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Monitoring GPU temperatures with nvidia-smi and Check MK (OMD)

The Nvidia monitoring setup described at https://elwe.rhrk.uni-kl.de/howto/ worked in Check MK 1.2.8, but fails in 1.4. After some modification things now work – it required some modification of the check script /omd/yoursite/local/share/check_mk/checks/nvidia_smi. The two modifications needed were:

Remove the grouping of nvidia_smi.errors1 and 2 (I can live with this as our GTX1070 doesn’t report this anyway).

Remove the unicode degree characters from the temperature output, as this seems to cause the system to choke on the textual output.

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Microsoft Office Autoupdate for Mac

Note to self – versions can be found at

https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Update-history-for-Office-2016-for-Mac-700cab62-0d67-4f23-947b-3686cb1a8eb7#bkmk_mau

Version that comes with Mac Office 2016 ISO doesn’t work!

ResourceSpace cron and database notes

Ran into a couple of issues today:

Note: system setup is Debian 9 with standard options (Apache 2.4, PHP 7.0, MariaDB 10.1)

Cron

The documentation implies you should run cron_copy_hitcount.php as a cron job. However, the new correct way seems to be to run batch/cron.php, which runs a bunch of sub-jobs. I’ve got this set up in cron.daily as:

#!/bin/sh
wget -q -r http://localhost/resourcespace/batch/cron.php

We’ll see if this works. Certainly running it directly by browsing to it seems to work.

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Securing MariaDB

MariaDB behaves a bit differently than MySQL when installing (on Debian at least) – it doesn’t ask for a database root password. There is a script that is installed (on Debian 9 at least) called mysql_secure_installation which allows you to set to root password and cleans up some other stuff. Worth running after install on any production system.

Notes on getting Ubuntu 16.04 to work with NIS

Note – this only sets up the system to use user and group logons, not automounting home directories. I haven’t figured out how to make this work in Ubuntu 16.

Install package nis

Probably a good idea to set network address statically in /etc/network/interfaces (NetworkManager should recognise this and then leave it alone)

Probably also a good idea to check that /etc/hosts has the domain name for the system, i.e.

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