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Today I finally managed to release GKrellM 2.3.11 for Windows.

This release updates all dependencies to newer versions, mostly thanks to MXE which is the cross-environment I use for building GKrellM for Windows. I switched back packaging to ship with OpenSSL instead of GnuTLS since GKrellM was originally meant to be built with that and it actually happens to be smaller overall compared to GnuTLS and its dependencies. Finally this release starts shipping third-party GKrellM plugins that could be made working on Windows. For now the plugins available are:

Back in 2016 I wrote a Checkmk notification script that sends messages via a Telegram Bot. Only a few years later I got around and turned it into a real Checkmk package.

After switching to Checkmk 1.6 some months ago, all I had for notifications was email. During my christmas vacation I got notifications via Telegram set up again. As part of the setup I also brought the old code into shape and finally packaged it as a real Checkmk package to make installation easier.

Most content from my previous blog website “metzlog” now got merged into www.srcbox.net. Maintaining two websites using two different static site generators (Jekyll and Hugo) felt like too much effort and the few posts about software releases and smaller admin tasks should fit in here just fine.

I once installed Checkmk into an existing Nagios installation, back then by using a plain source package. This also meant I had to take care of installing and configuring all dependencies like Apache, Nagios and PNP4Nagios. Keeping this setup working was quite tedious over the last two upgrades (1.2.4 to 1.2.6 and finally 1.2.6p16) so I decided to switch to the official Checkmk CRE packages instead. For now I switched to the rather outdated 1.2.6p16 packages to concentrate on migrating my configuration first.

Just a small note that this blog moved to metzlog.srcbox.net (update 2020-12-27: now merged into www.srcbox.net).

The old domain name already redirects here and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

After upgrading to Seafile 5 I observed that my client was not syncing libraries anymore.

It turns out that this happens for libraries that were created long ago (before Seafile 3). According to Seafile issue #975 syncing of Seafile libraries may fail over HTTP(S) if they are stored in an older format on the server.

This is just a small update of an earlier post about Seafile on Nginx with uWSGI.

The upgrade to Seafile 5.x needed a few changes to the uWSGI configuration because the Seafile directory layout hanged a bit in Seafile 5.0.0.

After a self-inflicted downtime of my server that also happens to handle my email I decided that it’s time to have monitoring notifications delivered out-of-band instead of foolishly trying to send them via the most important resource I monitor.

Since I recently started using Telegram I decided to give it a try for monitoring notifications.

Please note that normal Telegram message contents are unencrypted so they can possibly be read on the Telegram server side!

As part of modernizing GKrellWeather I changed the hand-coded configuration UI to a file that can be edited visually using Glade.

I’ve been using Seafile as my personal cloud storage for quite some time now and it’s working really really well. Since I’ve departed quite a bit from the standard setup instructions for the web frontend (Seahub) I’m going to document the setup a tiny little bit.

This is a sort of follow-up post to Running Trac on Nginx with Phusion Passenger.

As my hosting needs have slightly changed lately I now have no immediate need for running Ruby, Rails or Rack applications. I’m lately using more and more web applications but they are based on different technologies.

So far I’ve been using Nullmailer only to relay mail from LAN machines to SMTP servers that accept anything from the internal network, a very easy method to forward system messages from various internal boxes without the need to administrate a full-blown MTA.

I’m currently investigating ways to replace Apache httpd with nginx on srcbox.net.

After about two years of complete TV absence both due to technical reasons (TV socket in wrong room on the other side of my flat) as well as the quality of the programme (ads, fake reality shows, lack of real movies), I nevertheless decided to get myself a network-enabled TV-tuner.

Being network-enabled was both an easy way to get around the need for new cabling as well as making TV available to all the machines scattered throughout the flat.

While maintaining GKrellM for Windows I have found several things in the code that I wanted to improve. Apart from the Preferences Dialog which needs quite a bit of cleanup, the biggest offender both in terms of portability as well as readability is the socket code.

After quite some hiatus (more than two years according to my last post) I decided to give this site a facelift and actually start some “real” blogging, meaning more frequent posting even in the absence of new software releases.

Originally intended to be released shortly after the gkrellm-2.3.2 release (released 2008-10-04), I stumbled across some bugs here and there so in the end it took much longer.

As some of you might know, Windows has something similar to daemons, its so called “services”. Lately I have been able to find some free time and managed to make a true Windows service out of gkrellmd.

I’m currently updating my build system and will look into some of the bugs that I found in the last GKrellM for Windows release. I also spotted a few problems with the new release (mainly clock/calendar formatting) so it will take some more time before I can release something usable.

Today I built and packaged GKrellM 2.3.0 for Windows. It is available both in form of a handy installer as well as plain Zip-File. As this is the first release made by me I’m very interested in any kind of feedback, even if it’s just as short as “it works” :)