Opinions on building highly available software businesses
My HTPC is almost appliance like, in the way I never upgrade it, i.e. this morning it was still running Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal… It’s also not very appliance like in that it’s also full of random development stuff that probably shouldn’t be on it as well as several different types of databases, my backup […]
We’re using an old version of Upstart, on Centos, to manage stopping and starting our Node.js daemons, and one of the things the script does, like any good deamon, is change the user of the deamon process from root to something more applicable, security and all that 😉 The scripts look a little like this […]
I want to have a set of users on my Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid Lynx box managed by MySQL, rather than LDAP for a change which means delving in to the sexy world that is libpam-mysql! As ever, the first thing that we need are packages! Remember when installing mysql-server to set a strong root MySQL […]
I’ve recently needed to add disk usage quotas to a server in order to limit how much data users can store so as not to affect the quality of service for other users. Linux has a method called quota which can help you do this. Ubuntu provides some packaged tools which let you manage quotas […]
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 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 […]
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, […]
I’m trying out this Continuous Integration fun at the moment. My end game is to get Hudson, Maven and Nexus working together to continuously build and run unit tests against code, which then gets turned in to Deb packages. A new Xen VM will then be created and configured using Puppet which the new Deb […]
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
