check_esx3 error "Permission to perform this operation was denied"

Today I was setting up VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi 5.0) on a new server. Since I'm on the Kool-aid, the first thing I do when setting up a server is getting some kind of Nagios monitoring going. For several years, on ESXi servers, I have been using op5's check_esx3 plugin. Today was the first time I had set up an ESXi 5.0 server though, and when I first ran it after creating my Nagios user in ESXi I got the following error:

Permission to perform this operation was denied

Installing MongoDB with Replication on Ubuntu

Here I describe how to install MongoDB on Ubuntu, with replication. I am using a replica set with 3 nodes (2 DB servers, and 1 arbiter).

Issues Installing x2go

I was having issues today after installing x2go.  Here is was I did to fix them.

Installing PyLucene on Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot)

I recently needed to install PyLucene for our developers on a server running Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot). Unfortunately the version in the repos was much too old, so I had to build it from source. Below I will describe what I did, in the hopes it will help someone else.

Nagios Plugin - check_rss

As IT moves towards the cloud there are certain things we can't monitor effectively with Nagios, so I made a plugin to check RSS feeds. Many cloud services offer an RSS feed with their status. check_rss allows you to parse these feeds either looking for certain keywords that exist (or don't) or the date of the last post.

Login/Boot Scripts for Ubuntu/Gnome

I couldn't find any good information on writing logon/boot scripts for Ubuntu/Gnome, so here you go.

Tiny Borders in Ubuntu

**Update** - This also works in 11.04 (Natty Narwhal)

Maybe I'm a little late to the party, but I figured I would post a fix to the really annoying fact that the default Ubuntu theme (Ambiance) in 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) has super tiny (1 pixel) borders, which makes resizing nigh impossible.

Nagios Check - check_temp_weathergoose

I wrote a check for Nagios to check (and convert to Fahrenheit) the temperature for a Weathergoose environmental monitor.

Nagios Check - check_users (Windows)

   I wrote a check for Nagios to tell you the number of users logged in to a machine, as well as the last person logged in.

AutoDVDEncoder

   I wrote a script to help me encode DVDs to  to high quality Xvid videos in a Matroska container, with multiple AC3 audio streams (if the film is foreign), subtitles and chapters. The script was written in bash for GNU/Linux.