Category Archives: Sysadmin

Out of the box, the Prometheus binaries in the latest release (v2.7.1) clock in rather large, at: -rwxr-xr-x 1 ward ward 60097588 Jan 31 06:18 prometheus -rwxr-xr-x 1 ward ward 38359349 Jan 31 06:19 promtool Fillippo Valsorda has a post … Continue reading →

Even though I have been using SSDs for more than 5 years on my main machine, I’ve never bothered to set up TRIM properly. At first, that was because the drive didn’t support it – it was the first Intel … Continue reading →

Slurm uses the scontrol show daemons command to figure out what it should run on the machine it is being invoked on. If you have a config file error, that command will return a blank line. And /etc/init.d/slurm-llnl will exit … Continue reading →

The built-in PDF.js viewer in Firefox is nice, but it still has quite a few bugs. Most of the rendering issues are caused by it not supporting certain PDF features yet. Sometimes one needs to make a PDF with fancy … Continue reading →

I had a few old MoinMoin installs that were due for an upgrade, and I wanted to migrate them to Redmine. I found a migration script at norwinter.com, which I improved a bit. It will handle wiki pages with full … Continue reading →

I wasted some time on Friday trying to get a machine with grub 2 installed to boot. The machine booted into Grub’s rescue mode. Grub 2′s rescue mode is nice, but not exactly intuitive (no ‘help’ or ‘?’ command), and … Continue reading →

Before: -rw-r–r– 1 root root 1.1G 2010-10-31 20:19 10125-127-2010-10.error After: -rw-r–r– 1 root root 11M 2010-10-31 20:19 10125-127-2010-10.error.bz2 Bzip2 reduced the file to 1% of its original size. Not bad!