Author Archives: ward

nagios, mdadm and snmp

Posted on November 9, 2009 by ward

I found this script while looking for a simple script to monitor mdadm arrays. The script is fine, but it has a subtle bug – it will never report an error because the –detail parameter is missing in the call … Continue reading →

Posted in Sysadmin | 1 Comment

a new home server

Posted on September 6, 2009 by ward

I’ve been running an old Shuttle with a 2.4GHz celeron CPU, 512MB of ram and two 500GB disks in raid-1 as home server for the past 5 years or so. Well, I upgraded the disks in May 2007, before that … Continue reading →

Posted in Hardware, Sysadmin | Tagged | 1 Comment

over to x25-m

Posted on August 31, 2009 by ward

I bought an Intel X-25M SSD drive for my laptop in early June. I got the 80GB version, and this was to replace a Hitachi 7K200-160 – a 160GB 7200rpm drive. Note that the X25-M is generation 1; Intel has … Continue reading →

Posted in Hardware | Leave a comment

capistrano, svn and webserver timeouts

Posted on July 3, 2009 by ward

A customer reported problems with capistrany deploys that would just die like this: ** [XXX.XXX.XXX :: err] svn: REPORT request failed on ‘/!svn/vcc/default’ ** svn: REPORT of ‘/!svn/vcc/default’: Chunk delimiter was invalid (http://XXX.XXX.XXX) command finished After disabling gzip compression on … Continue reading →

Posted in Sysadmin | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

monit, mongrel_rails and ENV["HOME"]

Posted on June 28, 2009 by ward

So your mongrels are humming along happily and you have monit monitoring them with a definition like this: check process mongrel_8010 with pidfile /path/to/current/log/mongrel.8010.pid start program = “/usr/bin/mongrel_rails cluster::start -C /path/to/current/config/mongrel_cluster.yml –clean –only 8010″ stop program = “/usr/bin/mongrel_rails cluster::stop -C … Continue reading →

Posted in Rails | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Monticello municipal fiber now really a go

Posted on June 23, 2009 by ward

I wrote about Monticello, Minnesota and its fight with the local incumbent telco TDS last fall. At the time, TDS had its lawsuit against the city thrown out for lack of merit. No big surprise, since the gist of the … Continue reading →

Posted in Broadband | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

df and zettabytes

Posted on June 23, 2009 by ward

This is a very confused filesystem. But check it out – df supports zettabytes! # df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/md0 19G -64Z 22G 101% / Surprisingly, the machine is up and runs just fine.

Posted in Sysadmin | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

on the G1′s bluetooth support

Posted on June 19, 2009 by ward

I got a G1 the other day, and have it upgraded to android 1.5 (cupcake). Turns out the bluetooth abilities of this phone are rather … limited, particularly compared to my trusty nokia E70: G1: $ sdptool browse 00:22:A5:XX:XX:XX Browsing … Continue reading →

Posted in Android | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

IIS taking a nosedive

Posted on June 17, 2009 by ward

Netcraft’s June 2009 Web Server Survey is very interesting. Check out the IIS line on this graph (red): That sharp drop is a reduction from 29,049,223 (May) to 21,898,527 (June) active sites. Netcraft explains the drop like this: A reduction … Continue reading →

Posted in Everything else | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Rails, Sysadmin | Leave a comment