Category Archives: Sysadmin

on the importance of gem cleanup

Posted on June 16, 2009 by ward

I have a monit config that tries to stop/start mongrel instances like this: start program = “/usr/bin/mongrel_rails cluster::start -C path-to-mongrel_cluster.yml –clean –only PORT” stop program = “/usr/bin/mongrel_rails cluster::stop -C path-to-mongrel_cluster.yml –clean –only PORT” I have the latest mongrel_cluster gem installed … Continue reading →

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checking dns glue records

Posted on June 14, 2009 by ward

This is mostly a reminder to myself. Here’s a way to check a domain’s DNS glue records. For example, for google: dig +trace +nosearch +all +norecurse google.com

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counting known_hosts

Posted on May 14, 2009 by ward

All right folks, time to fess up. What’s your count? $ wc ~/.ssh/known_hosts -l 1470 Obviously there are some old machines in there – this file goes back at least five years. There are some duplicates as well as there … Continue reading →

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recycling a ton of old computing gear

Posted on March 14, 2009 by ward

We recycled at work this week – literally over a metric ton (estimated) of old servers. This is what about two thirds of that amount looked liked: Apologies for the low quality picture – I only had a crappy cell … Continue reading →

Posted in Environment, Hardware, Sysadmin | 2 Comments

ff3 sets downloaded files as readonly when using the ‘open with’ feature

Posted on February 25, 2009 by ward

Firefox 3 has a new ‘feature’ where downloaded files are marked readonly when they are opened on the fly with the ‘open with’ feature. The reasoning behind this is that there were many people who lost information because they didn’t … Continue reading →

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what’s going on with the .org nameservers?

Posted on January 21, 2009 by ward

I got rather strange error messages from two servers this evening, one at 18:00:21 EST, and another one at 18:34:01 EST. One server lives in Brussels, the other in Boston. On both servers a (totally different) script executed via cron … Continue reading →

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lessons learned from a colo migration

Posted on October 2, 2008 by ward

I moved a bunch of servers from one colocation facility to another last night. I had been preparing this move for a few weeks. While everything went well in the end, things took much longer than anticipated. Here are a … Continue reading →

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wireless mac address cloning on WRT54GL

Posted on February 27, 2008 by ward

I have a bunch of WRT54GL units that still run OpenWRT Kamikaze 7.07 (latest version is 7.09). I needed to swap out a unit that is one half of a WDS pair, but preferred not to touch the other half. … Continue reading →

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xen 3.2 serial

Posted on February 18, 2008 by ward

Getting access to the serial port in a Xen 3.2 dom0 is somewhat complicated. This is the magic incantation for your grub menu.lst file to get console at 115200 bps on the first physical serial port, as well as on … Continue reading →

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sanitizing /var/log

Posted on February 13, 2008 by ward

I don’t know about you, but I like to have my system logs split day by day, particularly on busy machines. I also like to have a full timestamp (including year and timezone thank you) in system log files. The … Continue reading →

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