After 2 years of using the iMac, what do I think of it?

18 months ago I wrote about my idea for a replicated filesystem for FreeBSD, then posted it to the FreeBSD mailing lists. So I was quite pleased to read that the FreeBSD Foundation have awarded a grant to fund the creation of storage replication software.

OpenNMS a network monitoring system,and is in some ways a competitor to Nagios. Having been a Nagios user for a while now, I was intrigued to see the alternatives were like. I last tried installing OpenNMS many years ago, and struggled installing it on FreeBSD. Now that it's had a few more years to develop, I wondered if it was any easier to install, as there's no port for it. Here are the notes I made to get it installed...

The Newport Branch is entirely closed today. It was originally built as a branch of of the Birmingham and Liverpool Junction Canal, linking to the Shrewsbury Canal.

From reading articles on the web, you might be lead to believe that much of it is gone. Maybe because it passes through such a desolate area, it hasn't been built on, so restoration along the original line seems feasible (though of course expensive and slow, as progress on the Montgomery has shown). The section between Norbury Junction and Newport seems like it might be restored relatively easily. The problem with section is the high number of locks, which means a lot of expense (a set of gates for a single lock in in the tens of thousands of pounds range), and also a lot of water supply needed, which would have to come from the Shropshire Union main line. Also, the dry dock at Norbury Junction would have to go.

No restoration is taking place on this canal currently, though the Shrewsbury and Newport Canals Trust have started to make some progress at restoring Wappenshall Junction.

I've been using Nagios for a while to monitor several servers. When I set it up, one of the things I left until later was monitoring PostgreSQL databases, as it requires a plugin, and I wasn't sure which plugins to try. Then I noticed an announcement on the PostgreSQL website that a new version (version 2.9.2) of the check_postgresql.pl plugin was available, so I thought I'd give it a try.

While looking at the stats for this site, I noticed that plenty of people seems to be searching for information on running FreeBSD on the Dell PowerEdge R300. All I can tell you is that since FreeBSD 7.1 it works just fine, without modification, using the GENERIC kernel.

The Shrewsbury Canal is in a sorry state today. No restoration is taking place on this canal currently, though the Shrewsbury and Newport Canals Trust have started to make some progress at restoring Wappenshall Junction.

The Whitchurch Branch of the Ellesmere Canal ran close to Whitchurch town centre. Today only a short section remains, used mainly for moorings. 

The Prees Branch on the Llangollen Canal is today a short branch that leads to Whixhall Marina. It was originally longer, reaching Quina Brook, though like many canal schemes it didn't reach its original goal of Prees.

The Montgomery Canal has a long straight section, just south of the Perry aqueduct. It then heads towards Rednal Basin. It wasn't always this way though.