Opinions on building highly available software businesses
I got this annoying SVN error today, that I hadn’t come across before. Even after resolving the conflict in the file, highlighted by lots of <<<<<<<, I still couldn’t get my commit to work! idimmu@boosh:~/work/systems/trunk/dns$ svn ci idimmu.net -m “new funky domain” svn: Commit failed (details follow): svn: Aborting commit: ‘/home/rus/work/systems/trunk/dns/idimmu.net’ remains in conflict After […]
I had a crazy weird bug today whilst running Puppet on one of our CentOS boxes where no packages were being installed. A quick investigation with yum yielded the following scenario! Id I tried to use yum as root or with sudo it gave the following error .. [idimmu@server ~]$ sudo yum check-update rpmdb: Lock […]
I recently needed to extract a file with the new, popular 7zip compression, which Ubuntu’s File Roller doesn’t support out of the box. Enabling 7zip support in File Roller was as simple as: apt-get install p7zip-full
I managed to screw up my home machine when upgrading from Dapper to Hardy somehow, so decided to flatten and reinstall Hardy from scratch. This is all well and good but I have a RAID 5 array on my machine which stores all my important documents and stuff (I really hate drive failure). Ubuntu didn’t […]
We recently had a few power outages at work, some scheduled, some not, and this played havoc with our xen servers. One of the problems we had was that xend would not start (and thus xendomains would also not start). Checking /var/log/xen/xend.log gave us the following snippet: inst = XendNode() File “/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/xen/xend/XendNode.py”, line 164, in […]
We have several PHP applications and libraries incorrectly packaged for i386 rather than all, which means they wont install to our nice new shiny AMD64 servers. Unfortunately we don’t have (or at least we can’t find) the original package sources, so we need to ‘frobble’ the packages and change the arch by hand! Deb files […]
Some of our PERL tools require some CPAN modules that are not part of the standard Ubuntu distribution. It’s obviously possible to install the module using CPAN but I like using deb packages where possible as then you only have one repository to manage. Fortunately with dh-make-perl it is possible to quickly turn any CPAN […]
As part of our internal office systems upgrade we have a shiny new LDAP server which we like to use as much as possible. One of the things we use it for is Apache user auth, mainly we control SVN with it so people can only commit to the projects they’re allowed to but we […]
I’ve had some debugging to do for work for a part of our site that uses webcams but I’ve been a bit hazey about starting it because the last time I plugged a webcam in to a Linux box, 100 years ago, it was a bit messy. I decided to risk it as I’m too […]
As part of our test environment rebuild one of the first things we tackled was moving the databases to the new virtual environment, this means changing the database address in a lot of config files, fortunately sed makes this job really easy! sed -i s/olddatabase/newdatabase/g *.xml We’re also using CNAMEs now for the addresses to […]