Opinions on building highly available software businesses
My home Ubuntu Jaunty installation often takes a good 40-60 seconds to connect to using SSH, none of the other servers I maintain have this same problem, they’re pretty much instantaneous, and today, on a Friday evening at 1am this irked me enough to fix it! The first step is of course to make the […]
I’m currently setting up some new clusters under RedHat and each cluster is getting it’s own Nagios instance, trying to use the web based management interface however threw and error. I’ve seen this error before on Ubuntu and was getting it again under RedHat. Of course I revisited my Ubuntu solution and realised that it […]
We’re rolling out a RedHat platform for a major product delivery to a client in the next couple of weeks, which is a great chance for me to build a fresh platform using all the skills I’ve acquired and actually do things properly (TM). We’re using RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 because this is a very […]
Meta-< -> go to beginning of history file Meta-> -> go to end of history file Meta-f -> go to next word in command line Meta-b -> go to previous word in command line Meta-d -> delete next word in command line (from the actual position of the prompt) Ctrl-a -> go to the start […]
I needed to burn an XVid of one of my performances to DVD last night, remotely, as my MythBuntu box was being used by someone else to watch some crappy TV and I wanted to show off! It was a pretty simple process, just involving a bit of a wait during the transcode 🙂 First […]
At the moment I’m trying out the beta for Ubuntu Jaunty and one the first thing I noticed was the new version of screen available! Initially you are provided with a menu to choose a theme! I went with option 3, Ubuntu Dark! You’re then presented with an interesting new screen display, with 2 rows […]
At my current place of employment we have a fairly strict password policy for everything, all passwords must be unique (so no single password used everywhere) and we use KeePass and KeePassX to manage them, so we can have fairly long passwords that aren’t immediately rememberable full of fun characters. Generating the passwords is a […]
There is an error that I often run in to when working with files and while loops in BASH. Often I have scripts similar to the following, where I cat a file and read it in using a while loop to process variables in the file: #!/bin/bash count=0; cat testfile | while read line do […]
I’ve been doing a lot of Nagios deployments recently, and this error always bites me, on all Ubuntu versions, including Hardy and Intrepid (haven’t quite bit the bullet to try the Jaunty beta yet 🙂 ) Error: Could not stat() command file ‘/var/lib/nagios3/rw/nagios.cmd’! The external command file may be missing, Nagios may not be running, […]
Mucking about with LVM and partitions isn’t really taxing, it’s all well documented. Trusting it however is a different matter. I’ve resized loads of Ext3 LVM partitions in the past, but was asked to resize a ReiserFS one today, which made me ask the question: “Is there anything writing to it currently, as I will […]