External command error: Timeout: No Response from xxx.xxx.xx.xx:161

Checking for any alerts in WARNING status on our Nagios server, I have found the following errors for a couple of Linux servers :

External command error: Timeout: No Response from 192.168.81.245:161

ERROR: Interface Status Request : No response from remote host “192.168.81.245″

ERROR: Description table : No response from remote host “192.168.81.245″

ERROR: hrStorageDescr Table : No response from remote host “192.168.81.245″

ERROR: Description Table hrStorageType : No response from remote host “192.168.81.245″

ERROR: hrStorageDescr Table : No response from remote host “192.168.81.245″

In this particular configuration, Nagios server sends regularly a SNMP request to servers with a running SNMP daemon for server- health status (swap, cpuload) checks. If the SNMPD program is not started, the information requested are not reported as it should be and the error messages above are brought to the sysadmin through Nagios web interface.

In order to remove these errors, SNMP daemon must be started :

root@localhost:~#/etc/init.d/snmpd start

To check the SNMPD status :

root@localhost:~# /etc/init.d/snmpd status

The latest command should print the SNMP daemon PID.

Hope this will help you !

[AO_ALSA] alsa-lib: conf.c:3406:(config_file_open) /usr/share/alsa/pulse-alsa.conf may be old or corrupted: consider to remove or fix it

With the recent upgrade of pulseaudio to version 1.1-3, you will probably encounter error messages while playing an audio file as the ones below :

[AO_ALSA] alsa-lib: conf.c:1220:(parse_def) show is not a compound
[AO_ALSA] alsa-lib: conf.c:1686:(snd_config_load1) _toplevel_:24:26:Unexpected char
[AO_ALSA] alsa-lib: conf.c:3406:(config_file_open) /usr/share/alsa/pulse-alsa.conf may be old or corrupted: consider to remove or fix it

I had the messages above with mplayer while listening to an on-line radio.

After searches, this has been recently filed as a bug : Debian bug 661095

Look at the following configuration file : /usr/share/alsa/pulse-alsa.conf

Make a copy of it before doing any changes :

root@localhost:~# cp /usr/share/alsa/pulse-alsa.conf /usr/share/alsa/pulse-alsa.conf.save

With your favorite text editor, remove all the lines starting at line 20 until the last line. Here is what you should have at last :

root@localhost:~# cat /usr/share/alsa/pulse-alsa.conf

# This file is referred to by /usr/share/alsa/pulse.conf to set pulseaudio as
# the default output plugin for applications using alsa when PulseAudio is
# running.

pcm.!default {
    type pulse
    hint {
        show {
            @func refer
            name defaults.namehint.basic
        }
        description “Playback/recording through the PulseAudio sound server”
    }
}

ctl.!default {
    type pulse
}

You can now play any audio file with no more error messages.

Hope this help !