Be sure to thank the computer geek in your life who keeps all your digital bits flowing smoothly… or even if the bits don’t flow smoothly at least show your sysadmin some sympathy.

Good-bye CMS Made Simple Hello WordPress

As a long time CMS Made Simple user I’m sad to report that it’s time for me to move on and standardize on WordPress.

Years ago when WordPress was just viewed as a just a blogging platform I decided to standardize on using CMS Made Simple. It was a good move and still is a great tool for the following reasons:

Actively developed
Community support
Smarty template engine support
Straight forward design
Easy to use
Templates

If you haven’t at least heard about the project it’s worth the time to checkout all of the features.

Despite the good memories with CMS Made Simple I’ve decided that I’ve got to cut back on my repertoire and standardize on WordPress and Drupal.

Nobody likes to admit their site is using a template but I’m thinking of upgrading to the UBlog WordPress Theme. More to follow…

Bookmark – Useful Online Text Conversion Tools

These are two useful sites that I found useful for converting text between different formats. My thanks to each of the site authors!

Converting XML Escaped Text

To convert text with XML escaped characters such as > or ĵ this tool at Freeformatter.com came in handy.

Convert Serialized PHP Strings

The PHP Online Unserializer was useful to quickly convert PHP serialized strings into readable text.

Installing Sealion on Centos 5 – Python Dependency

Overview

This is a short guide containing the steps I took to install Sealion on an older Centos 5 server. Sealion is a activity monitoring service website that reports the status of your linux every 5 minutes. An agent running on your server runs a set of common commands (i.e. ps, top, vmstat, …) and reports the results back to the sealion.com site web console where you can view the results. The Sealion introduction video says it all.

Installation Problems

The normal agent installation is usually a one line command but it failed on my server with this python dependency error:

Performing dependency check…
Error: Python dependency check failed
File “../bin/check_dependency.py”, line 19
except Exception as e:
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

The Sealion site didn’t list the dependencies and there weren’t any support documents that I could find. I emailed Sealion and they replied with a link to this article for installing Python 2.7 on RedHat or SUSE.

Installing Python 2.7 got me one step closer but failed during the make process for the sqlite module with the following error:

In function ‘_pysqlite_set_result’:
error: ‘sqlite3_int64’ undeclared

After some searching this article came up listing the error as a known bug in Python 2.7.3. I repeated the Python installation with 2.7.8 and substituted the correct Pthyon version into the agent installation curl command and all worked.

Complete Procedure

wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.8/Python-2.7.8.tgz
tar -xvf Python-2.7.8.tgz
cd Python-2.7.8
./configure
make
make install
curl -s https://agent.sealion.com | sudo bash /dev/stdin -o YOURSEALIONKEY -p /usr/local/bin/python2
Tip: The -p parameter specifies which version of python to use. Substitute /usr/local/bin/python2 with the location your make install command placed Python and YOURSEALIONKEY with the user key obtained from the Sealion add server screen.

Note: As part of the troubleshooting process I updated sqlite but I’m not certain this was required. If you have problems try:

yum install sqlite.i386 sqlite-devel.i386

This installed and started the Sealion agent and after a few minutes server and server data appeared in my Sealion.com console.

Thoughts About Sealion

This is my first attempt at evaluating the Sealion linux server monitoring service. Other servers more up-to-date distributes installed the agent without issue.

The Sealion site is beautiful, functional, but a little sparse on content. There are only sporadic references to it across the internet (as of the time of writing) when I went searching for installation assistance. The lack of community activity leaves me a little worried about the reputation of Sealion but I can’t deny that the service is useful and easy to use. Their support email address responded quickly when I finally submitted my issue.

The service meets a need and has value to me. I hope to see it’s reputation increases and turn into a reasonably priced service.

Revision: 2014-07-04 Minor correction thanks to feedback from Team Sealion.

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