Nagios to notify you by sending you a telephone call:

Add the following block to Nagios’ commands.cfg:

define command{
        command_name  notify-host-by-sip
        command_line  (sleep 30 && echo q) | /usr/bin/pjsua --config-file=/etc/pjsuarc sip:$CONTACTEMAIL$
}

Add below contact to Nagios’ contact.cfg:

define contact{
        contact_name  user_sip
        alias  useralias
        service_notification_period  24x7
        host_notification_period  24x7
        service_notification_options  c
        host_notification_options  d
        service_notification_commands  notify-service-by-sip
        host_notification_commands  notify-host-by-sip
        email  <your phone number>@<SIP gateway IP>
}

That’s it, from this point Nagios will call you in case of critical problem and won’t bother you with warnings.

He is Finnish but actually grew up speaking Swedish. This is because Linus is one of the “finlandssvensk” or “finlandssvenskar” community in Finland. These were Swedes who moved to Finland many hundreds of years ago when the country was part of the Swedish Empire and continue to speak Swedish.

It was on August 25th 1991 that Linus announced to the Usenet newsgroup “comp.os.minix.” that he was making a free OS, although he thought it wouldn’t be big or professional like Gnu. Well, who would have thought that Linux would turn the computing world on its head?

He hates phones, which he believes distracts him from more important things in life. This doesn’t mean he doesn’t own a phone, he just uses it for the GPS function when he’s driving.

Linus Torvald rarely gets to code any more. This is not because he’s spending all his time looking at his bill on www.o2.co.uk or crafting amazing images on photoshop, no, he’s replying to a huge email in-box and the few bits of code he does write are usually pasted in emails to questions explaining what to avoid.

I don’t know how much tea or coffee you drink, but Linus reckons he is a coffee addict and calculates that he and his wife have drunk an average of 4.7 double shots per day between 2002 and 2010 and that’s not including take-out coffees.

Despite this caffeine intake, he still manages to get a fairly serious nine hours sleep a night (he goes to bed at 10 and gets up at 7).

Perhaps this is because he likes drinking Guinness, that Irish stout from Dublin that contains a serious amount of iron and used to be taken as a health tonic in the British Isles before modern fads changed peoples’ opinions.

Prior to having laser surgery, Linus used to wear spectacles.

He is married and lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Tove and their three daughters.

[ This is sponsored blog post. Feel free to contact me via artiomix at gmail dot com for more details about availability and prices for sponsored posts. ]

Netflow is the protocol developed by Cisco to manage data about IP traffic. In a few words using Netflow you can collect data about all IP data send/received on multiple Cisco/Linux/BSD/Juniper hosts and send it to central Netflow collector that will show you the nice graphs and also will allow to have a complete picture of what data was sent/received on those hosts (including destination and source IP, port, bytes transfered, int/out interfaces etc). Nfdump is netflow collector. Nfsen is graphical tools for generating graphs and querying Nfdump for historical traffic reports. In this article you will see how to deploy all this staff in Linux.

Netflow probe is required to collect IP traffic data on Linux host. In general this piece of sofware will sit in background, store every network activity on certain network interface and then send collected data to Netflow collector nfdump. As Netflow probe I prefer fprobe that is totally simple application that just does its job. If you feel that fprobe is not what you need or there are some problems with installing it you can try softflowd that can do the same job.

Install fprobe from sources:

cd /usr/src/
sudo -s
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/fprobe/files/fprobe/1.1/fprobe-1.1.tar.bz2/download
tar -xvjf fprobe-1.1.tar.bz2
cd fprobe-1.1
./configure --prefix=/
make
make install

Point fprobe to one of network interfaces of Linux host and make it to send data to Netflow collector:

fprobe -i eth0 11.22.33.44:23456

In above example fprobe stores all data trasnfers on eth0 network interface and sends collected data to 11.22.33.44 host via 23456 UDP port (you may want to change firewall rules to make Netflow working over 23456 UDP port).

Install nfdump Netflow collector from sources:

cd /usr/src/
sudo -s
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/nfdump/files/stable/nfdump-1.6.2/nfdump-1.6.2.tar.gz/download
tar -xvzf nfdump-1.6.2.tar.gz
cd nfdump-1.6.2
./configure --prefix=/ --enable-nfprofile
make make
install

When finished Netflow collector becomes ready so you can start capturing traffic from Netflow probe. If you don’t need any graphical tools like nfsen described below you can just start collector and save Netflow data in /var/neflow/ directory (THIS STEP IS OPTIONAL):

/bin/nfcapd -w -D -p 23456 -B 200000 -S 1 -z -I Linux-Host-1-eth0 -l /var/netflow/

In order to install nfsen from sources you have to get all its prerequisites, run one of below lines depending on what Linux distro you’re using (1st line is for Fedora, Centos, Redhat while 2nd line is for Ubuntu, Debian, Mint and similar):

yum install rrdtool rrdtool-devel rrdutils perl-rrdtool -y

or

aptitude install rrdtool librrd2-dev librrd-dev librrd4 librrds-perl librrdp-perl

Compile nfsen from sources:

cd /usr/src/
sudo -s
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/nfsen/files/stable/nfsen-1.3.5/nfsen-1.3.5.tar.gz/download
tar -xvzf nfsen-1.3.5.tar.gz
cd nfsen-1.3.5
cp etc/nfsen-dist.conf etc/nfsen.conf

In order to continue the installation you should edit file etc/nfsen.conf to specify where to install nfsen, web server’s username (yes, you have to install apache, lighttpd, nginx or any other web server first), its document root directory etc. The major section of that config file is ‘Netflow sources’ that must list all hosts you’ve started Netflow probes at. Here is an example section for monitoring above Linux host:

%sources = (
    'Linux-Host-eth0'    => { 'port' => '23456', 'col' => '#ff0000', 'type' => 'netflow' },
);

When finished it’s time to actually install nfsen using installation script:

./install.pl etc/nfsen.conf

In case of successful installation you will be notified with corresponding congratulations message so it would be proper time to start nfsen daemon:

/path/to/nfsen/bin/nfsen start

Now you can open http://localhost/nfsen/nfsen.php at Linux host where nfsen was installed to start using this Netflow tool and see some graphs. Notice that it takes about 5-10 minutes to see first bars at the graphs, if the graphs are still empty you will have to check at least the following:

1. If fprobe is able to communicate to Netwflow collector and can send Netflow data to it (use ‘ps ax | grep fprobe’ and Linux host being monitored and tcpdump tool at Netflow collector).
2. If Netflow collector is started and can receive data from Netflow probe. Use ‘ps ax | grep nfcapd’ and tcpdump at Netflow collector Linux host.

If you can add anything — feel free to drop a comment below.

First of all, let’s see current port range available for TCP sessions:

cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range

Most likely the output will show something like this one “32786 65536″. In order to expand this range you can either echo modified range into above file in /proc filesystem (temporary solution) or add corresponding line into /etc/sysctl.conf (constant solution).

To temporarily expand port range from 28,232 to 40,000 do the following:

sudo -s
echo "25000 65000" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range

To make sure new port range will be applied after reboot add the following line to /etc/sysctl.conf:

net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range="25000 65000"

or just execute this:

sudo sysctl -n net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range="25000 65000"

Whole setup relies on the following components: sendmail – receives mails from MTAs around the Web and sorts incoming mails between users of mail system, procmail makes it possible to apply various custom configurations for selected users e.g. set up autoresponder, filter e-mails etc., spamassassin is well known spam filter, dovecot — POP3 and IMAP service daemon.

1. Sendmail installation procedure depends on your Linux distribution but in most cases it is enough to install corresponding binary package e.g. sudo yum install sendmail or sudo apt-get install sendmail. But it is also natural idea to compile sendmail from sources to get the most fresh version — this is perfectly covered at sendmail.org.

2. If you run one of major Linux distributions you should just execute something like below in command line to get all other required components installed:

sudo apt-get install procmail spamassassin dovecot
or
sudo yum install procmail spamassassin dovecot

The possibility to install all the components from sources is still open [for geeks only].

3. Sendmail’s configuration is stored in /etc/mail directory and by default it is configured not to receive mails for any domain. We should change by adding ‘example.com’ domain to /etc/mail/local-host-names file. Please notice that MX DNS entry for your domain e.g. “example.com” should point to server where you’re trying to set up sendmail.

4. There is another key configuration file /etc/mail/virtusertable that holds all mail routing information, e.g. below line tells sendmail that all incoming mails to test@example.com should go to user ‘user1.virtual’:

test@example.com user1.virtual

The following line routes rest incoming mails to user2.virtual:

@example.com user2.virtual

5. As it comes from their names user1.virtual and use2.virtual are virtual so they shouldn’t be present in /etc/passwd. In order to make sendmail to deliver mails to virtual users it is required to specify them in /etc/alias file. E.g. if we plan to route mails destined to test@example.com to user1.virtual we should add the following line to /etc/alias:

user1.virtual: |/etc/smrsh/user1.virtual

This line tells sendmail that it should execute script /etc/smrsh/user1.virtual to deliver mail to user1.virtual. Please notice that if you place the script to ther directory than /etc/smrsh setup wont’ work. Now let’s see the contents of /etc/smrsh/user1.virtual, it contains one line including the path to procmail binary and procmailrc script for user1.virtual user:

[root@server ~]# cat /etc/smrsh/user1.virtual
/usr/bin/procmail /etc/procmail.d/user1.virtual

/etc/procmail.d/user1.virtual file includes all custom settings for user1.virtual virtual user, e.g. below is an example that will receive mails to test@example.com, check them for spam and store into user1.virtual’s inbox:

[root@server ~]# cat /etc/procmail.d/user1.virtual
PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/contrib/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin
MONTHYEAR=^Date +%y%m
VHOME=/var/spool/virtual/example.com/mail/user1.virtual
LOGFILE=/var/spool/virtual/example.com/logs/user1.virtual/log
LOGABSTRACT=all
VERBOSE=on

:0:
$VHOME/inbox

As you can see spam mails will be stored in inbox while spam e-mails will be forwarded to file named ’spam’. Later on you will be able to access inbox using POP3 and spam using IMAP service. In order to prepare user1.virtual’s inbox you should do the following:

mkdir -p /var/spool/virtual/example.com/mail/user1.virtual
mkdir -p /var/spool/virtual/example.com/logs/user1.virtual
chown mail.mail /var/spool/virtual/example.com/mail/user1.virtual -R
chown mail.mail /var/spool/virtual/example.com/logs/user1.virtual -R

As for spamassassin, it is comes configured by default so in order to start it you should start spamd daemon e.g. by command service spamd start or /etc/init.d/spamd start. You can get more information about how to configure it at SA’s website.

From this point you may try sending mails to test@example.com and see log entries in /var/spool/virtual/example.com/logs/user1.virtual/log and incoming mails in /var/spool/virtual/example.com/mail/user1.virtual/inbox. If something goes wrong it makes sense to look into /var/log/maillog sendmail’s main log file.

5. Default configuration of dovecot is rather useful and makes it possible to establish POP3 and IMAP services for virtual users in seconds. Let’s imagine you’re running dovecot 2.x version, here are some configuration keys you should add into dovecot’s config, e.g. /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf:

protocols = pop3 imap

log_path = /var/log/dovecot.log
info_log_path = /var/log/dovecot-info.log
debug_log_path = /var/log/dovecot-debug.log

Once you make sure your dovecot’s configuration includes mentioned lines you’re welcome to try starting dovecot either by service dovecot start or by just ‘dovecot’. In case of success you will see 110 and 143 ports in output netstat -lnp or errors in dovecot’s log file /var/log/dovecot.log. Let’s imagine it started without problems

Now it’s time to set up the password for user1.virtual user, according to dovecot’s configuration suggested above the passwords are stored in /etc/dovecot/passwd. This is a text file, here is example line from it:

user1.virtual:{PLAIN}pass123:8:12

In this example user1.virtual has password pass123 stored in plain text, 8 is UID of mail user in your /etc/passwd, 12 is GID of mail group (you can also check this in /etc/passwd).

Fin.

All what you need to have to start using namebench is Python and Tk library, e.g. if you use Ubuntu or Debian just run the following command to meet namebench library requirements:

sudo apt-get install python python-tk -y

When done go to namebench’s official website and download the latest tarball from there. For example 1.3.1 is the latest version for today so you can download it directly from here. Or you can just take below steps:

cd /usr/src
sudo -s
wget http://code.google.com/p/namebench/downloads/detail?name=namebench-1.3.1-source.tgz
tar -xvzf namebench-1.3.1-source.tgz
cd namebench-1.3.1
./namebench.py


Here you go:

The application has the only button so I believe it won’t bring any problems even to Linux newbies

Shell script with ifconfig commands

This is one of the most inefficient ways to get many IP addresses applied to one network interface. Anyways it allows to create as many aliases for the interface as you like so you should create shell script and execute it every time Linux boots.

touch /path/to/script.sh
chmod +x /path/to/script.sh
vi /path/to/script.sh

Now you should add there shell lines which will apply IP addresses, e.g. the following one applies 60 IP addresses to eth0 interface:

for n in {3..63};  do ifconfig eth0:${n} 10.10.10.${n} netmask 255.255.255.0 up; done

If you type ‘ifconfig’ now you will very long output like this one:

eth0:3  Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:50:8D:D1:24:DB
          inet addr:10.10.10.3  Bcast:10.10.10.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          Interrupt:10 Base address:0x2000 

eth0:4  Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:50:8D:D1:24:DB
          inet addr:10.10.10.4  Bcast:10.10.10.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          Interrupt:10 Base address:0x2000

...

eth0:63  Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:50:8D:D1:24:DB
          inet addr:10.10.10.63  Bcast:10.10.10.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          Interrupt:10 Base address:0x2000

If you decide to delete those IPs you can run the following line as a remedy:

for n in {3..63};  do ifconfig eth0:${n} 0.0.0.0 &> /dev/null; done

Once you finished editing /path/to/script.sh script you should add it to startup, so put the line /path/to/script.sh into /etc/rc.local file that Linux executes every time it boots. Please notice that in various distributions this file may be missing so consult with distro’s docs to get where it is stored.

Redhat/Centos/Fedora network scripts

Users of these Linux distributions can apply ranges of IP addresses using ifcfg-eth0-range0 files which are read during initialization of network interfaces during boot up process. The following example will make Linux to apply 200 IP addresses to eth1 during booting:

[root ~]#cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1-range0

IPADDR_START=192.168.1.1
IPADDR_END=192.168.1.200
CLONENUM_START=10

CLONENUM_START value specifies starting identifier of alias that will be applied to eth1 interface, in above example the first 192.168.1.1 will be assigned to eth1:10 alias. The last IP of the range 192.168.1.200 will be applied to eth:210 sub-interface. This is totally easy approach.

Loopback interface

Did you know that by one line presented below you assign 1022 virtual IP addresses to your Linux system? Here it is:

ifconfig lo:0 10.0.0.1/22

Now you can make sure of this by pinging IPs from that range (10.0.0.1 – 10.0.3.254).

[root ~]#ping 10.0.0.1 -c 1
PING 10.0.0.1 (10.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 10.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.063 ms

--- 10.0.0.1 ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.063/0.063/0.063/0.000 ms

...

[root ~]#[root@whitehorse /]# ping 10.0.3.254 -c 1
PING 10.0.0.1 (10.0.3.254) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 10.0.3.254: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.063 ms

--- 10.0.3.254 ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.063/0.063/0.063/0.000 ms

If you still feel that the first suggested way meets your requirements better than the third one please read more about loopback interface at wikipedia — loopbacks are much more useful than aliases in most cases.

Hope it helps!

Below is beginner’s guide that helps to quickly deploy netflow collector and visualizer under Linux and impress everybody by cute and descriptive graphs like these:

It is highly recommended to look through Netflow basics to get brief understanding of how it works before configuring anything. For example, here is Cisco’s document that gives complete information about Netflow. In a few words to get started you should enable netflow exporting on Cisco router and point it to netflow collector running under Linux. Exported data will contain complete information about all packets the router has received/sent so nfdump and nfsen working under Linux will collect it and visualize to present you the graph like above example.

Cisco Router Setup

1. Enable flow export on ALL Cisco router’s interfaces that send and receive some traffic, here is an example:

Router1# configure terminal
Router1(config)#interface FastEthernet 0/0
Router1(config-if)#ip route-cache flow input
Router1(config-if)#interface FastEthernet 0/1
Router1(config-if)#ip route-cache flow input
...

2. Setup netflow export:

Router1# configure terminal
Router1(config)#ip flow-export source FastEthernet0/0
Router1(config)#ip flow-export source FastEthernet0/1
Router1(config)#ip flow-export version 5
Router1(config)#ip flow-export destination 1.1.1.1 23456

Where 1.1.1.1 is IP address of Linux host where you plan to collect and analyze netflow data. 23456 is port number of netflow collector running on Linux.

Linux Setup

1. Download and install nfdump.

cd /usr/src/
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/nfdump/files/stable/nfdump-1.6.2/nfdump-1.6.2.tar.gz/download
tar -xvzf nfdump-1.6.2.tar.gz
cd nfdump-1.6.2
./configure --prefix=/ --enable-nfprofile
make
make install

2. Download and install nfsen.

It requires web server with php module and RRD so make sure you have the corresponding packages installed. I hope you’re running httpd with php already so below are rrd/perl related packages installation hints only.

Fedora/Centos/Redhat users should type this:

yum install rrdtool rrdtool-devel rrdutils perl-rrdtool

Ubuntu/Debian:

aptitude install rrdtool librrd2-dev librrd-dev librrd4 librrds-perl librrdp-perl

If you run some exotic Linux distribution just install everything that is related to rrd + perl.

At last, nfsen installation:

cd /usr/src/
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/nfsen/files/stable/nfsen-1.3.5/nfsen-1.3.5.tar.gz/download
tar -xvzf nfsen-1.3.5.tar.gz
cd nfsen-1.3.5
cp etc/nfsen-dist.conf etc/nfsen.conf

In order to continue you should edit file etc/nfsen.conf to specify where to install nfsen, web server’s username, its document root directory etc. That file is commented so there shouldn’t be serious problems with it.

One of the major sections of nfsen.conf is ‘Netflow sources’, it should contain exactly the same port number(s) you’ve configured Cisco with — recall ‘ip flow-export …’ line where we’ve specified port 23456. E.g.

%sources = (
    'Router1'    => { 'port' => '23456', 'col' => '#0000ff', 'type' => 'netflow' },
);

Now it’s time to finish the installation:

./install.pl etc/nfsen.conf

In case of success you’ll see corresponding notification after which you will have to start nfsen daemon to get the ball rolling:

/path/to/nfsen/bin/nfsen start

From this point nfdump started collecting netflow data exported by Cisco router and nfsen is hardly working to visualize it — just open web browser and go to http://linux_web_server/nfsen/nfsen.php to make sure. If you see empty graphs just wait for a while to let nfsen to collect enough data to visualize it.

That’s it!

sudo aptitude install pdftk
(if you run Fedora, RedHat or CentOS use this one: sudo yum install pdftk)

Split large pdf into many one-page files:

pdftk largepdfile.pdf burst

(as the result you will get many small files like pg_0001.pdf, pg_0002.pdf and so on).

Merge files into one PDF file:

pdftk *.pdf cat output onelargepdfile.pdf

pdftk is extremely powerful and makes it possible to do almost anything with input pdf files. Thus above two commands are just examples showing how to split and merge pdf files in Ubuntu easily.

Rather long preface but solution is quite simple. If u run Ubuntu you can try lxsplit utility for breaking files into parts (binary packages for other Linux distributions as well as source code are available at lxsplit project’s homepage.):

sudo apt-get install lxsplit

In order to split some file in 3.99GB parts use the following command:

lxsplit -s /path/to/hugemoviefile.mkv 3999M

Depending on size of hugemoviefile.mkv you will get several parts hugemoviefile.mkv.001, hugemoviefile.mkv.002 and so on stored in current directory. It means that if you’re going to store those parts on some external storage like ipod you can do the following:

cd /media/ipod/
lxsplit -s /path/to/hugemoviefile.mkv 3999M

and hugemoviefile.mkv.001.. will saved in /media/ipod/ directory regardless where hugemoviefile.mkv is located.

Now coming to assembling procedure. It’s just as easy as splitting:

lxsplit -j hugemoviefile.mkv.001

Once done you will get hugemoviefile.mkv saved in current directory.

Have an interesting article? You’re welcome to contact me and get it published at LinuxScrew.com!