syslog
ramblings of an administrator
Find and replace across multiple files
Aug 13th
I needed to quickly modify 500 hundred XML files, each was about 10MB in size, thankfully Linux makes that pretty fast and very easy. find . -name “*.xml” -print | xargs sed -i ‘s/FROM/TO/g’ A semi “real world” example: find . -name “*.xml” -print | xargs sed -i ‘s/foo/bar/g’
Adding swap while the server is online with Debian and VMWare ESX
Jul 7th
Recently I had to install Oracle on a virtual machine but didn’t find out until after I’d spun up of the machine that Oracle required at least 2GB of swap space, my machine did not have enough. Thankfully it’s quite simple to increase swap space, using VMWare ESX, simple add a new drive to the
Trigger command on filesystem changes with inotify + incron
Jul 3rd
During a seemingly normal work day a colleague pointed out a problem to me and asked if I had any solution. The problem was that they were trying to use InfoBright (http://www.infobright.com/) for some data crunching, export the data to CSV and then import in to MySQL. My first idea was to output the data
Using dpkg selections to backup and install packages
Jul 2nd
Sometimes you want to be able to install packages on another machine without the hassle of a long apt-get install command or having to write down every single package you’ve installed. Luckily Debian has the wonderful dpkg which has 2 methods for generating a list of installed packages and another for importing a list. Generating
AFK, an SMS sender and way too much PHP…
Jun 13th
Sadly of late I’ve been stuck writing nothing but PHP during my work hours. Short of a few major internal disasters I’ve done nothing I would count as interesting enough to really post about, until recently. A week or two ago I made some modifications to our internal Nagios monitoring system – http://nagios.com/ – which
Coming soon… Solr research
Apr 18th
Recently I decided that it would be a good idea for the company I work for to start looking in to Apache Solr for use with some of our bigger clients, I will report any fun I find it with back here including installation on Debian/Ubuntu and most likely complain about Jetty and Tomcat because
New syslog.tv nginx wordpress site configuration explained
Apr 18th
I made some modifications to my nginx configuration this weekend to improve performance and clear up some bugs…
Convert PEM & Key to a single PKCS#12 file
Apr 13th
Sometimes keeping multiple copies of keys, certificates and root certificates can be a real annoyance, thankfully it’s quite simple to convert them in to a single PKCS#12 file with the following command. openssl pkcs12 -export -out certificate.pkcs -in certificate.crt -inkey private.key -certfile rootcert.crt -name “PKCS#12 Certificate Bundle” This will create a file called certificate.pkcs which
Building nginx on Red Hat and Debian to RPM/DEB-style locations
Apr 2nd
The title of this post is a bit stupid, but I honestly couldn’t think of any other way to write it… When compiling nginx by hand, by default make install will push the binaries out to /usr/local/nginx and it doesn’t come with a start/stop script, understandably because it doesn’t know which OS it is going
Apache internal dummy connection
Mar 27th
Recently I found that one of the servers I look after that runs a high profile site was generating semi-high load at traffic peaks. You could generally say that this would be understandable but the server was shooting up to a load of around 10 for a few seconds and with that load jump I
Configuring Nagios to monitor remote load, disk, swap etc using NRPE
Mar 21st
Using nrpe to monitor remote servers with Nagios on Debian or Ubuntu.
Show IP in Apache logs from nginx reverse proxy
Mar 20th
Quick blog post on how to send through correct IP to Apache logs when reverse proxying requests through nginx.
nginx – increase increase server_names_hash_bucket_size
Mar 18th
Explanation on how to increase server_names_hash_bucket_size if you have large domain names and wish to use them with nginx.
Finding files over a set size with find & awk
Mar 17th
User uploaded content can be a pain when it comes to disk usage, especially if the users upload 10MB photos. This post will show you how to use find, awk, egrep and wc to find names over files over a specified size, total amount of files and even check based on filetype.
Convert DER certificate to PEM
Mar 3rd
Some times as an administrator you will be given a certificate from a third party that will be in the DER format, which cannot be loaded in to Apache. Converting it is a simple process and will be described in this blog post.
less is more
Mar 1st
A very, very short blog post detailing why less is more and more is less, with usable options and built-in key bindings.
HOWTO: SSH config on Debian/Ubuntu
Feb 18th
Today I finally got round to setting up my local user ssh config on my new work laptop and figured I’d do a quick write up on it and it’s uses.
HOWTO: Guest Virtual Machine disk extend online with Debian/Ubuntu, LVM2 and VMWare ESX
Feb 16th
Recently a request was put forth to increase the disk space on a couple of our VMs for them to be filled with user generated content. Each VM was 10G in size and so were far too small, I originally tried to increase the disk space offline using GParted but ran in to problems because of LVM, then I realised that LVM meant the VM didn’t need to be offline. This guide will try to help walk you through the process of extending disk space without putting the machine offline using the wonders of cfdisk and lvm.
More nginx proxy_cache optimizations and nginx load balancing
Feb 14th
This is yet another follow up to post to several previous posts about using nginx as a reverse proxy with caching. It is actually a direct addition to my post from a week or so ago which outlined how to actually using nginx’s proxy caching feature. This post will cover changes to I’ve made to my caching config and the addition of load balancing.
code_swarm – Apache, Python and PostgreSQL commit visualization
Feb 13th
These videos are pretty old now and I had forgotten about them until a colleague tweeted about a Twitter code_swarm visualization which made me remember. Great visualizations of commits to Apache, Python and PostgreSQL.