Performance review for Indians

Here is what I would rate from a totally negative manager’s point of view. I guess most of the people would agree with me.

People : We don’t care about others. Common mentality here is  “As long as my work is getting done, I will bribe, cheat, bend laws in order to get it”.  We want to know shortcuts for everything. We don’t like paying tips, but we do like receiving them. When we have problems, we will accuse the “system”. When they see a person is bleeding on the road, they will still walk away, after taking a picture on their mobile !.

Politicians :They are busy with securing a good future for themselves and their family. They have expertise in hiding money in foreign accounts. They go to USA for studying problems of people in India. Right will blame the left, and left will blame USA!

Media : They are supposed to report news as it happens. They will do anything but. dot.

Bureaucrats :They don’t consider people as people. For them, we are some worthless animals wasting their time. If you do not know any politicians or friends/relatives of these people, you have no voice, no choice but to bend your knees and lick their feet.

Managers : They think that we are slaves to them. Some of them even talk like they are the company, they will do good to their chamchas, they decide your future. What the heck.

Religions : They are busy in executing their agendas. Long time back they stopped reading what the Holy book ( be it Gita, Bible or Quran ) says. And even educated people are blindly following the blunders their leaders are making such as Jihad, Conversions etc.

Hospitals : No Doctor tells you the truth. You end up doing all kind of tests worth thousands even if what you have is just a fever. Medicines are sold at 200% profit . They might remove your Kidney when you go for doing surgery for appendicitis. Good luck.

Schools :Donations are sky high. We have different syllabus for different schools. So our children acquires different levels of knowledge  even though they are same age. Some get quality education and some end up getting nothing out of it even when they are going to school. Teachers are getting their jobs by paying bribes. How they will teach values to children?

As always, there are exceptions. Some people are there to help others, do their duty and work towards prosperity of everything. But unfortunately they are a rare breed and scarce to find.

Result : Improvement Needed.

P.S. : The common dialogue I hear regularly is “Why don’t you come to politics and improve it all ?” . Well my answer is : That does not mean that we cannot have an opinion. That’s just what I did now.  :)

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Libre Office – Free Yourself.

The Document Foundation is an independent self-governing meritocratic Foundation, created by leading members of the OpenOffice.org Community. After Oracle’s takeover of Sun, there has been a lot of discussion going on as to what would be the future of the Open Source Projects funded by Sun. Oracle has already shown that they are not so much into supporting Open Source projects. So I think this is definitely a good move.

I have downloaded it and installed on my computer. It is definitely faster and lot better in UI already. If you are still using OpenOffice, you could also consider migrating to LibreOffice. It uses the same code base and is already improved a lot than OpenOffice. May the freedom be with you ! :)

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SNMP Monitoring using Nagios

Nagios is very good and commonly used monitoring tool for systems and network equipments. It can monitor and report availability statistics as well as provide alerts in case of host or service incidents. I am going to discuss on how to use the SNMP capabilities of Nagios and GNU/Linux to enable monitoring without special agents installed on the hosts.

Usually, Nagios will need you to install NRPE addons to report disk space and so many other updates about the system that need to be monitored. This needs you to install additional software on the target machines which is not always possible/recommended practice. Instead, we are going to use the SNMP software that comes as part of the GNU/Linux OS to provide information for Nagios. I am not going to brief about how to install Nagios and Plugins. You could read that in a beautiful how-to here : http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/quickstart-ubuntu.html

There are two steps in enabling SNMP Monitoring.

Configure SNMP in the host to be monitored.

  • Edit /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf and add one line. ( rocommunity public )
  • Restart snmpd service ( sudo /etc/init.d/snmpd restart )

Configure Nagios to check free RAM in the host via SNMP .
First, add a host entry like this to your .cfg file.

define host {
use linux-server
host_name linuxserver01
alias MyLinuxServer
address 192.168.1.24
}

Now we will add a service to check free RAM

define service{
use generic-service
host_name linuxserver01
service_description Free RAM
check_command snmp_freeram_linux
}

Next, we will define the snmp_freeram_linux command to use snmp_check plugin that comes as part of Nagios Plugins installation.

define command{
command_name  snmp_freeram_linux
command_line /usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_snmp -H $HOSTNAME$ -C public -o .1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.4.11.0
}

After this, restart Nagios. ( sudo /etc/init.d/nagios restart )

You should be now able to see a new service added to host and SNMP getting the data. With some efforts, you would be able to configure SNMP for other operating systems and network equipments too. If you have queries, please let me know. :)

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Making Ubuntu Better !

Here’s a few things I do just after installing Ubuntu Linux. While this step is not mandatory, it sure makes a lot of good additions to the experience. With these few simple commands, your new Ubuntu system will get lot of additional things that is going to make it feature packed, shinier and a pleasure to use.

Before we start
Having a internet connection is necessary to do these tricks. Before we start, update your system by running the following commands one by one.

sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get upgrade

Multimedia
Adding VLC Player, Lots of different codecs for playing variety of Media formats like MP3, MP4 etc is so easy. This command will also install some of the fonts used commonly in Microsoft Office Documents for compatibility. avidemux is a simple but capable Video Editor.

sudo apt-get install vlc ubuntu-restricted-extras avidemux

Graphics Applications
Scribus is a Desktop Publishing Software. InkScape is a Vector Graphics application just like Corel Draw. Gimp could compete well with Photoshop.

sudo apt-get install gimp scribus inkscape

Windows Programs
You want to run Windows Programs in Ubuntu ? Sure. Let’s install Wine. After installing wine, you could just double click any .exe files just like you did earlier to run them. You could even install Windows Software packages on Ubuntu. They will appear under Applications -> Wine -> Programs Menu after installation.

sudo apt-get install wine

Sun Java Support
If any of your programs are not running because Sun Java is not installed or the OpenJDK is not able to run them, install Sun Java.

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts

Skype, Acrobat Reader, Flash and lot more..
You want to customize it further and add lots of more softwares like Skype, Acrobat Reader, Google Chrome and much more ? Install Ubuntu Tweak. Download the package and double click on the file to install. Once installed, this tool appears under the Applications menu. There are a huge number of things you could do with this very handy application. For example, if you dont like the “close” button on the left side of your windows, this tool will help you to change it back to the right corner..

For GUI Lovers
All the above apt-get commands can be done via GUI using applications -> software center. Just search for the package name and click install. Like I always say, it’s all about choice. :)

Side Note : Some of these commands actually makes you install non-open-source applications or libraries to your system. You have been warned. :)

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