May 2012

Disabling Forefront for Exchange 2010 when Installing Exchange Service Packs and Hotfix Rollups

Belatedly installing Microsoft Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2 Hotfix Rollup 2 this week, I once again was niggled by the need to manually disable Forefront for Exchange first.

Unknown to me, the Microsoft Exchange designers included the right hooks into the product to make this easy.

A quick web search led to an Exchange Team blog post from back in June 2010, entitled "Sample script to disable and enable Forefront service during patching".

Unfortunately, their sample script leaves a lot to be desired, and isn't general enough to be useful everywhere.

So I've tweaked it into a more sensible form, which you can download here.

It should be placed in <Exchange installation folder>\Scripts\Customization

On my Exchange 2010 systems, that's C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\Scripts\Customization

Create the Customization directory if it does not already exist.

Fixes:

1: If Forefront for Exchange isn't installed, do nothing.

2: If one of the listed services is not present on the box the script is run on, treat it as successfully started/stopped and continue.

3: Wait until the service is successfully stopped/started, or for 3 minutes, whichever happens first (easily modified to suit your environment and experiences). Based on a code snippet by andreister on StackOverflow.

The end result is that the same copy of the script can be deployed to all Exchange 2010 servers in your organisation, and it just does the right thing.

Enjoy.

Postscript, May 30th

There's a bug in the original which rendered the script ineffective. The path to the FSCController executable, retrieved in line 62 of the script, is enclosed in double quotes. These need to be stripped off for the script to do the right thing.

Adding

    $imagePath = $imagePath -replace '"(.*)"', '$1'

after line 65 strips the offending " characters. Fixed, properly tested in an Exchange 2010 SP2 RU3 install.

[Updated] Compiling an RPMForge-compatible Nagios 3.5.0 RPM

At some point I had the brilliant idea of replacing our hand-compiled build of Nagios with RPMForge's RPM version.

All was well with that, but RPMForge is still stuck at version 3.2.3, and Nagios 3.4.1 has just been released.

There's one patch from Icinga which we really want, by Icinga core developer Michael Friedrich (@dnsmichi), which fixes perfdata issues (a regression in nagios 3.3.1 which is still not fixed in 3.4.1):

re-allow perfdata with empty results being put on perfdata channel, disable via opt-in cfg option

Updated, Sept 5th, 2012:

Nagios users have reported memory leaks if embedded perl is compiled in, even when not used, so I've removed it from the configuration in the nagios.spec file.

In this build, I also re-implement execv (bug 346) using my fixed regexp. Double quotes and escape characters are no longer an issue. This is based on the changes to checks.c in Icinga to implement execvp.

I've also fixed a problem with pagination in pages generated by a hostname search in the Nagios 3.4.1 status.cgi.

Fixed too is a sorting issue on paginated pages (bug 381).

Also included are cvelasco's patches for a problem with scheduled downtimes (bug 338) and some memory leaks in 3.4.1 (bug 339).

So, to build a Nagios 3.4.1 RPMForge-layout compatible RPM on CentOS 5.x, I did the following:

1: Download nagios-3.2.3-3.rf.src.rpm and install (you'll need the --nomd5 switch in rpm).

2: Download nagios-3.4.1.tar.gz into /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES

3: Download my perfdata.patch into /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES

4: Download my execv-v2.patch into /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES

5: Download my status.patch into /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES (this will be in Nagios 3.4.2)

6: Download my status-paginate.patch into /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES

7: Download the downfix-6.patch into /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES

8: Download the leaks1-2.patch into /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES

9: Download my nagios.spec into /usr/src/redhat/SPECS

10: rpmbuild -bb /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/nagios.spec

The built RPMs will be left in /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386.

They'll happily install over the old RPMForge Nagios 3.2.3 RPMS.

Enjoy.

Postscript, July 18th

The perfdata patch has been checked in to Nagios by the developers. Lets hope the execv one follows.

Postscript, November 13th

The forthcoming Nagios 3.4.3 includes all but the execv patch, so a slight mod to the spec file to change the version to 3.4.3 and include only that patch (or not, as you choose) is all that's needed to get 3.4.3 built in RPMForge-compatible style.

Postscript, May 8th, 2013

Now updated for Nagios 3.5.0. I've left the above instructions intact for historical reasons.

Apart from my execv patch, there are two additional patches, from the Open Monitoring Distribution team. Were I to build a Nagios server today, I'd use OMD.

The build instructions now are:

1: Download nagios-3.2.3-3.rf.src.rpm and install (you'll need the --nomd5 switch in rpm).

2: Download nagios-3.5.0.tar.gz into /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES

3: Download my execv-v2.patch into /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES

4: Download 0006-fix_f5_reload_bug.dif into /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES

This fixes an annoying screen refresh bug in the Nagios web interface.

5: Download 0007-fix_downtime_struct.dif into /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES

This reverts a Nagios API change which was incompatible with check_mk, which manifested itself as crashes at midnight during Nagios log rotation, and maybe at other times too.

6: Download my nagios.spec into /usr/src/redhat/SPECS

7: rpmbuild -bb /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/nagios.spec

The built RPMs will be left in /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386.

Enjoy.