The new consolidated Asterisk machine has been running well, but a recent outage shows the potential folly of (still) using Gentoo as a server base.

The new machine was not in any of the Cacti graphing, so I decided to set it up on Friday night.  net-snmp had been installed, but I must have removed it in an overly-agressive cleanup (when I transferred the desktop built onto it).  So I rebuilt net-snmp, configured and started it, added the box to Cacti, and was happy.

The following night, Susan told me that her mum had tried to phone in the morning and it rang out.  At first we figured we were actually out, but the time was wrong.  Looking in the Asterisk CDR log, I saw a call of 0:00 duration, marked as “NO ANSWER”.  Picked up the mobile and dialled home, and sure enough no ringing.  What was worse was that I could not even dial between extensions.  Hmmm.

Googling turned up little response, and neither did turning up the log level.  I could find that a curious AGI script called “dialparties.agi” was telling the dialplan that all available extensions were busy (which they certainly were not).  By the output, it looked like the script was not running correctly…  I found that there was an update to FreePBX available, and thinking that I might have tickled some bug all of a sudden I tried to install it.  The installation script produced a cryptic error, something like the following:

/usr/bin/php: libnetsnmp.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Suddenly the soup got clearer!  Rebuilding net-snmp probably brought in a version upgrade; PHP was linked against net-snmp, and the library was gone.  But the whole FreePBX interface is PHP code, and it was working fine… it would seem that Apache mod_php was either rebuilt after the net-snmp build or does not link against net-snmp, because any PHP code in web pages was fine.  And sure enough, the dialparties.agi script is command-line PHP.

So rebuilding PHP fixed the problem!  Now I know some more about FreePBX — it is totally broken without a functioning command-line PHP.  PHP in turn is dependent on net-snmp… and who knows where the chain goes after that…

I probably need to put this kind of stuff on my Wiki, as it will likely catch me out again.  Maybe I need to get in the habit of running revdep-rebuild a bit more often (or compile a list of those packages that revdep-rebuild should *always* be run after).

EDIT: Zoinks!  revdep-rebuild has a list of about 50 packages that are broken…  Sigh

My father-in-law and I took Nicholas to the Brisbane Motor Show today.  What a great day out!  He absolutely loved it.  We rode the bus to get there, and he loves bus rides, but when we got inside and onto the show floor he was speechless!

He loved the Lamborghinis, was in awe of the Audis, thought the Ferraris were fine, and took a liking to the Lotus.  He also thought the Nissans were neat, and took a shine to the Subarus!  While at Holden, he couldn’t take his eyes off the HSV Grange.  He climbed in a few cars, ran his hand along a few more, and even sat on a couple of scooters — I think he liked the Yamaha Majesty best!

Pop and Nicholas sat in a Peugeot 407 Coupe and were both impressed (even though Nicholas said the radio was “a bit noisy” when Pop turned it on!).  His eyes almost popped out of his head when he saw the Hummer H3, but it was on a tiny little stand that was way too crowded and he couldn’t get away from it fast enough.

There were a couple of Corvette Z06s there as well, and while Nicholas didn’t think too much of the car, he was glued to the screen showing video of the car being put through its paces by the presenters of such TV shows as Top Gear.

By lunchtime, we were all totally worn out.  Nicholas fell asleep on my shoulder as we were getting ready to leave the floor.  As worn out as I got though, I can’t wait to take him back next year!