I finally got to finishing up some backlogged changes to bbmrtg today. The noi and noo MRTG options are now recognized so the display should be a bit cleaner when displaying single values (like temperature), where an IN and OUT value don’t apply. The nopercent option is also recognized, which futher cleans up the display when dealing with values for which a percentage is meaningless (temperature being a good example again).

Chris Blank has also added support for routers2.cgi, which seems to be more current than 14all.cgi and mrtg-rrd.cgi.

I should post bbmrtg-1.8 to deadcat next week if the tests run clean here.

Tonight my server started making the now familiar chik-chik-chik sound that signals yet another of the daily brute force password guessing attempts being logged. Given the repeating pattern of user names being guessed, they are the work of of people with spare computing power and without the brains to write their own tools. The chance of success is pretty slim here; the root account can’t log in, and none of other users exist.

I decided to install a dynamic firewalling tool anyhow to drop connects from attacking hosts. I downloaded daemonshield, a python script that monitors log files and creates iptables rules as needed. The install was simple - taking about 2 minutes from the download completing to the first rules being created to drop connections from 74.67-18-68.reverse.theplanet.com, tonight’s unwanted guest.

That should extend the log disk’s life a bit.

A new feature in BBMRTG v1.5 broke the script output for Windows server users. I’ve posted v1.7a to deadcat with the fix. If you’re using a Windows server, and have been getting HASH(…..) as your displayed output, you need this fix.

I’ll be working on implementing more of the MRTG parameters into the script in the next couple of releases. Temperature or voltage don’t always make sense when rules are displayed in the script output. MRTG already understands this; BBMRTG should.

I posted BBMRTG v1.7 to deadcat this afternoon. It’s been tested on Big Brother and Hobbit, a GPL’d replacement for BB. This version includes Jim Johnson’s support for MRTG’s Factor parameter, and a couple of bug fixes from Dan McDonald.

I shipped a preview of the next release of BBMRTG to the folks who contributed changes. This release contains only a couple of fixes, but a fair amount of work was done cleaning out unused code and standardizing the code. More work remains for the next release. The biggest change is the documentation overhaul. The bulk of it was moved from inline comments to the POD. Some may prefer the inline documentation, but I found it fairly messy to read.

There still remains some trouble with reporting disk usage on iSeries machines, although I’m not entirely sure what’s wrong just yet.

I hope to post the next version to deadcat later this week, or early next week.