https://www.unixdaemon.net/ Recent content on UnixDaemon: In search of (a) life Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Sun, 18 Feb 2024 08:50:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/incident_initiation_pinpointing_the_precise_problem_point/ Sun, 18 Feb 2024 08:50:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/incident_initiation_pinpointing_the_precise_problem_point/ A question about incident timelines to help you start your day. On Thursday you raise the rate limit on an API end point. On Friday traffic levels start to rise due to a bot. On Saturday the API becomes unavailable due to a DDOS. When did the incident start? https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/indicators-of-outage-status-page/ Tue, 13 Feb 2024 08:55:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/indicators-of-outage-status-page/ Sketching out some possible improvements to our monitoring and something that popped into my head was tying traffic spikes on our status page to our alerting system. If we suddenly see a few hundred percent rise in traffic we can be pretty sure something’s not working somewhere on our side. Not quite as much fun as a previous experiment on watching tweets for our name and less than positive sentiment but something that could be interesting to prototype. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/reduce-leaked-information-when-streaming/ Thu, 21 Oct 2021 12:43:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/reduce-leaked-information-when-streaming/ Lock down removing my need to commute to work each day gave me a few extra hours back and last year I decided to try streaming some small coding sessions on Twitch. I only did a few, as I discovered how much I hate the sound of my own voice, but when watching one of the streams I realised how much information I was leaking from my normal shell and web browser workflows. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/prevent-unauthorised-website-certificates-for-your-domains/ Tue, 12 Oct 2021 12:45:23 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/prevent-unauthorised-website-certificates-for-your-domains/ The big push, over the last few years, to move websites to use Transport Level Security (TLS) Certificates has been incredibly successful, in no small part to Let’s Encrypt. As always the arms race between attackers and defenders continues and with the increased adoption of TLS comes a number of attackers looking for less diligent Certificate Authorities who will issue a certificate for sites attackers may not actually own. Luckily for the rest of this post there’s a way to prevent this from happening, the Certificate Authority Authorization (CAA) DNS record. https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/civil-service-jobs-salary-explanation/ Sun, 10 Oct 2021 17:08:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/civil-service-jobs-salary-explanation/ A few people asked me about the “Pay” section on a Civil Service Site Reliability Role and as Government ranges can be a bit odd I thought i might as well explain how they worked at the department I used to work in. I originally wrote most of this on Twitter but it’s come up often enough that I’d like to keep it somewhere more permanent. I’m not a recruiter but I’ve been a hiring manager and this post is based on my experience and understanding. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/planning-against-themes-with-radar-charts/ Sun, 10 Oct 2021 14:44:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/planning-against-themes-with-radar-charts/ In a previous role we were working on a large set of services, each with a variety of projects on the backlog. We were having issues deciding what to work on first so we decided to try a few different ways to evaluate the possible options. My prototyped contribution to the process was to try and map each piece of work against a number of themes / values we’d all agreed on and display them on a radar chart. https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/visualise-recruitment-process-sankey/ Mon, 21 Jun 2021 12:26:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/visualise-recruitment-process-sankey/ “How can I better show where we lose potential employees in a recruitment process?” has been playing on my mind. I’m happy to look at a basic Google Sheet but occasionally you need something more visually arresting to hold an audiences attention. I decided to do a few short experiments with representing the data using a Sankey diagram and I think they might be helpful. The example recruitment workflow I used is a simple one: https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/97-things-every-sre-01/ Mon, 11 Jan 2021 14:00:11 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/97-things-every-sre-01/ A few people I follow on twitter mentioned they’d contributed to 97 Things Every SRE Should Know. It’s a book full of short, 1-3 page chapters, focused on topics dear to an SREs heart. So i had no choice but to buy it. In an attempt to be more deliberate with my reading and what I’ve retained from the book I’ve decided to create some reading notes for future me. This post is broken down into a section per chapter. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/scary-sysadmin-halloween-stories/ Mon, 07 Dec 2020 08:28:46 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/scary-sysadmin-halloween-stories/ Gremlin recently ran a small twitter hashtag challenge called “#talesfromtheNOC” where people were invited to share their scary sysadmin stories. Reading through of the entries I was reminded of one slightly less than welcoming environment that led to a lot of learning, frustration and trepidation. I’ve captured my posts here. Opening Volley I was hired as the new sysadmin at a financial services company and had no hand over as my predecessor had apparently ‘left on short notice’. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/add-rubocop-rspec-cops/ Tue, 08 Sep 2020 08:34:22 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/add-rubocop-rspec-cops/ Over the last few weeks I’ve been on a slight rubocop rampage with some of my older ruby based projects. Running a static code analyser like rubocop over code originally written for ruby 1.9.3 has been a nice refresher in how idioms change over time. Once I learned to accept I’m going to use the occasional override, or even just turn certain rules off, I came to agree that it’s helped improve my code. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/streaming-with-twitch/ Tue, 01 Sep 2020 12:34:21 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/streaming-with-twitch/ Sometimes you stumble onto things in the oddest ways. Some of my relatives were discussing how a few of my nephews and nieces spend their time “Watching other people play games” in a predictable tone you’d never experience when discussing large sporting events. I am an acceptably mediocre gamer and so I thought I’d watch a few and see how the platform worked and how good the production quality, and the players were. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/playing-with-checkov/ Thu, 27 Aug 2020 08:22:51 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/playing-with-checkov/ If quarterly road maps are to be believed in a month or so I’ll have a lot more terraform back in my life so I’ve been dipping my toe back into terraforms ecosystem and supporting tools. One of the areas I’m most interested in updating myself regarding is automated testing, from static analysis tools and linting to integration testing the resources it creates. I recently spent a few days playing with rego, conftest and OpenPolicyAgent related tools in the Docker space (Playing with conftest and yum repository policies) and while it also supports Terraform I didn’t enjoy the process or the tooling and decided to look else where. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/handling-flaky-pytest-tests/ Wed, 12 Aug 2020 08:45:26 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/handling-flaky-pytest-tests/ There’s often a deadline sitting between pragmatism and perfection in a code base and during an exploration of Pythons pytest extensions and plugins I found a couple of exemplary examples of straddling that line. The two modules Flaky, and the more subtly named, pytest-rerunfailures each help blur the lines a little by allowing you to rerun failing tests and often take the “two out of three approach” to handling troublesome tests. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/overengineering-humanised-jobnames/ Sun, 09 Aug 2020 12:30:31 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/overengineering-humanised-jobnames/ I recently took the opportunity to heavily over engineer what should have been about 15 lines of python into a docker based microservice called humanised-jobname. I had a small application that I wanted to add Docker-esque memorable names to and over the course of a few lunch breaks I essentially built an entire repository around the equivalent to 12 lines of code from the Moby container name generator. And I enjoyed every minute of it. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/benchmarking-your-http-security-headers/ Thu, 06 Aug 2020 08:55:13 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/benchmarking-your-http-security-headers/ Not a single piece of the Internets infrastructure seems to stand still for long anymore and after a lunchtime discussion about a HTTP header I’d never heard of, Permissions-Policy, I thought it was time to do a brief refresher on the current recommendations. Rather than looking through the recent specs and RFCs I decided to make it a little more entertaining and try to improve my SecurityHeaders.io grade. SecurityHeaders is an awesome site that checks HTTP headers and reports on any important ones that are missing. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/upgrading-docker-compose-prometheus-0.0.3/ Thu, 30 Jul 2020 08:22:34 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/upgrading-docker-compose-prometheus-0.0.3/ Summer is in the air and it seems like time to replace my entire home lab monitoring system once more. Sensu has been plodding along nicely but I’m in this for the learnin’ so I’m looking for something more interesting that a major version bump and move to Golang. I’m thinking of giving Prometheus a spin to see how it’s changed over the last few years and as a first step I decided it was time to upgrade my local test bed Docker Compose Prometheus and add some bells and whistles. https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/first-steps-honeycomb-io/ Thu, 23 Jul 2020 18:40:21 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/first-steps-honeycomb-io/ I’ve been a big theoretical fan of Honeycomb.io for a long time now. The technology seems both timely and needed. The employees are prominent in our field and the people that start using it seem to very quickly become convinced of its worth. What’s made it theoretical for me is that I’ve just not had a reason to actually delve into it and have a play around. Or I hadn’t until I saw Observability in the SSC: Seeing Into Your Build System. https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/introducing-terraform-input-validation/ Tue, 21 Jul 2020 07:55:11 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/introducing-terraform-input-validation/ A few years ago CloudFormation was a large part of my day. While Terraform slowly began to creep into my stacks, with its daring support for other providers, one of the features I always missed was an equivalent to CloudFormations AWS specific parameter types. These provided a great way to ensure you were using the type of value you thought you were, enforcing that something was actually a subnet ID for example, and now with Terraform 0. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/900-posts/ Wed, 15 Jul 2020 18:14:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/900-posts/ I recently migrated this blog from a very old version of hugo to a much newer one and while diffing the output I noticed I’d very nearly hit a blog post milestone. With the publication of this little exercise in vanity I’ve posted 900 articles to UnixDaemon. I’ve had the domain for nearly 20 years now and it has been one of the best investments of my career. It started as a place to centralise little projects and provide links to my code on Freshmeat, Sourceforge and CPAN. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/adding-multiple-cards-trello-intro/ Tue, 14 Jul 2020 18:02:20 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/adding-multiple-cards-trello-intro/ I’ve been using Trello boards for some of my basic task tracking for quite a while and as other people in my family have seen it in action, mostly via my huge TODO and BLOCKED columns, we’ve begun to use it in a more shared and collaborative way. In addition to the core usage of adhoc task tracking the more frequent use cases we’ve adopted are adding a set of cards on either a semi- periodic basis or a group of tasks when a certain event happens. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/playing-with-conftest-yumrepos/ Wed, 08 Jul 2020 19:21:41 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/playing-with-conftest-yumrepos/ A project to modernise an old Terraform code base came across my desk recently and while investigating the more recent developments in testing tools and workflows I stumbled onto conftest, a utility to help you write tests against structured configuration data. I was interested in trying the technology out but I don’t want to put something i have this little experience in on the main flow of work so I decided to do a few tests with it against a smaller, more self contained, use case. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/spotting-suspicious-domain-names-with-dnstwist/ Mon, 06 Jul 2020 18:20:23 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/spotting-suspicious-domain-names-with-dnstwist/ After seeing DNSTwist mentioned in a twitter thread recently I’ve been having far more fun than appropriate using it to investigate domain name typo squatting. Typo squatting is when you mistype a domain name or URL and someone has registered a very similar domain in order to capture that traffic and often do unpleasant things with it. A benign example of this is GutHib, a common typo for GitHub that just helps people along with a subtle indication of the error. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/marvel-comic-covers-bot-intro/ Sat, 04 Jul 2020 14:47:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/marvel-comic-covers-bot-intro/ Back in the mists of time when I first registered this domain name the main purpose of the site was to be a place where i could link to all my little side projects. Over the years, as I’ve been fortunate to be found by readers, I’ve grown more and more picky about what I posted and by side effect, some of the side projects I’d invest a few hours in to. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/adding-github-superlinter/ Thu, 02 Jul 2020 14:48:11 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/adding-github-superlinter/ GitHub recently announced the Super Linter, a Docker container that can be run via GitHub Actions and comes complete with a lot of built in linting tools to help you detect less than ideal code. As someone who uses linters in different contexts, for example shellcheck for bash, rubocop for Ruby and flake8 for Python, I like the idea of having someone else package these up for easier use in my own GitHub repositories. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/incident-updates-and-interruptions/ Wed, 24 Jun 2020 19:16:18 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/incident-updates-and-interruptions/ For most companies Incident Commander or Incident Manager is not a specific job, it’s a role you may take on when something has gone, often horribly, wrong and you need to quickly unite an adhoc group into a team to resolve it. The incident commander should be the point of contact, and source of truth, about your incident and to do that successfully they’ll need to be updated and kept informed about what’s happening. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/google-form-apps-script-introduction/ Mon, 15 Jun 2020 23:25:27 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/google-form-apps-script-introduction/ After my recent foray into Monitoring alerts and customer satisfaction surveys I was fortunate enough to have a couple of conversations with other SREs interested in trying out similar approaches and while discussing the specifics of our individual forms the lack of an easy way to share the details became an annoyance. Storing the wording in a shared doc was OK at first but recreating the forms so we could each learn from and tweak each others wording and design quickly became a distraction with the Google Forms web UI taking up most of the time we had to chat. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/monitoring-alerts-and-customer-satisfaction-surveys/ Fri, 12 Jun 2020 13:05:59 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/monitoring-alerts-and-customer-satisfaction-surveys/ Closing the loop on a monitoring alert is traditionally something that implicitly happens when the dashboard returns to its idyllic green state, the text massage returns a well deserved “Service: OK” or in more extreme cases the incident review is over and actions have been assigned. This however assumes the alert is working well and the operator understands why it woke them up and the value their involvement brings. In more fluid environments alerts can be incorrect, issues that do not require immediate attention and in the worst case ghost calls that mysteriously correct themselves just after you’ve woken up enough to find your MFA device. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/mocking-the-system-time/ Wed, 03 Jun 2020 09:17:11 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/mocking-the-system-time/ Testing your shell scripts can be complicated enough already but when you start to incorporate time based test scenarios you can quickly find yourself in the land of fragile tests and intermittent failures. By adding a small command line utility, called faketime, to your toolbox you can make your chronology related tests more reliable and reproducible. To start we’ll install faketime. This focused little binary allows you to explicitly set the system time for which ever command you pass to it. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/slo-adoption-and-usage-in-sre-notes/ Sat, 30 May 2020 11:39:39 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/slo-adoption-and-usage-in-sre-notes/ I recently read SLO Adoption and Usage in SRE, a free book of two halves. The first provides a brief introduction to SLIs, SLOs and Error Budgets that could be given to an impatient but interested co-workers. The second part is an analysis of the responses from the ‘SLO Adoption and Usage in SRE’ survey. If you like the DORA State of DevOps Reports you’ll also enjoy this. Summary “SRE is an emerging IT Service Management framework” and should be treated in the same way as ITIL, distrusted but pillaged for the good bits. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/the-little-tab-in-the-middle/ Tue, 12 May 2020 13:33:33 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/the-little-tab-in-the-middle/ I have a tab that normally lives somewhere near the middle of my web browsers tab bar. Over the course of my day it faces constant pressure on each side. From ad hoc work tabs being opened by the pinned email and slack tab on its left and from proactive work based tabs from its right. I’ve learned I can tell how my week is going by where it is on the bar. https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/mindmapping-on-fedora-30/ Tue, 11 Feb 2020 08:26:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/mindmapping-on-fedora-30/ I’m not a massive fan of Mind Mapping, a “hierarchical way to diagram and visually organise information that shows relationships among pieces of the whole”, but before Christmas I found myself blocked and unable to gain traction on a small research based side project. After idling for an uncomfortable duration I tried a few alternative approaches and Mind Mapping appeared to be a decent fit so I decided to install a tool and break my block with it. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/low-hanging-bcp-and-dr-scenarios/ Fri, 07 Feb 2020 13:36:57 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/low-hanging-bcp-and-dr-scenarios/ Just before Christmas I had to do some work on new business continuity plans (BCP) and disaster recovery (DR) documents. To help warm up and get myself in the right frame of mind I posted a few easy opening scenarios to Twitter for comment and I’ve decided to collect them back up and post here, in my external memory, for posterity. Each of these ideas should be considered the most generic and low hanging fruit of your plans. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/from-free-work-phone-to-life-balance-complaints-in-2-easy-steps/ Wed, 05 Feb 2020 19:19:19 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/from-free-work-phone-to-life-balance-complaints-in-2-easy-steps/ I’ve spotted a small but recurring pattern among some of my friends, their on-call responsibilities, and the gradual erosion of their work life balance. It all starts innocently enough with the ceremonial signing off of the new work phone. The keen new employee goes to the Corporate IT team and gets given a 2 or 3 generation old, locked down, mobile phone. It normally comes with the trinity of features, a slightly shonky battery, a larger than expected physical presence and a decent bandwidth package you never have to pay for. https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/initial-github-actions-experiment-ruby/ Wed, 29 Jan 2020 09:31:32 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/initial-github-actions-experiment-ruby/ Next in my unhurried investigation of hosted build systems for my small collection of Free Software are GitHub Actions. A fully hosted task runner that can Build, test, and deploy your code right from GitHub. As someone not exclusively using GitHub to manage all their source code the idea of being completely tied into a single provider isn’t a great one but the technology looks interesting enough to justify running a few simple experiments. https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/dependabot-bulk-merger/ Fri, 20 Dec 2019 13:04:41 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/dependabot-bulk-merger/ I recently enabled Dependabot to help track updates to my dependencies and keep them current. The user experience has been a pleasant one with simple configuration and timely pull requests but I’ve quickly come to dread one specific thing - the Updating Of The Rubocop. I have quite a lot of ruby bases repositories and I like to use rubocop as a basic safety net and second set of eyes so it’s in heavy use, which is great until the version changes. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/magic-numbers-and-second-guessing-slos/ Wed, 13 Nov 2019 08:56:52 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/magic-numbers-and-second-guessing-slos/ I’ve had a half written draft of this post sitting in a folder for the last six months and I’ve not been able to shake the root cause so I’m going to publish it and see what the feedback teaches me. But first the heresy - Service Level Objectives make me uncomfortable. I have no issue with the idea that you need some form of measurement and tracking to ensure you’re maintaining an acceptable level of service but when reading posts on SLOs, or watching recorded conference sessions, the concept seems to imply some rigour and background process to determine the numbers to work towards that feels decoupled from any hard details and often comes across as either a guesstimate or just a Current Representation of Actual Percentages. https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/enabling-dependabot/ Fri, 08 Nov 2019 08:44:41 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/enabling-dependabot/ I have a small pile of old Ruby based Puppet modules and extensions that I don’t use anymore but have had some adoption and so thanks to an over abundance of guilt I make the occasional attempt to ensure they are still working and kept vaguely up to date. With the GitHub acquisition of Dependabot, an automated dependency update service, I decided to enable it for a few repos and see how it fits my work flow. https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/initial-circle-ci-experiments/ Sun, 03 Nov 2019 12:17:12 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/initial-circle-ci-experiments/ Travis CI has long been my hosted continuous integration service of choice for my open source repos but there have been some recent [changes](https://hub.packtpub.com/idera-acquires-travis-ci-the-open- source-continuous-integration-solution/) and departures that inspired me to look around and see what else the modern world has to offer. I run a local Jenkins for my own personal use but it’s not hardened to a degree where I’d trust it to run random pull requests from the wild internet so a hosted, free, solution would be an ideal place to start from. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/orggraph-update-2019-08/ Sat, 24 Aug 2019 11:01:11 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/orggraph-update-2019-08/ Sometimes it’s the least expected ideas that grab you. Since writing the Building the Organisation Graph introductory post the concept behind it, allow easier adhoc querying of organisational data and stop putting everything in Google Sheets, has repeatedly popped up as I do my now essentially non-technical role. I’m not sure if it’s the idea itself or the timing of not really having anything hands on to keep my mind busy with but over the last month I’ve found the occasional 45 minute time slot to add pieces of functionality here and there. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/introducing-pyenv/ Fri, 02 Aug 2019 11:51:51 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/introducing-pyenv/ I mentioned pyenv in my post about Python print syntactic sugar and I received a few questions about what it is and why I use it so I thought I’d do a brief followup post about the why and how. Having worked with ruby developers a fair chunk over the last few years I’ve had some exposure to a tool called rbenv, which provides a way to have multiple versions of ruby installed for your user. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/building-the-organisation-graph/ Sat, 27 Jul 2019 11:36:11 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/building-the-organisation-graph/ While it’s said a lot of Open Source software is written to scratch an itch sometimes it’s written to stop that gentle but persistent itch behind the back of your eyeball that makes you twitch every time a subject comes back up. After another quarterly set of changes, teams, missions and all the associated admin overhead and metadata I decided I could no longer face a disparate, possibly consistent but probably not, batch of un-version controlled Google Sheets. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/python-print-syntactic-sugar/ Wed, 24 Jul 2019 07:41:55 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/python-print-syntactic-sugar/ Since Python 3.6 introduced f-strings I’ve been trying to shake the habit of using .format I developed when re-learning python 2. As I work in a number of different languages I find the embedded {foo} syntax to be more familiar and less special case in nature, much nicer than the older % without parens with one argument and with parens with two, and in general more flexible. So I was pleasantly surprised when one of the shinier new f-string features came up in conversation. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/reading-the-realms/ Sun, 21 Apr 2019 14:53:36 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/reading-the-realms/ As a young teenager there was a local second hand bookshop I’d frequent and develop what seems to be an ongoing interest in science fiction and fantasy books and Marvel comics. They didn’t have a massive selection of the first two but over the years I managed to stumble my way onto some of the classics such as Arthur C. Clarke, Asimov and Mercedes Lackey. The ultimate doom of my limited pocket money was the timing of my first Forgotten Realms (FR) novel, Spellfire, and the creation of an Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (2nd Edition) group at school. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/android-update-murder/ Wed, 10 Apr 2019 00:18:38 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/android-update-murder/ She started the Android update and took the knife from the sideboard, knowing he had no chance of calling for help over the next 20 minutes. The cracked screen, caked in his dried blood and still clutched in his desperate hands, was the only witness to what had happened. The last words he saw were, ‘Optimising app 18 of 148’ https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/the-mysterious-lump-in-the-night/ Mon, 08 Apr 2019 09:04:09 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/the-mysterious-lump-in-the-night/ This is not a technology post. About a month ago I discovered a small lump between my shoulder and my spine. With my usual cavalier attitude of “It’ll be OK and sort itself” I ignored it for a week or so until it became clear it was growing at a rapid rate and it was starting to constantly hurt. After a few days of trying to get a GP (local Doctor) appointment booked, the earliest I could get being about 4 weeks away, a recurring pattern in this post, things started to get a lot worse and the mobility in my right hand and arm began to degrade. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/bash-5-features/ Sat, 26 Jan 2019 10:59:15 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/bash-5-features/ The newest version of bash, every ones favourite default shell, was recently announced and while reading through the bash 5 release anouncement I noticed a couple of tiny but useful features and an annoyingly described but potentially awesome one. The tiny but immediately useful additions are a couple of new bash variables, $EPOCHSECONDS and $EPOCHREALTIME. Rather than scattering date commands through your scripts you can now use one of these and save the process execution and command running syntax. https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/terraform-input-variable-restrictions/ Mon, 31 Dec 2018 13:55:38 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/terraform-input-variable-restrictions/ One of the things I find myself occasionally missing from terraform are the native AWS specific parameter types you can use in CloudFormation. These are refinements to the usual template parameters that further limit the valid input, help describe what the value should actually be, and in some cases verify that the resource passed in actually exists. In CloudFormation you’d often start with a basic string parameter like this in your templates: https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/experimenting-with-vim-ale/ Sat, 29 Dec 2018 14:12:40 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/experimenting-with-vim-ale/ I’ve been a basic but happy user of the syntastic syntax checking plugin for vim for a few years now but time and software wait for no one and after seeing a few posts mentioning the newer ALE - Asynchronous linting/fixing for Vim I’ve decided to give it a go for a month and see how it impacts my work flow. Installing it was much easier than expected. I use the vundle plugin manager so replacing one plugin with another and then triggering the install was all I needed to get up and running. https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/aws-support-and-leaked-credentials/ Sat, 20 Oct 2018 09:15:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/aws-support-and-leaked-credentials/ Once you have enough people each working in multiple accounts it becomes a waiting game until you’ll eventually get the dreaded “Your AWS account 666 is compromised.” email. As someone who’s been using AWS since S3 arrived this is the first time I’ve encountered this so I thought I’d write up some notes about what actually happens. First comes the easy, but not recommended, part of the whole experience; push some credentials to GitHub. https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/quarterly-sre-healthcheck/ Thu, 18 Oct 2018 08:30:34 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/quarterly-sre-healthcheck/ At $WORK I’m one of the people responsible for our SRE community and in addition to the day to day mechanics of ensuring everyone is willing and able to meaningfully contribute I’ve been looking at ways to gain a higher level, people focused, view of how they’re feeling about their role. With our move to quarterly missions now department wide it seemed like the perfect time to try our first “Quarterly SRE Health check”. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/pihole-the-first-two-weeks/ Tue, 09 Oct 2018 07:55:34 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/pihole-the-first-two-weeks/ It all started with someone trying to show me an article on their mobile phone. As an adblock user I’d forgotten how bad the world was with all the screen space being stolen by pop-unders, pop overs and I was soon done. After mulling it over for a little while I decided to use it as a flimsy excuse to buy another Raspberry Pi and trial running Pi-hole - ‘A black hole for internet advertisements’. https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/swapping-pips-for-okrs/ Sat, 29 Sep 2018 10:10:10 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/swapping-pips-for-okrs/ For a number of years I’ve maintained what I call my Pragmatic Investment Plan (PiP). It’s a collection of things that ensure I have to invest at least a little time each quarter into my career and industry. While it’s always been somewhat aspirational, in that I don’t often complete everything, it does give me a little prod every now and again and stops me becoming too stagnant. My first few PiPs were done annually, but after I started seeing ever decreasing completed items I moved to quarterly and had a lot more success. https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/respect-as-local-currency/ Thu, 20 Sep 2018 18:07:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/respect-as-local-currency/ In the IT industry we are reputed to be serial job hoppers. While this may seem a little unfair, if it applies to you then you should consider where you’re spending your limited additional time and effort. First, a disclaimer: you need to invest enough time and effort into your current job to stay employed. Now that’s out of the way let’s look at our normal days. All those extra hours and hard work you put in everyday? https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/access-an-ipad-from-linux/ Fri, 31 Aug 2018 08:20:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/access-an-ipad-from-linux/ Despite using Linux on pretty much every computer I’ve owned for the last 20 years I’ve made an exception when it comes to tablet devices and adopted an iPad into my life as commute friendly “source of all books.” Overtime it’s been occasionally pressed into service as a camera and I recently realised I’ve never backed any of those photos up. “That’s something easy to remedy” I naively thought as I plugged my iPad into a laptop and watched as it didn’t appear as a block device. https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/slightly-shorter-meetings/ Wed, 29 Aug 2018 07:37:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/slightly-shorter-meetings/ A few jobs ago, as the number of daily meetings increased, I picked up a tiny meeting tweak that I’ve carried with me and deployed at each place I’ve worked since. End all meetings five minutes early. Instead of half past, end it at 25 and instead of on the hour (complex maths ahead) end at 55. My reasoning is simple and selfish, I hate being late for things. This approach gives people time to get to their next meeting. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/rediscovering-age-of-kings/ Sat, 18 Aug 2018 09:38:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/rediscovering-age-of-kings/ About a year ago, I decided it’d been long enough since I last wasted significant amounts of time playing computer games that I could buy a gaming machine and play for a sensible amount of time and not impact other demands for my time. I looked at all of the current generation consoles and to be honest I was put off by the price of the games. I’m aware of the Steam sale and considering it’s been a decade since I played anything seriously (I still miss you, Left 4 Dead 2) my plan was to quickly recoup the extra cost of a gaming PC by sticking to the best games of a few years ago. https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/the-four-pm-standup/ Fri, 17 Aug 2018 08:01:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/the-four-pm-standup/ I’m not a morning person. I never have been and I doubt it’ll suddenly become one of my defining characteristics. In light of this I’ve always had a dislike of the daily stand-up happening first thing in the morning, instead over the years I’ve become to much prefer having it at about 4PM. A late afternoon stand-up isn’t a common thing. Some people absolutely hate the idea and with no scientific studies to back me up I’m essentially just stating an opinion but I do have a few reasons. https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/talk-submission-thoughts-2018/ Sat, 04 Aug 2018 14:54:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/talk-submission-thoughts-2018/ The summer conference submission season is slowly subsiding and after reading through a combined total of a few thousand submissions I’ve got some hastily compiled thoughts. But before we get started, a disclaimer: I don’t publicly present. My views on this are from the perspective of a submission reviewer and audience member. And remember, we want to say yes. We have slots to fill and there’s nothing more satisfying than giving a new speaker a chance and seeing the feedback consist of nothing but 10’s. https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/terraform-precommit-hooks/ Sat, 04 Aug 2018 12:45:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/terraform-precommit-hooks/ I’m the only infrastructure person on a number of my projects and it’s sometimes difficult to find someone to review pull requests. So, in self-defence, I’ve adopted git precommit hooks as a way to ensure I don’t make certain tedious mistakes before burning through peoples time and goodwill. In this post we’ll look at how pre-commit and terraform can be combined. pre-commit is “A framework for managing and maintaining multi-language pre-commit hooks” that has a comprehensive selection of community written extensions. https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/managing-aws-vpc-default-security-group-terraform/ Tue, 19 Jun 2018 09:16:10 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/managing-aws-vpc-default-security-group-terraform/ When it comes to Amazon Web Services support Terraform has coverage that’s second to none. It includes most of Amazons current services, rapidly adds newly released ones, and even helps granularise existing resources by adding terraform specific extensions for things like individual rules with aws_security_group_rule. This awesome coverage makes it even more jarring when you encounter one of the rare edge cases, such as VPC default security groups. It’s worth taking a step back and thinking about how Terraform normally works. https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/automatic-terraform-documentation-with-terraform-docs/ Mon, 18 Jun 2018 14:26:10 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/automatic-terraform-documentation-with-terraform-docs/ Terraform code reuse leads to modules. Modules lead to variables and outputs. Variables and outputs lead to massive amount of boilerplate documentation. terraform-docs lets you shortcut some of these steps and jump straight to consistent, easy to use, automatically generated documentation instead. Terraform-docs, a self-contained binary implemented in Go, and released by Segment, provides an efficient way to add documentation to your terraform code without requiring large changes to your workflow or massive amounts of additional boilerplate. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/automatic-datasource-config-grafana-5/ Thu, 07 Jun 2018 09:44:44 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/automatic-datasource-config-grafana-5/ When I first started my Prometheus experiments with docker-compose one of the most awkward parts of the process, especially to document, were the manual steps required to click around the Grafana dashboard in order to add the Prometheus datasource. Thanks to the wonderful people behind Grafana there has been a push in the newest major version, 5 at time of writing, to make Grafana easier to automate. And it really does pay off. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/docker-container-package-vulnerabilities-with-microscanner/ Mon, 04 Jun 2018 16:45:31 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/docker-container-package-vulnerabilities-with-microscanner/ I’m a big fan of baking testing into build and delivery pipelines so when a new tool pops up in that space I like to take a look at what features it brings to the table and how much effort it’s going to take to roll out. The Aqua Security microscanner, from a company you’ve probably seen at least one excellent tech talk from in the last year, is a quite a new release that surfaces vulnerable operating systems packages in your container builds. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/aws-cis-security-benchmark-with-prowler/ Wed, 30 May 2018 19:05:12 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/aws-cis-security-benchmark-with-prowler/ Despite the number of Amazon Web Services that have the word simple in their titles, keeping on top of a large cloud deployment isn’t an easy ask. There are a lot of important, complex, aspects to consider so it’s advisable to pay attention to the best practices, reference architectures, and benchmarks published by AWS and their partners. In this post we’ll take a look at the CIS security benchmark and a tool that will save you a lot of manual verifying. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/the-simple-vims-code-comments/ Wed, 30 May 2018 16:12:11 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/the-simple-vims-code-comments/ After finding a bug in my custom written, bulk code comment / uncomment, vim function I decided to invest a little time to find a mature replacement that would remove my maintenance burden. In addition to removing my custom code I wanted a packaged solution, to make it easier to include across all of my vim installs. After a little googling I found the ideal solution, the vim-commentary plugin. It ticks all my check boxes: https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/viewing-alertmanager-via-mailhog/ Tue, 13 Mar 2018 09:01:12 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/viewing-alertmanager-via-mailhog/ After adding AlertManager to my Prometheus test stack in a previous post I spent some time triggering different failiure cases and generating test messages. While it’s slightly satisfying seeing rows change from green to red I soon wanted to actually send real alerts, with all their values somewhere I could easily view. My criteria were: must be easy to integrate with AlertManager must not require external network access must be easy to use from docker-compose should have as few moving parts as possible A few short web searches later I stumbled back onto a small server I’ve used for this in the past - MailHog. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/adding-alert-manager-docker-compose-prometheus/ Sat, 10 Mar 2018 14:40:12 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/adding-alert-manager-docker-compose-prometheus/ What’s the use of monitoring if you can’t raise alerts? It’s half a solution at best and now I have basic monitoring working, as discussed in Prometheus experiments with docker-compose, it felt like it was time to add AlertManager, Prometheus often used partner in crime, so I can investigate raising, handling and resolving alerts. Unfortunately this turned out to be a lot harder than ‘just’ adding a basic exporter. Before we delve into the issues and how I worked around them in my implementation let’s see the result of all the work, adding a redis alert and forcing it to trigger. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/green-system-percentage-vs-user-visible-issues/ Sun, 04 Mar 2018 15:08:44 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/green-system-percentage-vs-user-visible-issues/ How much of your system does your internal monitoring need to consider down before something is user visible? While there will always be the perfect chain of three or four things that can cripple a chunk of you customer visible infrastructure there are often a lot of low importance checks that will flare up and consume time and attention. But what’s the ratio? As a small thought experiment on one project I’ve recently started to leave a new, very simple four panel, Grafana dashboard open on a Raspberry PI driven monitor that shows the percentage of the internal monitoring checks that are currently in a successful state next to the number of user visible issues and incidents. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/prometheus-experiments-with-docker-compose/ Sat, 17 Feb 2018 12:12:12 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/prometheus-experiments-with-docker-compose/ As 2018 rolls along the time has come to rebuild parts of my homelab again. This time I’m looking at my monitoring and metrics setup, which is based on sensu and graphite, and planning some experiments and evaluations using Prometheus. In this post I’ll show how I’m setting up my tests and provide the [Prometheus experiments with docker-compose](https://github.com/deanwilson/docker-compose- prometheus) source code in case it makes your own experiments a little easier to run. https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/2017-short-review/ Thu, 04 Jan 2018 22:12:01 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/2017-short-review/ It’s time for a little 2017 navel gazing. Prepare for a little self-congratulation and a touch of gushing. You’ve been warned. In general my 2017 was a decent one in terms of tech. I was fortunate to be presented a number of opportunities to get involved in projects and chat to people that I’m immensely thankful for and I’m going to mention some of them here to remind myself how lucky you can be. https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/terraform-testing-thoughts/ Fri, 29 Dec 2017 12:55:12 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/terraform-testing-thoughts/ As your terraform code grows in both size and complexity you should invest in tests and other ways to ensure everything is doing exactly what you intended. Although there are existing ways to exercise parts of your code I think Terraform is currently missing an important part of testing functionality, and I hope by the end of this post you’ll agree. <tl;dr>I want puppet catalog compile testing in terraform</tl;dr> Our current terraform testing process looks a lot like this: https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/show-server-side-response-timings-in-chrome-developer-tools/ Thu, 28 Dec 2017 17:43:21 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/show-server-side-response-timings-in-chrome-developer-tools/ While trying to add additional performance annotations to one of my side projects I recently stumbled over the exceptionally promising Server-Timing HTTP header and specification. It’s a simple way to add semi-structured values describing aspects of the response generation and how long they each took. These can then be processed and displayed in your normal web development tools. In this post I’ll show a simplified example, using Flask, to add timings to a single page response and display them using Google Chrome developer tools. https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/use-github-ssh-key-in-aws-ec2-terraform-module/ Fri, 24 Nov 2017 15:48:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/use-github-ssh-key-in-aws-ec2-terraform-module/ Like most people I have too many credentials in my life. Passwords, passphrases and key files seem to grow in number almost without bound. So, in an act of laziness, I decided to try and remove one of them. In this case it’s my AWS EC2 SSH key and instead reuse my GitHub public key when setting up my base AWS infrastructure. Once you start using EC2 on Amazon Web Services you’ll need to create, or supply an existing, SSH key pair to allow you to log in to the Linux hosts. https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/no-commits-to-master-branch/ Tue, 21 Nov 2017 17:48:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/no-commits-to-master-branch/ I’ve been a fan of Yelps pre-commit git hook manager ever since I started using it to Prevent AWS credential leaks. After a recent near miss involving a push to master I decided to take another look and see if it could provide a safety net that would only allow commits on non-master branches. It turns out it can, and it’s actually quite simple to enable if you follow the instructions below. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/i-wrote-a-book/ Thu, 16 Nov 2017 17:26:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/i-wrote-a-book/ A few months ago while stunningly bored I decided, in a massive fit of hubris, that I was going to write and publish a technical book. I wrote a pile of notes and todo items and after a good nights sleep decided it’d be a lot more work than I had time for. So I decided to repurpose Puppet CookBook and try going through the publication process with that instead. But (disclaimer) with a different title as there is already an excellent real book called Puppet Cookbook that goes in to a lot more depth than my site does. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/managing-multiple-puppet-modules-with-modulesync/ Tue, 14 Nov 2017 14:13:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/managing-multiple-puppet-modules-with-modulesync/ With the exception of children, puppies and medical compliance frameworks managing one of something is normally much easier than managing a lot of them. If you have a lot of puppet modules, and you’ll eventually always have a lot of puppet modules, you’ll get bitten by this and find yourself spending as much time managing supporting functionality as the puppet code itself. Luckily you’re not the first person to have a horde of puppet modules that share a lot of common scaffolding. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/job-applications-github-profile-oddities/ Fri, 29 Sep 2017 18:37:35 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/job-applications-github-profile-oddities/ I sift through a surprising amount, to me at least, of curricula vitae / resumes each month and one pattern I’ve started to notice is the ‘fork only’ GitHub profile. There’s been a lot written over the last few years about using your GitHub profile as an integral part of your job application. Some in favour, some very much not. While each side has valid points when recruiting I like to have all the information I can to hand, so if you include a link to your profile I will probably have a rummage around. https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/aws-trivia-broken-user-data-instance-tagging/ Wed, 09 Aug 2017 18:42:16 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/aws-trivia-broken-user-data-instance-tagging/ Have you ever noticed in the AWS console, when new instances are created, the “Tags” tab doesn’t have any content for the first few seconds? A second or two before values are added may not seem like much but it can lead to elusive provisioning issues, especially if you’re autoscaling and have easily blamed network dependencies in your user data scripts. A lot of people use Tag values in their user data scripts to help ‘inflate’ AMIs and defer some configuration, such as which config management classes to apply, to run time when the instance is started, rather than embedding them at build time when the AMI itself is created. https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/over-engineering-a-terraform-data-provider/ Tue, 08 Aug 2017 19:12:36 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/over-engineering-a-terraform-data-provider/ All the well managed AWS accounts I have access to include some form of security group control over which IP addresses can connect to them. I have a home broadband connection that provides a dynamic IP address. These two things do not play well together. Every now and again my commands will annoyingly fail with ‘access denied’. I’ll run a curl icanhazip.org, raise a new PR against the isolated bootstrap project that controls my access, get it reviewed and after running terraform, restore my access. https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/aws-security-audits-with-scout/ Fri, 04 Aug 2017 19:12:36 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/aws-security-audits-with-scout/ Inspired by a link in the always excellent Last Week in AWS I decided to investigate Scout2, a “Security auditing tool for AWS environments”. Scout2 is a command line program, written in Python, that runs against your AWS account, queries your configuration data and presents common issues and misconfigurations via a set of local HTML files. The dashboard itself is simple, but effective, and displays a nice overview of all the checks Scout2 ran. https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/terraform-equivalent-cloudformation-novalue/ Sat, 29 Jul 2017 18:40:26 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/terraform-equivalent-cloudformation-novalue/ Sometimes, when using an infrastructure as code tool like Terraform or CloudFormation, you only want to include a property on a resource under certain conditions, while always including the resource itself. In AWS CloudFormation there are a few CloudFormation Conditional Patterns that let you do this, but and this is the central point of this post, what’s the Terraform equivalent of using AWS::NoValue to remove a property? Here’s an example of doing this in CloudFormation. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/refreshing-a-keyboard-and-mouse/ Sat, 29 Jul 2017 12:33:11 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/refreshing-a-keyboard-and-mouse/ After having some work done at home I recently found myself in need of both a new keyboard and mouse on very short notice. Also wallpaper paste and electronics, not good friends. I’m very set in my ways when it comes to peripherals and over the years I’ve grown very fond of a Das Keyboard and, as a left handed mouse user, Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical combination. The keyboard should’ve been an easy replacement, unfortunately Das take a few weeks to be delivered, and these days are inching closer and closer to the 200 GBP price point. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/travis-testing-allow-failures/ Fri, 02 Jun 2017 13:01:25 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/travis-testing-allow-failures/ When it comes to running automated tests of my public Puppet code TravisCI has long been my favourite solution. It’s essentially a zero infrastructure, second pair of eyes, on all my changes. It also doesn’t have any of my local environment oddities and so provides a more realistic view of how my changes will impact users. I’ve had two Puppet testing scenarios pop up recently that were actually the same technical issue once you start exploring them, running tests against the Puppet version I use and support, and others I’m not so worried about. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/little-ruby-libraries-timecop/ Thu, 01 Jun 2017 09:55:17 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/little-ruby-libraries-timecop/ When it comes to little known rubygems that help with my testing I’m a massive fan of the relatively unknown Timecop. It’s a well written, highly focused, gem that lets you control and manipulate the date and time returned by a number of ruby methods. In specs where testing requires certainty of ‘now’ it’s become my favoured first stop. The puppet deprecate function is a good example of when I’ve needed this functionality. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/multi_epp-announcement/ Wed, 31 May 2017 10:20:25 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/multi_epp-announcement/ As part of refreshing my old puppet modules I’ve started to convert some of my Puppet templates from the older ERB format to the newer, and hopefully safer, Embedded Puppet (EPP). While it’s been a simple conversion in most cases, I did quickly find myself lacking the ability to select a template based on a hierarchy of facts, which I’ve previously used multitemplate to address. So I wrote a Puppet 4 version of multitemplate that wraps the native EPP function, adds matching lookup logic and then imaginatively called it multi_epp. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/non-intuitive-downtime-and-possibly-not-lost-sales/ Mon, 29 May 2017 11:18:44 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/non-intuitive-downtime-and-possibly-not-lost-sales/ One of the things you’ll often read in web operation books is the idea that while you’re experiencing downtime your customers are fleeing in droves and taking their orders to your competitors out of frustration. However this isn’t always the truism that people take it for. If your outages are rare, and your site is normally performant and easy to use (or has a monopoly), you’ll find this behaviour a lot less common than you’ve been told. https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/smaller-debian-docker-apt-lists/ Fri, 19 May 2017 18:23:47 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/smaller-debian-docker-apt-lists/ One of the hidden gems of GitHub is Jess Frazelle’s Dockerfiles Repo, a collection of Dockerfiles for applications she runs in containers to keep her desktop clean and minimal. While reading the NMap Dockerfile I noticed a little bit of shell I’d not seen before. I’ve included the file itself below. The line in question is && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*, a tiny bit of shell that does some additional cleanup once apt has installed the required packages. https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/nicer-jenkins-views-build-monitor-plugin/ Sat, 08 Apr 2017 13:25:28 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/nicer-jenkins-views-build-monitor-plugin/ While migrating and upgrading an old install of Jenkins over to version 2 the topic of adding some new views came up in conversation and the quite shiny Jenkins CI Build Monitor Plugin came up as a pretty, and quick to deploy, option. Using some canned test jobs we did a manual deploy of the plugin, configured a view on our testing machine, and I have to say it looks as good, and as easily readable from a few desks away, as we’d hoped. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/qa-and-the-script/ Wed, 01 Mar 2017 19:54:46 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/qa-and-the-script/ A number of roles ago the operations and developer folk were blessed with a relatively inexperienced quality assurance department that were, to put it kindly, focused on manual exploratory testing. They were, to a person, incapable of writing any kind of automated testing, running third party tools or doing anything in a reproducible way. While we’ve all worked with people lacking in certain skills what makes this story one of my favourites is that none of us knew they couldn’t handle the work. https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/developer-diaries-and-til/ Sun, 26 Feb 2017 15:14:34 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/developer-diaries-and-til/ One of the difficulties in technically mentoring juniors you don’t see on a near daily basis is ensuring the right level of challenge and learning. It’s surprisingly easy for someone to get blocked on a project or keep themselves too deep in their comfort zone and essentially halt their progress for extended periods of time. An approach I use to help avoid this stagnation is the keeping of a “Development Diary”. https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/terraform-version-restrictions/ Sat, 26 Nov 2016 19:42:10 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/terraform-version-restrictions/ One of my favourite forthcoming Terraform 0.8 features is the ability to restrict the versions of terraform a configuration file can be run by. Terraform is a rapidly moving project that constantly introduces new functionality and providers and unless you’re careful and read the change logs, and ensure everyone is running the same minor version (or you run terraform from a central point like Jenkins), you can easily find yourself getting large screens of errors from using a resource that’s in terraform master but not the version you’re running locally. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/removing-magic-numbers-and-times-from-your-puppet-manifests/ Thu, 06 Oct 2016 11:17:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/removing-magic-numbers-and-times-from-your-puppet-manifests/ In a large Puppet code base you’ll eventually end up with a scattering of time based ‘magic numbers’ such as cache expiry numbers, zone file ttls and recurring job schedules. You’ll typically find these dealt with in one of a few ways. The easiest is to ignore it and leave a hopefully guessable literal value (such as 3600). The other path often taken is the dreaded heavily linked and often missed comments that start off as 86400 # seconds in a day and over time become 3600 # seconds in a day. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-lint-plugins-2.0-upgrade/ Sun, 21 Aug 2016 17:47:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-lint-plugins-2.0-upgrade/ After the recent puppet-lint 2.0 release and the success of our puppet-lint 2.0 upgrade at work it felt like the right moment to claw some time back and update my own (11!) puppet-lint plugins to allow them to run on either puppet-lint 1 or 2. I’ve now completed this and pushed new versions of the gems to rubygems so if you’ve been waiting for version 2 compatible gems please feel free to test away. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-lint-2.0-upgrade/ Thu, 04 Aug 2016 11:47:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-lint-2.0-upgrade/ With the recent puppet-lint 2.0 release it seemed a good time to bump the version we use at $WORK and see what’d changed. In theory it was as simple as changing the version in our Gemfile and ideally everything should continue as normal, but in practise it was a little more work than that and in this post I’m going to explain what we found. Firstly let’s cover a lovely, free, bonus. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/specialising_puppet_validation_with_wrapper_functions/ Tue, 28 Jun 2016 20:10:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/specialising_puppet_validation_with_wrapper_functions/ Once your puppet code base reaches a certain size you’ll often have a number of validate_ functions testing parameters and configuration values for compliance with local rules and requirements. These invocations often look like this: validate_re($private_gpg_key_fingerprint, '^[[:alnum:]]{40}$', 'Must supply full GPG fingerprint') Once you’ve spent a minute or two reading that you’ll probably be able to understand it; but wouldn’t it be nice to not have to care about the exact details and focus on what you’re actually testing? https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/cloudformation-linting-with-cfn-nag/ Mon, 02 May 2016 17:46:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/cloudformation-linting-with-cfn-nag/ Over the last 3 years I’ve done a lot of CloudFormation work and while it’s an easy enough technology to get to grips with the mass of JSON can become a bit of a blur when you’re doing code reviews. It’s always nice to get a second pair of eyes, especially an unflagging, automated set, that has insight in to some of the easily overlooked security issues you can accidentally add to your templates. https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/terraform-module-sharing-wishlist/ Sun, 01 May 2016 17:15:40 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/terraform-module-sharing-wishlist/ I’ve been writing a few Terraform modules recently with the aim of sharing them among a few different teams and there are a couple of things missing that I think would make reusable modules much more powerful. The first and more generic issue is using the inability to use more complex data structures. After you’ve spent a while using Terraform with AWS resources you’ll develop the urge to just create a hash of tags and use it nearly everywhere. https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/testing-terraform-projects/ Thu, 21 Apr 2016 21:26:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/testing-terraform-projects/ While Terraform is remarkably good at its job there are going to be some occasions when you want to test what you wanted actually happened. In the unixdaemon_terraform_experiments repository I’m handling this with awspec and a little custom rspec directory modification. First we pull in the awspec gem. bundle install We also need to add the necessary scaffolding files: echo "gem 'awspec', '~> 0.37'" >> Gemfile mkdir spec echo "require 'awspec'" >> spec/spec_helper. https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/unixdaemon-terraform-experiments-repo/ Thu, 21 Apr 2016 20:25:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/unixdaemon-terraform-experiments-repo/ Introduction While it’s possible to experiment and learn parts of Terraform in isolation sometimes it’s handy to have a larger, more complete, environment to run your tests in. For me unixdaemon_terraform_experiments this is that repo. It will contain a number of different terraform based projects that can be consistently deployed together. You can see some of my thinking behind this in the Naive first steps with Terraform post. Terraform is a very powerful, but quite young, piece of software so I’m making this repo open to encourage sharing and invite feedback on better way to do things. https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/contaminate-aws-instance-on-login/ Sat, 02 Apr 2016 10:10:10 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/contaminate-aws-instance-on-login/ One of the principles of running large numbers of instances is that consistency is key. Config deviations cause oddities that’ll drain your time with investigations and nothing causes entropy on your hosts like an admin investigating an issue. In this post we’ll configure our instances to mark themselves as contaminated when someone logs in. We can then use other tooling to query, collate and probably reap, machines corrupted by the keystrokes of humans. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/2016-smaller-drives/ Sun, 27 Mar 2016 11:39:46 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/2016-smaller-drives/ Over the years I’ve built up a small stack of removable drives, mostly for off site backup rotation, and when one of them (a decade old Maxtor) started to sound like two angle grinders ‘passionately embracing’ I thought it was time to do some data validation and re-planning. Although I’m fully aware that most technology trends towards getting smaller and cheaper it’s been a while since I’ve been drive shopping. My god, the difference a few years makes! https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/naive-first-steps-with-terraform/ Thu, 10 Mar 2016 18:27:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/naive-first-steps-with-terraform/ Naive First Steps with Terraform On one of the $WORK projects, we’ve recently had a chance to join seemingly the entire AWS using world and spend some time using Terraform to manage a few migration prototypes. I’ve had a few little plays with Terraform over the last few years but I’ve never tried to plan a large environment with it before and even though it’s -very- early days for me it’s been an interesting path of discovery. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-integration-tests-in-seven-minutes/ Mon, 08 Feb 2016 22:45:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-integration-tests-in-seven-minutes/ While puppet-lint and rspec-puppet (thanks to Tim Sharpe) will help ensure your Puppet code is both clean and produces what you’d expect in the compiled catalog there are times when you’ll want to go further than unit testing with rspec-puppet and do some basic integration tests to ensure the system ends up in the desired state. In this post, with the assumption that you have Docker installed, I’ll show a simple way to run basic integration tests against a Puppet module. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-lint-world_writable_files-check-intial/ Wed, 03 Feb 2016 07:45:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-lint-world_writable_files-check-intial/ On a *nix system a world writable file is one that anyone can write to. This is often undesirable, especially in production, where who can write to certain files should be limited and enabled with deliberation, not by accident. Ideally you should not be deploying files with those permissions, especially not across all your machines using puppet and so I wrote this plugin to provide a small safety net. class locked_down_file { file { '/tmp/open_octal': ensure => 'file', mode => '0666', } } files should not be created with world writable permissions The world_writable_files puppet-lint check is one possible solution to this. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/yumrepo_gpgcheck_puppet-lint-initial/ Tue, 02 Feb 2016 07:43:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/yumrepo_gpgcheck_puppet-lint-initial/ The most recent in my recent series of puppet-lint plugins, the yumrepo gpgcheck enabled check, will mostly be of interest to security conscious Linux users who use a yum or dnf based package manager. In this case we’re checking the gpgcheck attribute, which indicates if yum should perform a GPG signature check on packages. Having this disabled means you’ll accept any packages from your configured repo, not just those signed by the packagers. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/no-cron-resources-puppet-lint-initial/ Mon, 01 Feb 2016 18:08:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/no-cron-resources-puppet-lint-initial/ Sometimes there are certain puppet resource types that you don’t want to include in your code base. In my case it was cron but in yours it could be the more line originated augeas or the horribly named computer. The no cron resources check puppet-lint check will display a warning each time it finds a resource of that type in your manifests. class cron_resource { cron { 'logrotate': command => '/usr/sbin/logrotate', user => root, hour => 2, minute => 0, } }# and the lint check will show: # 'cron resources should not be used' While installing the plugin is done in the usual way - https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/duplicate_class_parameters-puppet-lint-initial/ Fri, 29 Jan 2016 07:23:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/duplicate_class_parameters-puppet-lint-initial/ In versions of Puppet under 3.8.5 it’s been possible to have the same parameter name specified multiple times in a class definition without error. Although allowed it was a little misleading as only the last value assigned to that parameter was taken and so in the name of simplicity it was decided in the No error on duplicate parameters ticket that this behaviour should change and now return an error. Puppet itself will start to throw an error in 3. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/no-symbolic-modes-puppet-lint-initial/ Thu, 28 Jan 2016 00:23:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/no-symbolic-modes-puppet-lint-initial/ Modern versions of Puppet allow you to specify the mode of a file resource in one of two ways, either as a traditional octal value or the (newer addition) symbolic file modes. Although these may seem equivalent there is a minor difference that recently caused an issue on a project I do a little bit of puppet work for. Below are two example resources that each set the files permissions so the user can read and write it. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/website-monitoring-statuscake-terraform/ Mon, 25 Jan 2016 22:29:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/website-monitoring-statuscake-terraform/ As part of operation ‘make my infrastructure look like an adult operates it’ I needed to add some basic uptime/availability checks to a few simple sites. After some investigation I came up with three options, Pingdom, which I’d used before in production and was comfortable with, and two I’d not used in the past Uptime Robot and Status Cake. By coincidence I was also doing my quarterly check of which AWS resources Terraform supported and I noticed that a StatusCake Provider had recently been added so I decided to experiment with the two of them together. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/tweaking-the-toolchain-201601/ Sat, 23 Jan 2016 17:34:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/tweaking-the-toolchain-201601/ Once you’ve been using *nix for a while it’s easy to become complacent with the dozen or so tools you reach for most often. As part of starting a new job, and having a Mac ‘bestowed’ on me, I’ve decided to make a conscious effort to choose my tools, rather than reach for the familiar. The first batch that have managed to survive January and still be mostly helpful are: https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/pip-2015-q4/ Sat, 23 Jan 2016 16:51:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/pip-2015-q4/ 2015 is long over and it’s time for a little belated reflection over its last three months. Firstly we’ll cover reading. In general I try and read one tech book each month. In Q4 I totalled 5 - Violent Python TMUX (PragProg) Exceptional Ruby (PragProg) Rails, Angular, Postgres, and Bootstrap (PragProg) The REST API Design Handbook Of those I enjoyed (the beta version of) Rails, Angular, Postgres, and Bootstrap the most. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/introducing-deprecate-function/ Fri, 27 Nov 2015 14:43:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/introducing-deprecate-function/ A fair while ago I wrote a Deprecation Warnings From Puppet Resources blog post and metaparameter for adding expiry information to your manifests - file { '/ec/cron.d/remove_foos': ensure => 'file', source => 'puppet:///modules/foo/foo.cron',# our custom metaparameter deprecation => '20130425:Release 6 removes the need for the foo cronjob', } We were happy users of this for a while but it had a high cost, we had to maintain our own puppet fork due to puppet being unable to load metaparams from modules. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-validate-json-schema-function/ Fri, 27 Nov 2015 12:45:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-validate-json-schema-function/ A few projects ago we had a JSON app with quite a fiddly config file that was undergoing rapid iteration. Although we never deployed an invalid JSON config we hit a couple of snags with config files that didn’t quite match up to the applications expectations. A proposed solution was to produce a JSON Schema document we could use in both integration tests and to ensure the JSON we generated in Puppet was both well formed and, more importantly, valid for that version of the application. https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/trying-jenkins-view-builder/ Wed, 25 Nov 2015 16:18:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/trying-jenkins-view-builder/ As you add more jobs to Jenkins you’ll often want to start breaking them out in to smaller, more logically grouped, views. While the UI itself makes this simple it’s a manual task, and as automation loving admins we can do better than clicking around. In this post we’ll take a brief look at the jenkins-view-builder and see if it can make our lives any easier. My test case will be a simple Jenkins view that should include any jobs whose names match the test-puppet-. https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/testing-dockerfiles-with-serverspec/ Thu, 05 Nov 2015 16:36:51 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/testing-dockerfiles-with-serverspec/ While there are many ways to test your code under Docker, for example puppet modules with dockunit, discussions about how to run acceptance checks against docker image and container creation are less common. In this post we’ll present one approach using the docker api and serverspec to test the creation and execution of a dockerised Redis. As our first step we’ll create the directory we’ll be testing under and a basic Dockerfile. https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/preventing-aws-creds-in-git-with-pre-commit/ Tue, 03 Nov 2015 12:20:53 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/preventing-aws-creds-in-git-with-pre-commit/ Ever since I started using distributed version control systems one of my fears has been accidentally publishing security credentials that could be maliciously used against me. Add to this services like AWS where you can run up a large bill very quickly, and an employer that tries to open source everything possible, and eventually you know you’re going to slip up and expose something you shouldn’t. In the past I’ve cobbled together git commit hooks to provide a basic safety net but I’m looking for a more designed solution and pre-commit is heavily in the running. https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/five-minutes-with-testinfra/ Wed, 28 Oct 2015 13:45:48 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/five-minutes-with-testinfra/ Continuing my journey through infrastructure testing tools we next visit testinfra, a serverspec equivalent written in python. For continuity purposes we’ll redo the Redis tests from the previous blog post. First we’ll configure a testinfra virtualenv we can use for our experiments. $ virtualenv testinfra-py-redis New python executable in testinfra-py-redis/bin/python2 $ cd testinfra-py-redis $ source bin/activate (testinfra-py-redis)[dwilson@home testinfra-py-redis]$ $ pip install testinfra # prove it works $ testinfra --version Now we have a working install of testinfra we’ll write some tests for redis. https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/aws-codecommit-initial-thoughts/ Tue, 27 Oct 2015 22:20:26 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/aws-codecommit-initial-thoughts/ As part of re-doing my home infrastructure I’m looking to add a remote location for my private git repos. My use case is a simple one, I need lots of low cost, tiny, private repos, each with a few dozen files at most. I don’t need a comprehensive set of collaboration features as I’m normally the only one working on them. My current practice is to keep my private repos on a local git server and anything open source goes to GitHub. https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/iam-users-groups-terraform-and-cloudformation/ Fri, 23 Oct 2015 19:08:40 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/iam-users-groups-terraform-and-cloudformation/ As possibly the last AWS using sysadmin in London who’s not invested in Terraform I’ve decided it’s time to take my quarterly look at the tool. This time around I decided to start with a basic IAM admin user and group. For my stripped down example I’m going to create a user and group, add the user to a group and set an explicit IAM group policy. As a novice terraform user I find the code easy to read, the online documentation was short but helpful and the getting started guide did indeed guide my starting. https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/testing-with-goss/ Thu, 22 Oct 2015 01:27:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/testing-with-goss/ I’m a big fan of serverspec but there are times the ruby tool chain behind it can be an annoyance and result in lots of baggage being installed. This isn’t a major problem on development machines, where many of the gems will already exist, but on production hosts the runtime dependencies can be comparatively heavy. To avoid this I’ve started looking at possible alternatives and one young, but promising, project is Goss https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/simple-puppet-module-testing-with-dockunit/ Tue, 20 Oct 2015 19:09:45 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/simple-puppet-module-testing-with-dockunit/ I’ve recently begun to look at replacing as much of my custom puppet tooling as possible with third-party, open source, code. As part of this I’m planning to update my old libvirt testing infrastructure with more modern tools, and this seems to be leading me heavily down the docker path. One of the simpler, but less known, solutions in this space seems to be Dockunit, which bills itself as “Containerized unit testing across any platform and programming language” and is remarkably simple to get started with. https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/ansible-expand-cloudformation-templates/ Wed, 26 Nov 2014 13:39:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/ansible-expand-cloudformation-templates/ After a previous comment about “templating CloudFormation JSON from a tool higher up in your stack” I had a couple of queries about how I’m doing this. In this post I’ll show a small example that explains the work flow. We’re going to create a small CloudFormation template, with a single Jinja2 embedded directive, and call it from an example playbook. This template creates an S3 bucket resource and dynamically sets the “DeletionPolicy” attribute based on a value in the playbook. https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/cloudformation-annoyance-deletion-policy-parameters/ Mon, 24 Nov 2014 13:22:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/cloudformation-annoyance-deletion-policy-parameters/ You can create some high value resources using CloudFormation that you’d like to ensure exist even after a stack has been removed. Imagine being the admin to accidently delete the wrong stack and having to watch as your RDS master, and all your prod data, slowly vanishes in to the void of AWS reclaimed volumes. Luckily AWS provides a way to reduce this risk, the DeletionPolicy Attribute. By specifying this on a resource you can ensure that if your stack is deleted then certain resources survive and function as usual. https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/aws-cloudformation-parameters-size-tips/ Sat, 22 Nov 2014 16:21:26 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/aws-cloudformation-parameters-size-tips/ While AWS CloudFormation is one of the best ways to ensure your AWS environments are reproducible it can also be a bit of an awkward beast to use. Here are a couple of simple time saving tips for refining your CFN template parameters. The first one is also the simplest, always define at the least a MinLength property on your parameters and ideally an AllowedValues or AllowedPattern. This ensures that your stack will fail early if no value is provided. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/facter-ansible-facts-in-puppet/ Thu, 09 Oct 2014 21:34:50 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/facter-ansible-facts-in-puppet/ Have you ever needed to access Ansible facts from inside Puppet? well, if you ever need to, you can use the basic ansible_facts custom fact. # make sure you have ansible installed $ sudo puppet resource package ansible ensure=present # clone my experimental puppet fact repo $ git clone https://github.com/deanwilson/unixdaemon-puppet_facts.git # Try running the fact $ ruby -I unixdaemon-puppet_facts/lib/ `which facter` ansible_facts -j { "ansible_facts": { "ansible_architecture": "x86_64", "ansible_bios_date": "04/25/2013", "ansible_bios_version": "RKPPT%$DSFH. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-3.7-file-function/ Thu, 09 Oct 2014 18:07:59 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-3.7-file-function/ Puppet’s always had a couple of little inconsistencies when it comes to the file and template functions. The file function has always been able to search for multiple files and return the contents of the first file found but it required absolute paths. The template function accepts module based paths but doesn’t allow for matching on the first found file. Although this can be fixed with the Puppet Multiple Template Source Function. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-lint-custom-checks/ Sat, 04 Oct 2014 11:29:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-lint-custom-checks/ In the past if you wanted to run your own puppet-lint checks there was no official, really clean way to distribute them outside of the core code. Now, with the 1.0 release of puppet-lint you can write your own, external, puppet-lint checks and make them easily distributable. I spent a little bit of time this morning reading through the existing 3rd party community plugins and after porting a private absolute template path check over to the new system I have to say that rodjek has done an excellent job with both the ease of writing your own checks and the quality of the developer tutorial. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-professional-2014/ Thu, 11 Sep 2014 13:36:27 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-professional-2014/ A little while ago in a twitter conversation, many hops away a few of us discussed the Puppet Certified Professional exam and topic coverage. Specifically how much of it was focused on Puppet Enterprise (PE) and if it would either dissuade users of purely FOSS Puppet or heavily impact their chance of passing if they’d never used PE. While I stand by my views I began to worry that my knowledge of the syllabus was only based on hearsay, the practice exam questions and that I was being overly harsh and possibly spreading misinformation through my own ignorance. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/simplifying-an-online-presence-2014/ Thu, 11 Sep 2014 01:24:27 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/simplifying-an-online-presence-2014/ It is amazing how many small commitments and fragments of an online presence you can collect over years of being involved in different projects and user groups. I’ve ended up hosting planets, user group sites, submission forms (and other scripts), managing twitter announcement accounts, pushing tar balls (don’t ask) and running (and owning) more domains than I could ever really want or do anything useful with. After an initial audit of how difficult it’d be to move some of my public servers I’ve realised that something has to change. https://www.unixdaemon.net/ansible/ansible-aws-lookup-plugins/ Wed, 23 Jul 2014 18:55:59 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/ansible/ansible-aws-lookup-plugins/ Once we started linking multiple CloudFormation stacks together with Ansible we started to feel the need to query Amazon Web Services for both the output values from existing CloudFormation stacks and certain other values, such as security group IDs and Elasticache Replication Group Endpoints. We found that the quickest and easiest way to gather this information was with a handful of Ansible Lookup Plugins. I’ve put the code for the more generic Ansible AWS Lookup Plugins on github and even if you’re an Ansible user who’s not using AWS they are worth a look just to see how easy it is to write one. https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/managing-cloudformation-stacks-with-ansible/ Tue, 25 Mar 2014 23:38:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/managing-cloudformation-stacks-with-ansible/ Constructing a large, multiple application, virtual datacenter with CloudFormation can quickly lead to a sprawl of different stacks. The desire to split things sensibly, delegate control of separate tiers and loosely couple as many components as possible can lead to a large number of stacks, lots of which need values from stacks created earlier in the run order. While it’s possible to do this with the native AWS CloudFormation command line tools, or even some clever bash https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/project-book-pages-2014/ Sat, 22 Mar 2014 15:30:13 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/project-book-pages-2014/ I’ve been doing my usual quarterly sweep of the always too full bookshelves and hit the usual dilemma of what to keep, what to donate to charity and what to recycle. Among the technical books in this batch is the ‘Sendmail Cookbook’, something I’ve always kept as a good luck charm to ward off the evil of needing to work with mail servers with m4 based configuration languages. Sendmail is one of those projects that I’ve not kept up with over the years. https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/managing-cloudformation-stacks-with-cumulus/ Mon, 17 Mar 2014 20:01:29 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/managing-cloudformation-stacks-with-cumulus/ Working with multiple, related CloudFormation stacks can become quite taxing if you only use the native AWS command line tools. Commands start off gently - cfn-create-stack dwilson-megavpc-sns-emails --parameters "AutoScaleSNSTopic=testy@example.org" \ --template-file location/sns-email-topic.json but they quickly become painful. The two commands below each create stacks that depend on values from resources that have been defined in a previous stack. You can spot these values by their unfriendly appearance, such as ‘rtb-9n0tr34lac55’ and ‘subnet-e4n0tr34la’. https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/abstracting-aws-cloudformation-iam-with-nested-stacks/ Tue, 04 Mar 2014 22:38:51 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/abstracting-aws-cloudformation-iam-with-nested-stacks/ Once we started extracting applications into different logical CloudFormation stacks and physical templates, we began to notice quite a lot of duplication in our json when it came to declaring IAM rules. Some of our projects store their puppet, hiera and rpm files in restricted S3 buckets so allowing stacks access to them based upon environment, region, stack name and other criteria quickly becomes quite long-winded. After looking at a couple of dozen application templates and finding that over 30% of the json was IAM based it was time to find a different approach. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/structured-facts-with-facter2/ Sat, 01 Mar 2014 16:04:44 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/structured-facts-with-facter2/ Structured facts in facter had become the Puppet communities version of ‘Duke Nukem Forever’, something that’s always been just around the next corner. Now that the facter 2.0.1 release candidate is out you can finally get your hands on an early version and do some experimentation. First we grab a version of facter 2 that supports structured facts from puppetlabs - # our play ground mkdir /tmp/facter && cd /tmp/facter # grab the code wget https://downloads. https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/automatic-cloudformation-template-validation-with-guard-cloudformation/ Sat, 01 Mar 2014 10:44:51 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/automatic-cloudformation-template-validation-with-guard-cloudformation/ One of the nice little conveniences I’ve started to use in my daily work with Amazon Webservices CloudFormation is the Guard::CloudFormation ruby gem. The Guard gem "is a command line tool to easily handle events on file system modifications" which, simply put, means “run a command when a file changes”. While I’ve used a number of different little tools to do this in the past, Guard presents a promising base to build more specific test executors on so I’ve started to integrate it in to more aspects of my work flow. https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/config-mgmt-camp-juju/ Wed, 12 Feb 2014 23:52:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/config-mgmt-camp-juju/ One of the biggest surprises of Config Management Camp 2014 for me was how interesting Canonicals orchestration management tool, Juju has become. Although I much preferred the name ‘Ensemble’. I attended the Juju session in an attempt to keep myself out of the Puppet room and was pleasantly surprised at how much Juju had progressed since I last looked at it. Rather than being another config management solution it allows you to model your systems using “charms”, which can be implemented using anything from a bash script to a set of chef/puppet cookbooks/modules, and instead focuses on ensuring that they run across your fleet in a predictable way while enforcing dependencies, even over multiple tiers, no matter how many tools you choose to use underneath. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/ansible-configuration-management-short-review/ Mon, 13 Jan 2014 21:50:37 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/ansible-configuration-management-short-review/ I’m still new to Ansible and while it’s been interesting seeing how people are starting to use the tool, picking up bits and pieces from different blog posts is a little too hit and miss for my learning needs. When I spotted Ansible Configuration Management (PacktPub) I decided to take the plunge and see if it could provide me with a more consistent introduction. And it did. This book makes an ideal first stop for anyone wanting to learn Ansible. https://www.unixdaemon.net/ansible/ansible-cloudformation-lookups/ Sat, 11 Jan 2014 12:49:37 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/ansible/ansible-cloudformation-lookups/ As the Ansible/AWS investigations continue I had the need to lookup outputs from existing CloudFormation stacks. I spent ten minutes reading through the existing lookup plugins and came up with the Ansible CloudFormation Lookup Plugin. I’m not sure this is going to be our final solution. Michael DeHaan suggested that moving to a fact plugin might be better in terms of cleaner usage and easier testing, so I’m at the least going to implement a trial version of that. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/learning-aws-opsworks-review/ Mon, 06 Jan 2014 10:26:50 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/learning-aws-opsworks-review/ I picked up a copy of Learning AWS OpsWorks during the PacktPub holiday sale. It was cheap, short and covered a AWS product that I’ve never had need to dig in to and knew very little about. The book takes you through creating a basic stack, the layers inside it and deploying an application to managed instances. Its coverage is very high level and doesn’t really go beyond a cursory explanation of the services used. https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/intro-to-cloudformations-conditionals/ Fri, 03 Jan 2014 12:51:15 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/intro-to-cloudformations-conditionals/ Back in November 2013 Amazon added a much requested feature to CloudFormation, the ability to conditionally include resources or their properties in to a stack. As an example I’m currently using this as a small cost saving measure to ensure only my production RDS instances have PIOPs applied to them while being able to build each environment from a single template. CloudFormation Conditionals live in their own section of a CloudFormation template. https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/pip-2013/ Wed, 01 Jan 2014 20:51:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/pip-2013/ I changed jobs midway through 2013 and quite quickly discovered that I’d been a little too buried in my role and not been keeping up other parts of my technical interests. As a first step I decided to put a very basic Pragmatic Investment Plan in place. Mostly as a simple way to ensure I actually started to get involved in non-work things again. Firstly I set myself the task of recording which books I actually read. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-package-install-options/ Fri, 20 Dec 2013 14:36:54 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-package-install-options/ One of the new features released in Puppet 3.4.0 is the ability to add options to rpm package installs. This is a feature that’s been discussed in a couple of tickets over the years and now we’ve got an official, in core, approach I’ve copied the code to the yum and apt providers github branch. class pkgoptions { package { 'strace': ensure => 'installed', provider => 'yum', install_options => [ '--noplugins', '--enablerepo=fedora' ],# or install_options => [ '-t', 'squeeze-backports' ], for Debian backports } } The approach in this patch is not the final one I’d like to take so I’ve not submitted it upstream. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-external-resource-hidden-gem/ Wed, 11 Dec 2013 13:07:10 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-external-resource-hidden-gem/ "a simple resource that blocks transactions until a check passes, theoretically indicating that a remote resource is in a desired state.“ – Puppet Remote Resource Documentation I stumbled over the Puppet Remote Resource module while looking around the Puppetlabs github account for something completely different and was surprised to find that I’d never seen this little gem mentioned anywhere else. A pre-built way to have a puppet resource skipped based on the result of an external command is a very flexible tool, especially when you couple it with all the available nagios checks. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/introduction-to-programming-in-go-short-review/ Wed, 04 Dec 2013 00:15:42 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/introduction-to-programming-in-go-short-review/ I don’t often impulse buy technical books. They cost too much and consume too much shelf space to be purchased frivolously but when it’s 1.95 for a Kindle book on Go and I’m stuck miles from home it seemed like a good idea. An Introduction to Programming in Go is a well written guide to your first hour in Go. While you can probably find coverage of the same material on the web, having it all nicely curated in one place is worth the money for someone like me who just wants a little taster and overview. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-resource-ordering-options/ Tue, 03 Dec 2013 12:47:22 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-resource-ordering-options/ Over the years Puppet has handled resources ordering without explicit dependencies in different ways, with the release of Puppet 3.3.0 they’ve exposed this ordering logic to the admin with three interesting options. To test these options out we’ll use the ‘ordering’ test module shown below. We include three classes, ordering::beta, ordering::alpha and ordering::gamma (note that the includes are not in alphabetically sorted order). Each of these classes has three notify statements that show a number and the class they are contained in. https://www.unixdaemon.net/ansible/ansible-aws-security-groups/ Mon, 02 Dec 2013 23:58:24 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/ansible/ansible-aws-security-groups/ We use Amazon CloudFormation for a number of our deployments at $WORK. Although it’s nice to have security group creation inside the same template as the resources it will secure, CloudFormations ‘helpful’ addition of a unique string at the end of the resource names it creates can sometimes be a problem. A couple of tools assume security groups will have an absolute, unchanging name and lack a way to search for an appropriately tagged security group whose name can change on stack rebuild. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-books-2013/ Sat, 30 Nov 2013 14:27:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-books-2013/ Even though I don’t spend as much time writing puppet code as I used to I try to stay relevant and as part of that I like to read all the Puppet books that come out. Below are the ones I’ve read this year, brief thoughts on them and the reading path I’d give to a new junior. As the name implies the Puppet 3 Beginner’s Guide is a decent place to start learning Puppet. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/pro-puppet-initial-review/ Sat, 30 Nov 2013 14:16:22 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/pro-puppet-initial-review/ The kind people at Apress provided me with an alpha review copy of Pro Puppet and while it’s not the finished product you can already get a good feel for the books tone and coverage. I quite liked the first edition of Pro Puppet and this update is more evolutionary than revolutionary. All chapters from the previous edition are present and the biggest addition is the very welcome chapter on using Hiera in your modules; even if it’s oddly placed at the end of the book. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/liquid-templates-in-puppet-initial-release/ Thu, 10 Oct 2013 12:24:40 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/liquid-templates-in-puppet-initial-release/ Puppet has always supported templating via ERB and while it’s a powerful, flexible templating engine the ability to use any arbitrary ruby code inside a template that’s run on the puppet master sometimes raises some eyebrows. As part of a security architecture review the concept of replacing the templating engine with something that still allows looping and text manipulation without allowing too much else was discussed and led to the idea of allowing templates to be written in Liquid. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/validate-config-files-puppet-ansible/ Wed, 09 Oct 2013 18:35:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/validate-config-files-puppet-ansible/ While doing some experiments with Ansible I came across a little snippet of code that I really liked - - name: manage /etc/sudoers template: src=sudoers.j2 dest=/etc/sudoers validate='visudo -cf %s' Ansible runs the command specified by ‘validate’ against the expanded templates contents and only copies the newly generated file in to place if it’s valid. This is a wonderful feature that will help stop you from making some potentially time consuming errors. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/asserting-existence-external-facts/ Tue, 08 Oct 2013 12:23:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/asserting-existence-external-facts/ Facter 1.7 introduced support for external facts, and I gave some external fact examples, but it left a couple of small issues unresolved. One of the larger ones is the subject of syncing the external facts down to the clients. At the moment most people are managing the external facts as file resources which creates one important difference between an internal and external fact. Internal facts are synced down at the start of the run and so are available to the puppet agent within a single run. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/protect-internal-puppet-classes/ Fri, 04 Oct 2013 10:52:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/protect-internal-puppet-classes/ When writing puppet modules sometimes you need to ensure that certain classes are only used within your module itself. For example a class that implements functionality based on the local operating system that should only be used by your public class. While reading though the new puppetlabs-mcollective modules source I came across a new pattern I’d not seen used in puppet before that achieves this in a very elegant way and i thought it was worth a second look. https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/cloudformation-s3-buckets-and-iam-roles/ Fri, 30 Aug 2013 17:13:34 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/cloudformation-s3-buckets-and-iam-roles/ We’re currently moving some of our early stage dev prototypes to a more automated environment and as part of this work I’m converting command line AWS resource creation to parameterised CloudFormation templates that we can use to either run multiple stacks side by side or recreate the entire stack from development to production. It’s been quite a frustrating afternoon due to some tool chain related yak shaving and some nuances in how CloudFormation works. https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/vca-dcv-cert-review-2013/ Wed, 28 Aug 2013 21:43:36 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/vca-dcv-cert-review-2013/ The most interesting links in my twitter feed this week have all been about VMWorld 2013 and the new technologies VMWare is making available in vSphere 5.5. As I don’t actually use VMWare at work (we’re using KVM and AWS at the moment) very little of it is immediately relevant to me - but then I spotted the ‘VMWare Certified Associate - Data Center Virtualization’ announcement. There is some combination of both being stuck inside waiting for family to arrive and pure envy about all the new cool stuff that tempted me in to watching the (free) VMWare Data Center Virtualization Fundamentals training course, reading the exam blue print and making an attempt at the exam. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/heroku-up-and-running-short-review/ Mon, 26 Aug 2013 19:17:58 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/heroku-up-and-running-short-review/ Disclaimer: I read the early release version of this book. Some details may change between the version I read the final, published one. The first two chapters of Heroku: Up and Running are my favourite of the book. After the usual selling and explanation of virtual servers and the arrival of ‘The Cloud’ the authors cover the concept, culture and technical architecture of Heroku. The technical details of a closed company are never covered as deeply as you’d like but the material here is interesting, explains quite a lot of Herokus main technology and approaches and how th platform has evolved to enhance an opinionated work flow that seems to suit many developers. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/bandit-algorithms-short-review/ Mon, 26 Aug 2013 17:03:32 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/bandit-algorithms-short-review/ It’s been quite a while since I’ve been heavily involved in large scale A/B testing frameworks and after reading Bandit Algorithms for Website Optimization I feel like I’ve been shown a whole new toolkit in under 90 pages. This slim book quickly explains the basic principles of A/B testing and then introduces both one of the major problems with it, sending traffic to an inefficient option, and presents three algorithms based on studies of the multi-armed bandit problem that will introduce you to new, faster, ways to determine which trials are worth investigation and further exploration. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-augeas-providers-shells/ Wed, 17 Jul 2013 18:21:55 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-augeas-providers-shells/ I’ve recently had the need to create a handful of small file based providers in puppet and while trundling uphill against the ParsedFile provider I decided to have a look at how custom providers are written using the Puppet augeas providers. My sample provider is a simple one, it manages entries in /etc/shells and was quite quick to write. While augeasproviders assumes you know how Puppet types and providers are structured it does present a very standardised way of using the augeas library in order to manipulate your target. https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/the-four-stages-of-cloudformation/ Mon, 15 Jul 2013 18:35:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/the-four-stages-of-cloudformation/ AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion. -- AWS CloudFormation Homepage I’ve gone from never having used Amazon CloudFormation to building multi- tier, cross region, many availability zone deployments in a couple of months and while digging through official documentation, support requests, blog posts and sample templates I’ve put together what I’ve come to view as the ‘Four Stages of CloudFormation’. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/velocity-santa-clara-2013-tutorials/ Wed, 19 Jun 2013 07:24:41 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/velocity-santa-clara-2013-tutorials/ Ever since they started the Velocity Conference in the US I’ve wanted to attend one and this year I finally made it to the Santa Clara Velocity (2013). I was lucky enough to attend a tutorial in each of the four slots: Monitoring and Observability - Theo Schlossnagle Bits on the Wire - Mark Nottingham Using Amazon Web Services for MySQL at Scale - Laine Campbell Managing PostgreSQL with Ansible in EC2 - Jay Edwards I attended Mark and Theos talks based on upon previous experience of them as presenters. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/external-facter-facts/ Wed, 15 May 2013 21:46:47 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/external-facter-facts/ While Puppet may get all the glory, Facter, the hard working information gathering library that can, seldom gets much exciting new functionality. However with the release of Facter 1.7 Puppetlabs have standardised and included a couple of useful facter enhancements that make it easier than ever to add custom facts to your puppet runs. These two improvements come under the banner of ‘External Facts’. The first allows you to surface your own facts from a static file, either plain text key value pairs or a specific YAML / JSON format. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/deprecation-warnings-from-puppet-resources/ Sat, 27 Apr 2013 12:53:44 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/deprecation-warnings-from-puppet-resources/ Over time parts of your puppet manifests will become unneeded. You might move a cronjob or a users in to a package or no longer need a service to be enabled after a given release. I’ve recently had this use case and had two options - either rely on comments in the Puppet code and write an out of band tool to scan the code base and present a report or add them to the puppet resources themselves. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/cisco-routers-for-the-desperate-2nd-edition-review/ Mon, 25 Mar 2013 16:25:46 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/cisco-routers-for-the-desperate-2nd-edition-review/ Reviewing the second edition of Cisco Routers for the Desperate was quite hard for me as I have very little to add to the Cisco Routers for the Desperate 1st edition review I posted a few years ago. After reading through this update pretty much all those comments still stand. It’s an excellent, useful, well written book and the author still has a -distinct- written tone. I enjoyed the book; I must have considering I bought the second edition! https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/fosdem-2013/ Sat, 16 Feb 2013 13:39:39 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/fosdem-2013/ Well, that’s another FOSDEM over with. In general this year seemed the same as the last couple of years but slightly bigger than usual (although it seems that way every year). The (newish) K building was in full swing with dozens of project stalls and dev rooms. The usual suspects - virtualisation / cloud, configuration management and MySQL rooms had nearly as many people trying to get in to the rooms as they did sitting down. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-camp-ghent-2013/ Mon, 11 Feb 2013 13:11:35 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-camp-ghent-2013/ It’s been a while since I’ve attended a Puppet Camp but considering the quality of the last one (organised by Patrick Debois) and the fact it was being held in the lovely city of Ghent again I thought it’d be a wise investment to scrape together the time off. The quality of the talks seemed quite high and considering the number of newer users present the content level was well pitched. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/resilience-and-reliability-on-aws-book-review/ Sun, 10 Feb 2013 16:23:03 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/resilience-and-reliability-on-aws-book-review/ With a title like Resilience and Reliability on AWS I had quite high expectations for this slim book. Unfortunately, they were not met. The first four chapters provide brief introductions to AWS and some of its more popular services. While these were fine I’d point people looking for this level of information at the Amazon Webservice Advent 2012 instead. Following this are a handful of more cookbook like chapters that each present a small amount of theory and advice about how to run a given applications on AWS - interspaced with multiple pages of python code. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/prettier-puppet-with-pocco/ Sun, 27 Jan 2013 11:10:33 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/prettier-puppet-with-pocco/ Back in October Nan Liu announced “pocco - a puppet manifest documentation experiment" as a way of generating much nicer looking documentation for puppet classes (you can see an example and reducing the amount of boilerplate needed to document your classes. After some issues with the ruby libraries it depends on, I ran it over a couple of my smaller manifests and I have to say the output is very readable and quite presentable. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/tech-events-q1-2013/ Sun, 27 Jan 2013 10:46:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/tech-events-q1-2013/ For sysadmins and devopsy type people the next couple of months are full of chances to meet and learn from your European peers - We start off with the return of PuppetCamp to its home in Gent. Puppetcamps are a great, informal way to see how other people are using Puppet and put names to faces. A number of the more active European community members will be present and Ghent is a lovely city so it’s worth a couple of days out of the office - and then of course you can stay for … https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/aws-advent-2012-rocks/ Sat, 12 Jan 2013 00:08:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/cloud/aws-advent-2012-rocks/ While most of us spend our December hunting for those last minute gifts, treats and surprise presents, a small number of techies manage to find the time to write a themed set of articles on certain technical topics that are combined in to an advent calendar. While I’m a little ashamed to say I’ve not yet read the 2012 SysAdvent posts I did have a chance to look at the inaugural, and quite excellent Amazon Webservice Advent 2012 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/puppet-types-and-providers-short-review/ Thu, 10 Jan 2013 21:34:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/puppet-types-and-providers-short-review/ Over the years I’ve realised that tools I can extend always return the effort taken to learn them many times over. While a number of us have worked through the source code of existing Puppet types and providers and the handful of official wiki pages and unofficial blog posts the release of Puppet Types and Providers means that the rest of you won’t have to - this book brings most of the power with far, far less of the pain and uncertainty. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/building-and-testing-with-gradle-short-review/ Thu, 10 Jan 2013 21:15:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/building-and-testing-with-gradle-short-review/ When I picked up this very slim tome I knew nearly nothing about Gradle. Over the hundred odd well written pages of Building and Testing with Gradle I learned enough to understand the basic how, when and whys of the tool. The book itself covered basic Gradle usage, how it compares to existing tools like maven, how to use ant and your existing ant task toolbox from within it and a basic look at how to write a custom task and integrate your own testing. https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/pip-2012-2013/ Sun, 30 Dec 2012 12:12:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/pip-2012-2013/ The aim is to, at the least, achieve all these goals. The time allocated is from December 2012 to December 2013. Read (and hopefully Review) 12 Tech books Building and Testing with Gradle - Short Review Puppet Types and Providers - Short Review Resilience and Reliability on AWS - book review Cisco Routers for the Desperate (2nd edition) The Phoenix Project Effective monitoring and alerting Beginning Puppet Cloud Architecture Patterns Bandit Algorithms for Website Optimization Heroku: Up and Running Extreme Programming Adventures in C# Micro-ISV (Vision to reality) An Introduction to Programming in Go Pro Puppet 2nd Edition Write 50 blog posts. https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/introduction-to-dsac/ Tue, 05 Jul 2011 18:45:59 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/introduction-to-dsac/ A while ago @ripienaar and I had a chat in a pub about monitoring, event systems and lots of related subjects. As we all know he’s way more productive than is fair and so while he’s been doing a BUNDLE of work with on subjects like monitoring frameworks and event correlation I’ve been doing some thinking (and no actual coding) about event auditing, continuous compliance and security event management. Now I’ve finished the $TIMESINK_PROJECT I’m soon going to actually need some of this stuff so I’ve started putting together a prototype framework that I’m calling DSAC - Dump Send and Correlate. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/simple-puppet-module-grepper-prototype/ Tue, 21 Jun 2011 00:36:19 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/simple-puppet-module-grepper-prototype/ <tl;dr> Search for puppet resources values using puppet, not just plain text</tl;dr> One of the ideas that has been sitting on my todo list is having a command that lets me grep a puppet manifest for certain properties, values or even just resources in a smarter way than just running a raw grep over files. While a simple grep works in some cases it is annoyingly fragile when you’re trying to ignore literal strings in resource types that you’re not interested in or narrow your search down to resources that have a property that can also appear in other types. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/smarter-service-status-in-puppet/ Thu, 16 Jun 2011 17:22:51 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/smarter-service-status-in-puppet/ While most people know you can use puppet to ensure a service is running the mechanism it uses to determine if a service is actually running is often unexplored. By default (at least up to Puppet 2.6) puppet assumes that a service doesn’t supply a working status option and so will look up the services name in the process table to check if it’s running. If your service does support the status argument you can set ‘hasstatus => true’ and the platforms service provider will be used to interrogate the services current status. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/vmware-vsphere-hadrs-deep-dive-review/ Sun, 22 May 2011 09:49:02 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/vmware-vsphere-hadrs-deep-dive-review/ It’s been years since I’ve read a book on VMWare. Between the maturity and ease of use of their GUI tools and my own continual move towards Free virtualisation I’ve not had the professional need or the spare time to invest but when a book comes as highly recommended as the VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical deepdive does you have to make some room on your (virtual) bookshelf. https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/wrapping-mcollective-for-nagios/ Sat, 14 May 2011 17:55:18 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/wrapping-mcollective-for-nagios/ I’ve been doing a little tinkering with pre/post release checklists and compliance reporting using cucumber and some Nagios wrapping (among other things) in my test lab and recently needed to do some higher level entire environment checks before moving on to the next step. While it’s possible to wrap something like nmaps ping check and then Nagios each target it does feel like stepping back a few years in the tool chain. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/london-devops-may-2011/ Sat, 14 May 2011 12:56:35 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/london-devops-may-2011/ I never thought I’d use a cliche like “David vs Goliath” but considering the two speakers at London Devops it does seem a little apt. Andrew Godwin from ep.io, a Python hosting platform, was the first speaker, and he did an excellent job of explaining their internal platform, how they make their decisions and what makes them special. While it was both an interesting and engaging talk it did leave me a little worried about the size of the operation. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/loadays-2011/ Tue, 19 Apr 2011 16:29:18 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/loadays-2011/ Last year at one of the many Belgium tech events Kris mentioned a conference called LOAD (2010) to me. I was a little late in booking the hotel and in the end I couldn’t make it over - and judging by the quality of this years event that was a big mistake. While it’s nice to spend time in the devops world and talk about communication, processes and how to merge development and operational tool-chains sometimes it’s nice to focus on solid, production grade sysadmining; and LOAD was the perfect conference for it. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/airgapped-gary/ Tue, 19 Apr 2011 14:33:01 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/airgapped-gary/ Our source code has always been air gapped from the Internet. The forensic examination confirmed that software development servers and workstations were not affected by the incident – from HBGary Anyone else find it hard to accept that none of the developers, testers, documentation writers or build people ever accessed source code from their Internet connected laptops / workstations? Especially considering the state of their other security measures. Don’t get me wrong, in some cases it’s a sensible solution ( off-line key signing for example) but for entire teams working on a shared code base? https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/listing-puppet-managed-files/ Tue, 22 Mar 2011 22:54:04 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/listing-puppet-managed-files/ Sometimes it’s the little niggles that annoy people the most. As my team progress in to puppet they have an annoying habit of asking very good questions; which can sometimes be a struggle to answer. Todays best question was - “How do I tell if this file is under puppets control?” While there are a couple of different ways to check (grepping through your git checkout or modifying the file and running puppet were the immediate winners) the best way is probably to look inside the catalog and check against the title of the File resources it contains. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/nagios-wrapped-puppet-runs/ Mon, 21 Mar 2011 22:56:16 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/nagios-wrapped-puppet-runs/ <tl;dr>Log nrpe-runner state changes when puppet runs to see what broke or was fixed.</tl;dr> While people most often use puppet to configure and repair their infrastructures sometimes they also inadvertently use it to damage and cripple them. As part of my attempt to reduce the mean time to spot a mistake across my systems I’ve come up with a handful of small scripts that let me wrap a puppet run in a Nagios NRPE powered safety net. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-cucumber-providers/ Thu, 17 Mar 2011 19:16:23 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-cucumber-providers/ At work we try, and sometimes even succeed, in using Test Driven Deployment so as one of my background projects I’ve been wrapping certaintools in to cucumber friendly forms. Over the last couple of days I’ve been grabbing ten minutes here and there to incorporate Puppet 2.6 in to the pile. Feature:Puppetwrappers Puppet Provider Examples Scenario:Confirming package installation When a machine has been puppeted Then the bash package should be installed Scenario:Confirm doodoodoo package is absent When a machine has been puppeted Then the doodoodoo package should not be installed Scenario:Confirm cron service is running When a machine has been puppeted Then the cron service should be running Scenario:Confirm tomcat6 service is not running When a machine has been puppeted Then the tomcat6service should not be running Scenario:Confirm dwilson is in libvirtd group When a machine has been puppeted Then dwilson should be a member of libvirtd Scenario:Confirm dwilson has a uid of 1000 When a machine has been puppeted Then dwilson should have a uid of 1000Scenario:Confirm dwilson has a given shell When a machine has been puppeted Then dwilson should have the /bin/bash shell I really like using the puppet providers for this because of the abstraction benefits they provide. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/losug-201103/ Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:03:47 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/losug-201103/ Tonights (the March 2011) London OpenSolaris User Group (LOSUG) was a little different to usual and while the topics have always been quite diverse we’ve never had as seditious a talk as one covering the Solaris fork, OpenIndiana, Illumos and the OpenSolaris community. Alasdair Lumsden did an excellent job of explaining the new projects, why they exist and what they’re aiming for. As someone who took a few steps back when Oracle purchased Solaris it was an interesting catch up. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/audit-sshkeys-via-puppet-catalog/ Mon, 14 Mar 2011 23:30:15 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/audit-sshkeys-via-puppet-catalog/ It all started with one of those annoying little items on the todo list find all the unpuppeted ssh authorized_keys files on a machine and alert on them. On first impressions it was going to be quite manual (always a bad sign), involve digging in to legacy installs and would be something we’d need to re-verify occasionally. It couldn’t be that bad though could it? After all how many places can an unmanaged-by- puppet sshkey live? https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/using-the-puppet-package-provider/ Mon, 14 Mar 2011 00:18:03 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/using-the-puppet-package-provider/ One of puppets more under-appreciated features is its ability to abstract and smooth the edges of certain operating system tasks and behaviours. Even something as trivial as installing a package can actually become a portability nightmare once you consider the number of different systems in the wild - rpm, yum, dpkg, pkgsrc etc. - and the varied commands needed to use them. You end up either hard coding commands, and sacrificing portability, or writing your own detection, lookup and invocation logic. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/introducing-nrpe-runner/ Wed, 09 Mar 2011 19:05:16 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/introducing-nrpe-runner/ It might be a sign that I spend too much time online but the quicker a system gives me feedback the more useful I find it. While I love knowing my Nagios safety net has me covered when making changes sometimes waiting for that cgi to refresh can take too long, especially if I’m taking a iterative / test driven approach to the changes I’m making. For those use cases I wrote nrpe-runner. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/clarifying-with-facter/ Wed, 05 Jan 2011 22:47:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/clarifying-with-facter/ While adopting a configuration management tool like Chef and Puppet will have a large, nearly immediate, effect on your work flow even after using the tools for a while you’ll still get a little smile at all the little niceties you continuously discover. One recent small win we had recently was bringing some apache configs files under Puppet command. When we started we had the following block of config: RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ! https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-cookbook-announced/ Tue, 04 Jan 2011 22:59:23 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/puppet-cookbook-announced/ Between Xmas and New Year I had some spare time to invest on a side project I’ve been looking forward to working on for quite a while. I’m pleased to announce the opening of the Puppet CookBook. I’ve introduced Puppet to quite a few companies, sysadmins and development teams over the years and a lot of the same issues, concepts and needs repeatedly crop up. By explaining how puppet works in terms of tasks and desired outcomes rather than in raw feature descriptions I hope to show some of its power and flexibility in easy to use examples in a different way to most of the existing documentation. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/hadoop-the-definitive-guide-second-edition-short-review/ Sun, 12 Dec 2010 09:12:14 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/hadoop-the-definitive-guide-second-edition-short-review/ Hadoop is one of those technologies that seems to have forever changed the way parts of the industry work but has had no effect on my actual job. In an attempt to keep myself current for the after techtalk conversations I decided to buy Hadoop: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition by Tom White - and I’m very happy with the choice. While there are massive amounts of information online about Hadoop and the ecosystem emerging around it I still found HadoopTDG to be a useful book and worth the money (especially on the iPad as it’s a bit big for comfortable tube reading). https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/london-perl-workshop-2010/ Wed, 08 Dec 2010 23:23:44 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/london-perl-workshop-2010/ Over the years I’ve had the opportunity to attend a lot of different events focused on quite a few different programming languages, but none of them match the sheer enthusiasm and love of the language that you get from London PM. While there is always a contingent of LPMers at Perl conferences held further abroad the London Perl Workshop is my yearly chance to see lots of old friends, what they’ve been up to and discuss what’s coming next in our field. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/mcollective-filemd5er/ Mon, 15 Nov 2010 23:26:33 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/mcollective-filemd5er/ I’ve been watching the Marionette Collective for a while, and even gave it a small trial in a couple of testing environments, but this weekend was the first time I’ve experimented with it at a slightly larger scale (just over a hundred small VM nodes - you have to love EC2) and I’m still impressed. I can see how it’s going to make parts of my work flow easier, and in an attempt to learn a little more about how the plugin system works under the hood I decided to write a small agent, FileMD5er. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/php-the-good-parts-short-review/ Thu, 11 Nov 2010 23:10:51 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/php-the-good-parts-short-review/ After working my way through JavaScript: The Good Parts I decided to put away all my misconceptions and give PHP a try. While I’m not actually looking to write any projects in the language at the moment I was interested to see how much of the PHP bashing was still based in fact and to learn what an expert in the language could show me. So I bought PHP: The Good Parts, which is a completely different book from the previous title in the series. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/zabbix-guis-and-automation/ Wed, 10 Nov 2010 20:32:34 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/zabbix-guis-and-automation/ In the T-DOSE Zabbix talk, which I’m happy to say was both well presented and showed some interesting features, I got called out for a quote I made on Twitter (which just goes to show - you never know where what you said is going to show up and haunt you) about the relevance, and I’d say overemphasis, of the GUI to the zabbix monitoring system - and other monitoring systems in general. https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/adventures-in-cronologger/ Mon, 23 Aug 2010 22:49:57 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/adventures-in-cronologger/ Cronjobs are one of those necessary evils of any decent sized Unix setup, they provide often essential pieces of a sites data flows but are often treated as second class citizens. While I’ve already mentioned my Cron commandments I’m always looking for improvements in the rest of my cron tool set and, with Vladimir Vuksan’s cronologger, I may have found another piece of the puzzle. The concept is simple, you add a command to the front of your crontabs and it invokes your actual cron command. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/gllug-2010-07-android/ Thu, 15 Jul 2010 23:24:02 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/gllug-2010-07-android/ This’ll be a short write up for a short talk. I went to the July 2010 GLLUG Android Talk where Sunny Aujla explained some of the history behind Android, Googles Linux operating system for mobile devices. He gave a brief overview of how the system differed from the main stream kernel, details of some of the interactions between the mainline kernel devs and the Google Android team and fielded a fair few questions about the tool chain and ideal uses. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/thoughtworks-anthology-short-review/ Sun, 27 Jun 2010 09:37:44 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/thoughtworks-anthology-short-review/ The ThoughtWorks Anthology is a collection of short articles and essays written by a number of their employees (some of who are now ex-employees) about software development with a heavily agile slant. The topics range from the very high level “Lush Landscape of Languages” and “What is an Iteration manager anyway” to the more technical and technique focused “Refactoring Ant Build Files” and “Object Calisthenics”. While the general quality of the writing is very good, especially my favourite - ‘Object Calisthenics’, the biggest problem with a book like this is that a lot of the essays authors, and some of their also knowledgeable co-workers, have personal blogs where this quality of information is available on a (near) daily basis, in both greater depth and more a conversational nature. https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/netbeans-vs-commandline/ Sun, 06 Jun 2010 13:11:33 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/tools/netbeans-vs-commandline/ The last time we interviewed for Java developers (a couple of jobs ago) it came as quite a surprise at how few of them could function without their IDE of choice. A high percentage of the candidates struggled to compile using javac, had problems navigating the docs and made a large number of very simple syntax errors that they were obviously used to their editor dealing with. At the time the more unix focused team, most of who were very long term vim and emacs users, had a number of discussions about how this should impact our rating of the candidates. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/obese-provisioning-antipattern/ Thu, 03 Jun 2010 22:37:45 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/obese-provisioning-antipattern/ One antipattern I’m seeing with increasing frequency is that of obese (or fat, or bloated) system provisioning. It seems as common in people that are just getting used to having an automated provisioning system and are enthusiastic about its power as it is in longer term users who have added layer on layer of cruft to their host builder. The basic problem is that of adding too much work and intelligence to the actual provisioning stage. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/puppet-camp-europe-2010/ Tue, 01 Jun 2010 21:45:22 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/puppet-camp-europe-2010/ To me puppet has always been a major evolutionary step up on the sysadmin tool chain. I consider it important enough to be ranked alongside version control systems and virtualisation as one of those mental leaps that leads to better management and enables more flexible solutions than you could offer before understanding it. While I’m quite a long term member of the puppet community I’m no where near as active as I should be, but even I couldn’t miss the chance to attend PuppetCamp Europe, and I’m glad I didn’t! https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/hardening-apache-short-review/ Tue, 25 May 2010 22:00:09 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/hardening-apache-short-review/ I’ve had Hardening Apache sitting on my shelves for over five years (Sep 2004 or so Amazon tells me). While I can remember dipping in to it for the Apache chroot chapter it never seemed to progress to the top of the pile, and now I’m cleaning out a lot of my old books I decided to finally give it a chance. The book is very well written, covers a good range of subjects from building apache from source to adding extra security modules and checking its running state. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/refactoring-databases-short-review/ Mon, 24 May 2010 21:20:56 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/refactoring-databases-short-review/ Considering the deadlines most of us have to work to it’s not surprising how much the idea of refactoring, which by continuously improving the design of code, we make it easier and easier to work with. appeals to us. But why should developers have all the ‘fun’? Databases need some love and care too! It’s easier to review this book if we look at it as two smaller books. In the first book, chapters 1 to 5, the authors take you through the details of Refactoring Databases. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/pigz-parallel-gzip/ Wed, 07 Apr 2010 09:00:05 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/pigz-parallel-gzip/ While searching for a completely different piece of software I stumbled on to the pigz application, a parallel implementation of gzip for modern multi-processor, multi-core machines. As some of our backups have a gzip step to conserve some space I decided to see if pigz could be useful in speeding them up. Using remarkably unscientific means (I just wanted to know if it’s worth further investigation) I ran a couple of sample compression runs. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/http-server-headers-via-cucumber/ Wed, 31 Mar 2010 22:53:34 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/http-server-headers-via-cucumber/ One of my little side projects is moving an old, configured in little steps over a long period of time, website from apache 1.3 to a much more sensible apache 2.2 server. I’ve been thinking about how to get the most out of the testing I need to do for the move and so today I decided to do some yak shaving and write some simple regression tests, play with Cucumber Nagios, rspec matchers and write a little ruby. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/html-css-good-parts-short-review/ Tue, 30 Mar 2010 22:55:37 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/html-css-good-parts-short-review/ I’m guessing that if you’re reading this then you’ve seen my very basic website at some point. I learned some HTML and CSS back when Netscape 4 and HTML 3.2 roamed the earth and while some of my very front end gifted co-workers have bought bits of my knowledge up to date I still don’t understand how to properly lay out a CSS only multicolumn page without cheating. I’m not sure if it’s because i had vague expectations on what this book would cover or just if I’m not the target market for HTML & CSS The Good Parts but I’ve read the thing from cover to cover and nothing really stands out to me. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/lovelace-day-2010/ Wed, 24 Mar 2010 23:35:34 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/lovelace-day-2010/ So today is Ada Lovelace day and we’re supposed to “celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.” I don’t know many women in science but I do know a few in technology and one in particular seems to go from back breaking task to another with politeness and grace I wish I could muster. So for my 2010 Lovelace day (and because she’ll need all the happy thoughts she can get now she’s president of the Perl Foundation) I’m naming Karen Pauley. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/losug-2010-03-changes-and-clouds/ Sun, 21 Mar 2010 19:30:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/losug-2010-03-changes-and-clouds/ The LOSUG seems to be the user group with the least cross over of attendees that I go to. It seems to be a three part mix - Sun engineers going along to meet co-workers and get the external eye on to what’s happening in different parts of the project, Unix people with dozens of years of experience who want something technical and interesting that matters on the server and people that don’t listen to the speaker and then ask questions that, quite frankly, they should be embarrassed over. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/network-ninja-short-review/ Sun, 21 Mar 2010 18:58:24 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/network-ninja-short-review/ I’d never even heard of this book until Bob used its name in the same sentence as the excellent “Cisco Routers for the Desperate”. However while that book is about hands on practical Cisco advice Network Ninja is all about the theory - from IP addressing to routing protocols. While no one’s ever going to confuse 200 easy to read pages with the Stevens books this slender volume is an excellent refresher for the experienced admin who doesn’t do too much to the network on a day-to-day basis or for the less experienced admin who wants to know some of the why instead of just the command lines. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/gllug-march-2010/ Sun, 21 Mar 2010 18:12:26 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/gllug-march-2010/ Over the years there have been a handful of GLLUG members that have given so many interesting talks that I’ll always turn up to watch them - and Richard Jones is definitely in that short list. The website does an excellent job of explaining: "libguestfs is a library for accessing and modifying virtual machine (VM) disk images. Amongst the things this is good for: making batch configuration changes to guests, viewing and editing files inside guests (virt-cat, virt-edit), getting disk used/free statistics (virt-df), migrating between virtualization systems (virt-p2v), performing partial backups, performing partial guest clones, cloning VMs and changing registry/UUID/hostname info, and much else besides. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/book-of-xen-short-review/ Sun, 21 Mar 2010 18:01:35 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/book-of-xen-short-review/ Although I’ve been a big fan of virtualization for many years I’ve mostly been a VMWare man. UML was good for the time but VMWare workstation and GSX always seemed to be better solutions - and they had the benefits of dealing with Windows. At $WORK we looked at using Xen for our new development environment but it never felt very finished, little things like needing to compile your own dhcp client in order to get PXE booting working always felt very wrong. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/london-devops-201003/ Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:13:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/london-devops-201003/ This month was the first of the London DevOps tech talks. Organised by R I Pienaar and masterfully shepherded on the evening by Chris Read about thirty sysadmins (and some developers, project managers and scrum masters) met for a series of impromptu discussions, beer and pizza While there was no formal schedule for the evening Chris led the group in a fishbowl, seeding some ideas and then watched the conversations bloom. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/bsd-magazine-from-fosdem/ Thu, 11 Feb 2010 20:56:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/bsd-magazine-from-fosdem/ While looking for an OpenBSD baseball cap on the BSD stalls at FOSDEM I was given a couple of issues of the BSD Magazine to flick through - and it’s a lot better than I’d hoped. As most of the UK Linux magazines have become very desktop focused it’s nice to see some actual low-level code - packaging for OpenBSD, writing sound drivers for your NetBSD NSLU2, custom Jabber components and basic GDB were all in the two issues I skimmed. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/grocery-arrival-excitement/ Wed, 13 Jan 2010 20:05:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/grocery-arrival-excitement/ Many years ago, in the first dotcom boom, I worked for a website performance monitoring company. I was one of the early employees (developer number 3 and sysadmin number 2) and I remember being in a meeting with the company CEO who was telling us about a new pitch we were doing for $SUPERMARKET, they were going to try this new idea of shopping online and then delivering it to your door. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/spreadsheets-vs-postitnotes/ Tue, 12 Jan 2010 23:32:37 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/spreadsheets-vs-postitnotes/ I’m a fan of documentation, over the years I’ve ended up supporting more than one business critical system that has less documentation than you get from a cat /dev/null. The only downside, and I’ve been bitten by a couple of things like this over the last week is the case of the spreadsheet vs the post-it note - if you have a lovely, well formatted and information dense spreadsheet that says “A is 1” and when you get to the server room the switch has a post-it, in bad scrawl, that says “B is 2” which do you believe? https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/hadoop-2009-talk/ Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:17:47 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/hadoop-2009-talk/ After an embarrassing tale of misunderstanding, wrong locations and blind luck I recently ended up at the Introduction to data processing with Hadoop and Pig talk over at SkillsMatter - and it was excellent. For those that don’t know about Hadoop, it’s an OpenSource Java framework for data-intensive distributed applications. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. Hadoop was inspired by Google’s MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/jruby-cookbook-short-review/ Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:08:50 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/jruby-cookbook-short-review/ First a disclaimer, I’m not a heavy Ruby or Java guy. Most of my coding for the last couple of years has been perl and shell - because I write little things that I need right now and those two languages excel at that (CPAN is still THE decision clincher). I recently became involved in a side project that is written in Ruby and Java though and in an excellent timing coincidence a friend returned my previously unread copy of the JRuby Cookbook. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/dynamic-motion-on-google-earth/ Wed, 30 Sep 2009 22:57:09 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/dynamic-motion-on-google-earth/ It’s very easy to become quite blase or even cynical about new technologies but sometimes a project grabs your attention and coaxes out a “that’s very cool”, the real time augmented Google Earth had that effect on me. How long will it be before you can roll back an overlay by X weeks and see what happened in that game last Thursday or check the traffic on your new route at 7am on every Friday for a couple of weeks? https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/raking-the-lawn/ Wed, 30 Sep 2009 22:48:26 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/raking-the-lawn/ I’ve never really liked make files, I don’t think I’ve ever had to write enough C to really appreciate (or just tolerate) them, so I was a little dismissive of Rake - and I was mostly wrong. Now we’re adding a new member to the systems team I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about our tool chain - what knowledge assumptions it makes, which parts are still more manual than I’d like and where the tool chain has gaps (this is the most annoying one for me) and rake seemed like a potential addition to encode some of that process knowledge in to a tool. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/djugl-200909/ Sun, 27 Sep 2009 19:53:31 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/djugl-200909/ Despite the fact a large percentage of the DJUGL meetups have occurred in the building I work in I’ve been very lax in attending one, and it’s been my loss. The crowd was friendly, the pizza and diet coke plentiful and the speakers enjoyable, and I’ve got every intension of making the next meeting - especially if it’s in the same building. Gareth Rushgrove started the talks with a subject very dear to my heart, deployment. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/simplifying-file-permissions-in-puppet-manifests/ Wed, 23 Sep 2009 23:16:01 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/simplifying-file-permissions-in-puppet-manifests/ I’ve been a user of Puppet for about three years now and while on a recent dig in to some of my older classes it was a little embarrassing to see lots of file types used like this: file { '/srv/whi/maps': ensure => present, source => "puppet://$servername/whi/maps.conf", owner => 'whi', group => 'whi', mode => 0644, } file { '/srv/whi/elocs': ensure => present, source => "puppet://$servername/whi/eloc.conf", owner => 'whi', group => 'whi', mode => 0644, } Luckily as we get more experienced with a tool we can often go back and improve on the first steps. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/ubuntu-security-talk-2009-09/ Thu, 17 Sep 2009 23:06:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/ubuntu-security-talk-2009-09/ A couple of days ago I had the chance to attend a talk on PAM and AppArmor at Skills Matter. To be honest it wasn’t what I expected, the subject level was very beginner focused, PAM only received scant coverage and the other tools were all old hands like a port scan with nmap or basic IP Tables rules. The evenings highlight for me was the coverage of AppArmor, both because it’s a very neat tech that seems orders of magnitude easier to use then SELinux and secondly because the last time I saw it mentioned was when Crispin Cowan spoke at GLLUG. https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/stand-alone-puppet/ Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:33:25 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/puppet/stand-alone-puppet/ While Puppet can be used to manage large, complex environments it’s also a useful tool at the lower end of the spectrum. Using just the puppet executable and a small inline class or two you can write very useful manifests in only a handful of lines. class build_host { package { 'build-essential': ensure => installed } package { 'subversion': ensure => installed } file { "/home/dwilson/repos/": ensure => directory, owner => dwilson, group => dwilson, }}node default { include build_host} To invoke the class you just run puppet -v build-host. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/javascript-good-parts-short-review/ Mon, 14 Sep 2009 23:25:16 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/javascript-good-parts-short-review/ Considering that JavaScript: The Good Parts is only 124 pages it took me a lot of attempts to work my way through it. A combination of the authors attitude and the dry presentation put me off within the first three chapters every time i tried to read the book. However a side project I was helping out on needed some JavaScript reviewed and considering how little of the language I knew I forced myself to work through the book and I’m glad I did - despite its short comings it’s an excellent introduction to the language for programmers with a couple of other languages under their belt. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/land-the-tech-job-you-love-short-review/ Sun, 13 Sep 2009 19:29:09 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/land-the-tech-job-you-love-short-review/ When it comes to progressing your technical career there are (IMHO) three main pillars, continuing your technical advancement, networking (with other people, not just wires) and building up your online presence. Land The Tech Job You Love covers all these critical points and expands the other parts of the job seeking process - researching the company, preparing for the interview and how to answer the more ambiguous questions that often come up. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/verified-by-visa-designed-by-idiots/ Wed, 02 Sep 2009 23:07:28 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/verified-by-visa-designed-by-idiots/ The one thing online that irks me beyond all others, even surpassing chromatic, is Verified by Visa. I hate this service and every site that uses it. If you’ve been blessed enough to never have it ruin your transaction here’s the short version - in the middle of paying for something you get bounced, with no clue where you’re going and how secure it is, to a third party site, which is completely safe as it’s run by visa, that then gets you to enter a password. https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/ubuntu-developer-week/ Tue, 01 Sep 2009 05:23:57 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/ubuntu-developer-week/ All this week there are Ubuntu Developer IRC workshops. While I don’t actually use Ubuntu at work it’s always a good idea to keep up with the new and shiny, and as an extra incentive a lot of the technical details mentioned also apply to Debian, which I do have to admin on a daily basis. While the IRC logs don’t go in to huge details the two sessions I’ve looked at (getting started and packaging perl modules) each contain enough useful links to make them worth my time. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/follow-the-mockery/ Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:58:26 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/follow-the-mockery/ Pay very close attention to them. Nothing marks a trouble spot in quite the same way. Either they’re being picked on and something needs to be done or they are the first people you should be helping to pursue new opportunities. Very far away. Either way you need to know. Leaving incompetent people in place destroys morale for the good staff and encourages them to look elsewhere. When there’s a bad apple or two lowering the teams value, and the quality of their output, pure professional pride only gets you so far. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/cloud-application-architectures/ Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:26:24 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/cloud-application-architectures/ With all the hype and misdirection around the cloud it’s always good to find a little bit of concrete information. If you’re interested in the general principles of how the cloud (and Amazon Webservices in particular) could replace some of your existing infrastructure then Cloud Application Architectures isn’t a bad place to start. The book is a slim tome, it’s easy to read in a couple of sittings and covers all the basics. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/project-california-short-review/ Sun, 30 Aug 2009 12:05:50 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/project-california-short-review/ When it comes to sysadmin buzzwords Project California: a Data Center Virtualization Server ticks a lot of the boxes, which is a little misleading as half the book is about solid hardware level details that are actually rarely covered. While this makes the first half more than a little dry it does introduce concepts that many of us take for granted, such as why DDR3 is faster than DDR2. The second half takes you through the Cisco UCS stack and where the benefits are. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/froson-2009/ Sun, 30 Aug 2009 12:00:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/froson-2009/ Last weekend I joined the hordes and worked my way from London to Seigburg for FrOSCon 2009. Along the way I experienced an airport evacuation due to fire alarm, a delayed flight, four trains (one in the wrong direction) and numerous kindly old German ladies that took pity on me and gradually got me in the right direction. And it was worth every second. I’d never really considered going to FrOSCon before, the percentage of talks given in German is quite high and I don’t speak a word of the language but this year there was an excellent line up of speakers (all presenting in English) in the OpenSQLCamp room. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/find-and-replace-interview-question/ Fri, 28 Aug 2009 22:54:36 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/find-and-replace-interview-question/ We’ve recently been searching for a junior sysadmin to join the team (and I’m very happy to say we’ve now succeeded) so as part of my day to day tasks I had to come up with a dozen simple questions to weed out the people that have never used anything but webmin (and there is a surprising number of them out there). One of the questions seemed to cause a lot of trouble in the general sense and tripped up the few who even made an attempt - https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/how-does-cron-reboot-work/ Thu, 27 Aug 2009 22:52:37 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/how-does-cron-reboot-work/ In a conversation with Stuart the subject of cron timings came up, and after a brief discussion the ugly head of @reboot reared. While most people know that you can use the special ‘event’ syntax to trigger cronjobs at specific times I’d guess a very small number of them actually know how it works. For example does cron rerun @reboot jobs when the service is restarted? (hint - no it doesn’t. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/large-uptimes-considered-harmful/ Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:48:13 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/large-uptimes-considered-harmful/ When it comes to the list of problems ‘our uptimes are too high’ isn’t normally in the top five that sysadmins dread. While having a lengthy uptime used to be a boasting point it can also hide technical issues - such as kernel upgrades you’ve applied but not enabled (unless you’re running something special like ksplice), confidence gaps in high availability systems (when was the last time you did a fail over? https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/nwrug-200908/ Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:38:47 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/nwrug-200908/ I recently headed up to the August NWRug in Manchester, firstly because it’s been a while since I’ve seen Will Jessop, the organiser (and more importantly a mate) and secondly because I was interested in Capistrano. While we use puppet at work for the more strategic stuff, such as ensuring machines start off with a well-defined configuration, I’ve been in need of something to perform sets of tasks against defined groups of servers. https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/moon-movie-review/ Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:09:09 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/moon-movie-review/ If you’ve not seen or read much in the way of Scifi then Moon may be an innovative movie that surprises you with its plot twists, (a film with a plot? Quick, change screens, Transformers is on next door) surprises and human/machine interaction. If you’re reading this blog then I’m guessing you’ll find it slow, predictable and a bit meandering. 5/10. Very average. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/testing-a-dns-move/ Wed, 19 Aug 2009 08:44:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/testing-a-dns-move/ We recently consolidated a number of websites used by one of our brands back down to a sensible number (sensible being one). Which, while only a single action point on an email, turned out to be a large amount of DNS and apache vhost wrangling. In order to give myself a safety net, and an easy to check todo list, I decided to invest ten minutes in writing a small test script. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/taking-babysteps-in-python/ Sat, 04 Jul 2009 19:30:41 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/taking-babysteps-in-python/ Thanks to the enthusiasm I’ve returned from EuroPython with (and the fact I couldn’t make it to OpenTech because of washing machine issues) I decided to spend a little bit of time porting Nagios Webchecks to python. As a use case it covers a lot of the functionality I need in my day to day system scripts. The ability to specify command line arguments, read a config file and interpolate a template file for output. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/by-puppet-or-package/ Fri, 03 Jul 2009 23:12:08 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/by-puppet-or-package/ At work we both build our own packages and use puppet to manage our servers. While the developers package up their work in the systems team we’ve moved more to deploying programs and their dependencies via Puppet. While it seems easier, and quicker, to do the pushing that way, at least for scripts, you lose the ability to track what’s responsible for putting each file on the system. I’m probably already modelling the more complex parts of what would be in a package (such as services and cronjobs) in the module and thanks to Puppet I’m probably doing it in quite a portable way. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/europython-2009/ Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:13:59 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/europython-2009/ Over the last week I’ve been up in Birmingham catching up with some old friends and attending some talks at the little get together of around 450 Pythonistas that was EuroPython 2009. This was my second Python conference. The first was PyCon 2008, which was so well organised (by many of the same team as this years EuroPython) that I was inspired to come back. And I wasn’t disappointed. There were a lot of very good talks, some that have planted seeds that I’ll have to come back and try to find the time to look at and some that showed me things I plan on using in the very near future (such as py. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/dstat-module-list/ Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:32:04 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/dstat-module-list/ When it comes to Unix diagnostics I was raised the old fashion way, with iostat, vmstat and similar tools. However times change and tools evolve. dstat, while not as comprehensive as using all the tools one by one, provides a wide range of system performance details in an easy to use package. While it’s useful enough in its default state there is even more functionality lurking just below the surface. To see which other modules are available (but are not enabled by default) run dstat -M list. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/long-critical-duration/ Wed, 03 Jun 2009 08:55:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/long-critical-duration/ Nagios has a wonderful ‘duration’ column in its web interface that’s always bemused me. At what point does a check being in a warning, or even worse, a critical state stop being a problem worthy of head space and start being normal operating procedure? Checks can stay in an extended broken state for many reasons but they all seem to be symptoms of a larger problem. If it’s a small thing then are you getting enough time to do housekeeping? https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/new-laptops-equals-leaving/ Wed, 08 Apr 2009 12:37:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/new-laptops-equals-leaving/ Is it just me or does everybody seem to go and buy a new laptop just before they leave their current job? Is it the techie version of buying new work shoes? https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/pip-2009-q2/ Wed, 08 Apr 2009 11:20:02 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/pip-2009-q2/ I’ve been quiet on the PiP front for a while now. While the day to day stuff has kept me busy it hasn’t exactly helped move my career along, I spend most of my time doing things I already know how to do but with a little twist on them. In an attempt to stop myself from further stagnation I’ve put a short list of goals below that should be my bare minimum for the next three months. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/ruby-dns-testing/ Mon, 06 Apr 2009 16:46:38 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/ruby-dns-testing/ DNS is one of those ‘small config change here, errors a long way over there later’ technologies that always leaves me a little worried about the knock on effect of my changes. As a simple, coarse, safeguard at work we use Nagios to check that a canary record in each zone can be resolved from each DNS server. It’s far from a perfect solution but it does catch some of the bigger errors and typos. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/repeat-the-question/ Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:06:41 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/repeat-the-question/ If someone in the audience asks a question that you plan on answering then please repeat it, with your own wording, before you respond. This gets us two things - the person asking probably won’t have a mic so not everyone will hear what he said, they will when you repeat it. Secondly - by repeating with your own phrasing - you’ll get basic confirmation that you understand what’s being asked rather than answering the wrong question; which wastes everyones time and leaves the asker frustrated. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/puppet-extract-report-issues/ Mon, 09 Mar 2009 20:57:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/puppet-extract-report-issues/ I spent a little while digging through the default puppet log types the other day and after reading through a batch of activity logs I whipped up extract-report-issues, a script that can be run on the command line (or daily via cron) and displays a list of errors and warnings from the specified glob of hosts and log files. By default it does all hosts for the current day, we’ve got it running nightly so we can work through the issues each morning. https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/who-watched-the-watchmen/ Mon, 09 Mar 2009 20:28:06 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/who-watched-the-watchmen/ On Friday night I was as predictable as most of the people in my feedreader and was camped down at 5PM for the evening showing of Watchmen - and I enjoyed it. It’s been a good few years since I read the original graphic novel so I’m not as likely to pick out little errors and omissions (like the Silk Spectre looking for a lighter in the book and just being nosy in the film) but I thought the story was a very good, and close, adaptation. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/github-first-steps/ Wed, 04 Mar 2009 22:22:17 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/github-first-steps/ I finally decided to set up and start using a github account and my early impressions are that it’s quite slick and very userfriendly. Apart from an annoyance where I couldn’t see my pushes for a little while (I think I fell afoul of some caching) setting up an account and adding new repos was simple. Pushing from my actual dev machine just worked and I’ve now been bitten by the github bug. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/personal-git-milestone-one/ Tue, 03 Mar 2009 22:12:50 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/personal-git-milestone-one/ It’s been a day for nice little technical surprises. On the tube ride to work this morning I started flicking through Cisco Routers for the desperate (2nd edition) and found a quote on the first page from the 1st edition book review I did a couple of years ago. I also had my first fully git workflow patch accepted by upstream. It was only a couple of lines of code but it means I’m gradually getting comfortable with the git toolchain. https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/puppet-types-ubuiqity-command/ Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:55:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/puppet-types-ubuiqity-command/ I like Ubiquity. It puts a lot of the sites I used on a regular basis close to hand without making me dig through my bookmarks (or del.icio.us account). In a small burst of productivity, and to avoid real work, I decided to put a command together for the Puppet Type docs at Reductive Labs. If you have the Ubiquity plugin installed you should be able to install a copy of the command from the Ubiquity Puppet Types Command page (which I no longer provide as of 20141224). https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/london-pm-200902-moose-talks/ Sun, 01 Mar 2009 23:03:33 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/london-pm-200902-moose-talks/ I wasn’t able to get to the actual talks but luckily the Moose talk slides are now all online (apart from Moose for Ruby programmers which has instead been expanded in to a blog post). By all reports it was another excellent night and I’ll have to keep the evening free for the next one. Now I’ve read the slides and heard so much positive feedback I think it’s time I tried Moose for a couple of projects. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/gdb-pocket-reference-short-review/ Sat, 21 Feb 2009 12:05:20 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/gdb-pocket-reference-short-review/ If you already know GDB then this book might be useful. It’s full of command summaries and option listings but lacks an actual introduction or any walk through examples. A google for GDB tutorials bought back some well written intros with actual sample code I could work through which is probably a more useful approach for most people. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/nagios-check-http-flaps/ Wed, 04 Feb 2009 16:53:18 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/nagios-check-http-flaps/ We recently had an odd one where the Nagios check_http check, which was both checking for the presence of a string in the response and that the page loaded in a certain time frame, went from reporting a ‘CRITICAL - string not found’ to a ‘HTTP WARNING: HTTP/1.1 200 OK’. My first thought, as this was a site pending migration, was that the URL had moved to a slower machine with the fixes released to it. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/single-file-bookmarks-in-vim/ Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:05:32 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/single-file-bookmarks-in-vim/ I like vim, I think it’s a great editor worth investing time and effort in to learning but I also think it’s one of the most horrible things to watch an inexperienced user typo his way through while you’re urgently waiting for them to finish the damn edit. My favourite one this week (and it’s only Tuesday) is looking for probably unique phrases that you can later search for to return to a specific part of a document. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/splitting-syslogs/ Tue, 03 Feb 2009 21:49:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/splitting-syslogs/ Logs are a wonderful thing. If done correctly they point out the source of all errors, show you what’s running slow and contain useful information on how your system is running. At every place I’ve ever worked they’ve been busy, full of odd one offs and too often overlooked. I’m going to be doing a fair bit of log processing next week so expect lots of little toolchain scripts like syslog-splitter. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/mysql-university-jan09-innodb-scale-challenges/ Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:19:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/mysql-university-jan09-innodb-scale-challenges/ I recently ‘attended’ my first MySQL University presentation - Scalability Challenges in an InnoDB-based Replication Environment. The service itself is great, you sign up, log in and then watch the speaker present in one window while listening to him speak and reading the slides (in the main part of the screen). Everything you’d expect really. The subject wasn’t anymore exciting than you’d guess (but what do you expect with that title? https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/losug-jan-09-wrapped-up/ Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:17:12 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/losug-jan-09-wrapped-up/ I’m going to try and get to more LOSUG meetings this year and the January presentation by MC Brown has done nothing to put me off. Although some of the audience tried their best… First up - the good. The actual presentation, MySQL/DTrace and Memcached, was very well done. The speaker was funny, well rehearsed and knew his material extremely well. The MySQL DTrace probes are made to be used in demos and are very enticing. https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/tinselworm-short-review/ Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:03:05 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/tinselworm-short-review/ It took me a while to warm to Bill Bailey as a comedian. His slower, more laid back humour is a change in pace from what I normally like but Tinselworm, like all his live shows, is an excellent mix of music and mirth. If you like Bill Bailey then it’s another must have, if you’ve never watched him then go for a little trawl through youtube (start with this) and if you don’t like him then you’re just weird. https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/cpan-tidy-up-jan-2009/ Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:52:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/cpan-tidy-up-jan-2009/ It’s been a while since I gave any attention to my CPAN modules but as an incentive to get more hands on with git I added them to my own gitweb, fixed the two that were failing tests and tided up some of the complaints from CPANTS. I’m sure I’ve missed something (or got it flat out wrong) but it’s nice to have at least a local copy of my modules without any issues remaining. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/losug-jan-2009-must-see/ Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:50:23 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/losug-jan-2009-must-see/ LOSUG is one of Londons best kept tech secrets. It’s hosted in a nice venue, often has a very knowledgeable audience full of Sun engineers and this month will be covering MySQL/DTrace and Memcached. If you’re a sysadmin or a developer interested in getting more, or better, metrics and understanding of how and what your system is doing make sure you book a place. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/my-pet-puppet-hate-types/ Mon, 19 Jan 2009 23:00:01 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/my-pet-puppet-hate-types/ Now that chef is out and about people that accepted the massive improvement over all the existing host configuration managers that is Puppet will probably be casting a weary eye its way. I’ve got a little too much in puppet at my current position to look at moving for a while yet but now the competition is rising its time to get my boot in and point out what, for me, is the worst part of puppet; how difficult it is to add new types. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/the-fear-of-git/ Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:14:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/the-fear-of-git/ Despite setting up my own gitweb install I’m still not using git regularly enough to be comfortable with it so today I went through the Peepcode Press Git Internals book/PDF. While the diagrams and details of what happens under the cover are useful it’s the wrong level for me as a basic user. To ease myself in to the move from subversion for some of my personal projects I found Git Magic to be more useful. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/prague-2008-cold/ Mon, 12 Jan 2009 22:18:20 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/prague-2008-cold/ … but the beer is very cheap. Which I know is an important thing for my readers. I can also agree with their choice of food, lots of pork and goulash with stodgy dumplings and thick sauce. Pig knuckle is much nicer than it sounds. I spent a long weekend in Prague, it was -10 for most of it but luckily the city isn’t very big and you can reach all the usual tourist spots by foot if you’ve got a day or two. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/pentesting-is-actionable/ Mon, 12 Jan 2009 21:44:45 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/pentesting-is-actionable/ Penetration testing is tactical. It provides tangible, actionable information – Ivan Arce It’s been a while since I’ve been involved in pen testing but the above quote from Ivan is perfect and its meaning all too often overlooked. When you invest the time in something like pen testing or performance tuning you should always come away with a list of actionable tasks. By doing this you ensure the work wasn’t pointless (or if it was avoid repeating the mistake) and have something you can present to stake holders to get buy in for the next time. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/limiting-failed-ssh-logins/ Thu, 08 Jan 2009 23:31:26 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/limiting-failed-ssh-logins/ Ever wanted to limit the number of ssh login attempts a user can make before their account gets locked? Well, not really, but when brute force tools are so common and easy to use it’s another useful trick in the sysadmins arsenal. In this example I’ll show you how to install, configure and audit failed ssh loging attempts on Linux. While the PAM mod_tally module is available for a number of different distros and Unix variants we’ll set it up on Debian. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/dns-delvings-day-one/ Wed, 07 Jan 2009 23:11:02 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/dns-delvings-day-one/ It’s been another day of many DNS changes and while the work itself has been amazingly dull, life draining, scut work at least one positive thing’s come out of it - my appreciation for the Net::DNS perl module has grown. While it’s possible to do nearly anything DNS query related with the dig command it’s a lot easier to extract the data and reuse certain fields if you have access to a decent data structure rather than grepping bits of text out. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/diffing-files-over-multiple-servers/ Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:26:30 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/diffing-files-over-multiple-servers/ Adhoc changes are a very bad thing in many ways, one of the worst is how often they are not fully implemented across all the servers or even pulled back to staging. In an attempt to sanity check the config files when we have to make these little hacks I oddly-proudly present - rd-differ. A tool for diffing config files over multiple machines. The idea is simple, you tell it the file or directory you’re interested in, specify a single machine as the baseline and then specify a number of others as the machines to check against it. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/gui-config-1000-cuts/ Mon, 05 Jan 2009 20:17:53 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/gui-config-1000-cuts/ Today has been one of those death by a thousand cut days. We did a migration first thing in the morning (I’m not supposed to be awake at 6am unless it’s from a really late night) and while all the big bits were planned and moved successfully the work list was missing enough little pieces to make the rest of the day very annoying. What made the work a lot harder was that the changes had to be made through a web front end that abstracted about 20 seconds of vim in to four minutes of clicking buttons that were never in the same place twice. https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/simple-stemming-with-perl/ Sun, 04 Jan 2009 19:32:42 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/simple-stemming-with-perl/ Stemming is the process for reducing inflected (or sometimes derived) words to their stem, base or root form. – Wikipedia article on Stemming Ever used a website that allowed you to tag content? Ever ended up accidently using slightly different tags? Something like graphs and graphing or blog and blogs? (I hope so, otherwise it’s just me…) To spot some of the more obvious overlaps you can stem each of the words and look for a common base. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/the-art-of-capacity-planning-short-review/ Sat, 03 Jan 2009 17:47:18 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/the-art-of-capacity-planning-short-review/ The only books on capacity planning I’ve ever skimmed my way through have been dense, dull tomes of long mathematical formulas, advice that’s hard to use in any practical way and page counts in the treble digits. Thankfully John Allspaw has bucked this trend with The Art of Capacity Planning and instead written a slender, thought provoking, book. The main focus of the book is that measurement is good, blind guessing is bad and that capacity planning, like security, is an ongoing process. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/im-a-pc-nc10/ Fri, 02 Jan 2009 21:22:07 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/im-a-pc-nc10/ Near the middle of December I lost a very dear, and constant, companion - my Sony Vaio ‘some model number or other’. After nearly five years the laptop stopped charging and it wasn’t worth paying for the repairs. I put off getting a replacement for as long as I could but while I had the work laptop as a standby I needed a machine I could treat as my own. Something outside the company security policy. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/pragprog-erlang-screencast/ Thu, 01 Jan 2009 20:05:56 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/pragprog-erlang-screencast/ I recently watched the first in the series of the Pragmatic Programmers Erlang in Practice Screencasts (by Kevin Smith - no, not that Kevin Smith). As I’ve not seen them discussed that much else where I thought I’d jot down my thoughts. First up a disclaimer/warning - I’m not an Erlang person and despite the title of ‘Episode 1’ this series of screencasts is not aimed at people with no experience in the language. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/book-reviews-2008q4/ Mon, 29 Dec 2008 14:02:20 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/book-reviews-2008q4/ Behind every good manager lurks dozens of bad ones. While Behind Closed Doors is full of mostly common sense tips it’s uncommon to deal with management that actually apply more than a couple of them. It’s an easy, quick read and an ideal gift for that special manager in your life that you really wished wasn’t. 7/10 The Python Phasebook is a concise, well written set of examples. Each ‘phrase’ is a short task with some sample code that shows one of the possible solutions. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/disturbing-diffs-safeopen/ Sat, 08 Nov 2008 13:11:51 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/disturbing-diffs-safeopen/ - file_move_safe(move_from_path, move_to_path) + move_file(move_from_path, move_to_path) Is move_file not as safe as file_move_safe? Is it safer? Dare I read the other diffs to find out? Am I better off not knowing? https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/events-november-2008/ Sat, 08 Nov 2008 13:06:02 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/events-november-2008/ It’s actually a good month for dynamic language fans in London as we’ve got both the London Perl Workshop and the inaugural Ruby Manor - both of which I’ll be attending. Although, as a sysadmin, I feel a little bad about not making it to the Linux 2008 event (organised by the UKUUG) I couldn’t really justify the time and cost this year. The talks were a decent selection but not enough to get me up to Manchester on my own budget for a weekend. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/dynamic-languages-and-joins/ Sat, 08 Nov 2008 12:41:44 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/dynamic-languages-and-joins/ I’ve been spending a fair amount of time recently trying to choose my Language of the year for 2009. I’ve always been a dynamic language fan (yes, I know this means I should be looking further afield for the next one) and I was surprised at how different even such a common task as joining all the elements of an array together, using a given separator, looks between them. First let’s look at the big three, including perl, my current favourite. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/reboot-via-prox/ Sat, 08 Nov 2008 12:25:28 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/reboot-via-prox/ You know what the best way to start the day is? I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t include a production web server putting its file systems in to read only mode. When this happens most local commands don’t work - init, shutdown, telnit and reboot all stop being useful and you have to resort to desperate measures… and here’s the desperate measure of the day. First, check that your system supports the magic sysreq key - https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/london-python-user-group-200810/ Wed, 08 Oct 2008 22:48:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/london-python-user-group-200810/ I made it along to my first ever London Python User Group tonight, and from what the regulars said about the turn out so did a lot of other people. Over 50 people in attendance is very respectable. The first talk was a bit of a let down, it felt really long, quite slow moving and could have been much better as a lightning talk. Shame it was the best part of over an hour. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/no-access-or-no-access/ Tue, 07 Oct 2008 07:23:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/no-access-or-no-access/ You’re in charge of a server that provides two types of assets. The first type is public and its visibility is important to your company. The second should be restricted access only and shouldn’t be public. Now suppose there is a mistake made and the private material is exposed publicly - what’s more important, that the public data is available or that the private data isn’t? Who’d make that decision where you work? https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/pyconuk-2008/ Sun, 05 Oct 2008 23:31:43 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/pyconuk-2008/ At $DAYJOB I’m working with a strong team of Python (and Django) developers so over the last couple of months my interest in the language has grown. Thanks to YAPC::EU not being very exciting this year I had a spare slot in my “conference schedule” and went to the highly recommended (by me and previous attendees I’d spoken to) PyCon UK. I’m glad I did. I was more than a little out of my depth in most of the talks but a lot of the speakers were excellent, especially Raymond Hettinger - who I ended up stalking (by accident) and seeing all of his talks. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/google-dev-day-london-2008/ Sun, 05 Oct 2008 22:56:10 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/google-dev-day-london-2008/ I recently went to the London 2008 Google Dev Day (the title of my post doesn’t lie!) and while it was lovely to be near that hallowed grass (only half of which was actually down) the talks themselves left a lot to be desired - actual technical content. I’m not sure if I’m the wrong audience in that I’ve already looked at the front pages and the code samples but I hoped, given the word developer in the events title, that it’d be a bit more tech heavy. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/spooks-code-9/ Sun, 05 Oct 2008 22:47:23 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/spooks-code-9/ When it comes to spinoffs the BBC isn’t doing too well. After two, very, very bad series of Torchwood we’re now ‘blessed’ with Spooks: Code 9. It’s got nothing to do with the main Spooks series (a series I do like), has very… inexperienced acting and dull plots. What’s good about it? A lot of the cast are very pretty and it’s only 6 episodes long. Luckily it’s been panned by nearly everyone who’s posted a review of it (I like to be on the bandwagon every now and again) and with a little luck it’ll be canned after just one season. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/first-day-with-python/ Sat, 06 Sep 2008 23:44:16 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/first-day-with-python/ While I’ve always been a bit of a perl guy I don’t want this post to be “perl has x and python doesn’t” in tone. Which is lucky really as Python has exceptions and threading as first class features where as perl has… ahem. So after spending a chunk of today reading a python book and spending some time writing code here’s my initial short list of gripes - except IOError print adding newlines Significance of whitespace in blocks. https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/pip-end-of-08/ Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:34:56 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/pip-end-of-08/ In the past I’ve written up a small list of general goals to help measure my technical progress. Over the last few years I’ve become a lot busier and this habit fell by the wayside. But no more! I’ve got a quarter left and I’m going to try and complete… Write and publish a technical article. Attend two technical events. Read and review 3 books. Write and publish two Perl modules. https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/ubiquity-rocks/ Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:58:41 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/ubiquity-rocks/ While Google Chrome has been getting all the press coverage recently Ubiquity, from Mozilla Labs, is where all the interesting action seems to be happening. Ubiquity ticks all the boxes for me, it’s a simple, easy to use idea, that’ll save me time. It’s easily extensible and already has a huge community of people working, enhancing and just trying new things with it. All the things I’ve come to expect from Firefox and the Mozilla using community. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/chrome-initial-thoughts/ Tue, 02 Sep 2008 21:08:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/chrome-initial-thoughts/ Like most of the techy part of the Internet I dutifully downloaded Google Chrome today and had a little play around. And just like all those other people I’m going to write about it. The difference is I’m very ambivalent about the whole thing. Chrome seems nice enough. It’s quick, works with all the websites I’ve tried so far and does have a killer feature - the task manager. Finally breaking tabs out in to their own sandbox is an idea whos time should have come years ago. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/nagios-stats-via-munin/ Sat, 23 Aug 2008 15:20:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/nagios-stats-via-munin/ We’ve been hitting some load issues on one of our monitoring machines recently and while it looks like the munin graph generation is the culprit we also decided to keep an eye on how many services and hosts Nagios was checking. One of the downsides of having a very automated server deployment system is how easy it is to suddenly find yourself with an extra dozen hosts you no longer really need. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/page-and-feed-nagios-checks/ Sat, 23 Aug 2008 15:11:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/page-and-feed-nagios-checks/ As part of my ongoing attempt to stop myself from silently making mistakes (I don’t so much mind the ones I notice) I’ve added another couple of Nagios Plugins. This time validate_feed and validate_html. As both of these checks call out to an external, third party resource, if you use them be sure to tweak your Nagios polling interval down to a respectful level. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/unixdaemon-gitweb-is-go/ Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:09:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/unixdaemon-gitweb-is-go/ I’m not exactly a demanding user of version control systems so I’ve not been heavily motivated to ditch my personal SVN repo (which I don’t use as much as I should) and plunge in to the shiny new distributed ones. However (and this is my excuse) I’ve recently wanted to put a handful of my own Nagios plugins under a public VCS. While we use a number of the checks at work I don’t necessarily want the local changes to be made immediately public so I thought I’d take this as an opportunity to have a fiddle with git. https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/mummy-tomb-of-the-dragon-emperor-short-review/ Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:54:46 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/mummy-tomb-of-the-dragon-emperor-short-review/ It’s been the summer of returns, from the very enjoyable Dark Knight to the should have been left buried ‘plot’ of Indy and the Crystal Skull. Unfortunately most of them have been rubbish - and the The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor doesn’t do anything to address this. The special effects are good but nothing ground breaking, the new Evelyn O'Connell is a masterpiece of terrible - how such an uninteresting character can steal and kill so many scenes baffles me. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/syslogslicer-announcement/ Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:28:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/syslogslicer-announcement/ While digging through a pile of syslog log files recently I needed something a little more data format aware than pure grep. So I present the first version of syslogslicer a simple perl script that knows a little bit about the syslog log file format. # some example command lines syslogslicer -p cron -f program,message /var/log/syslog # print the program and message for all lines with program 'cron' syslogslicer -p cron -m hourly /var/log/syslog # all fields for all lines with program 'cron' and message 'hourly' syslogslicer -p cron -m hourly -s 20080810100000 -e 20080810123000 /var/log/syslog # all fields for all lines with program 'cron' and message 'hourly' # between 20080810100000 and 20080810123000 syslogslicer allows you to filter the output by matching text in the program or log message, only print certain output fields and do basic time based filtering. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/nagios-check-proxy-check/ Thu, 14 Aug 2008 10:30:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/nagios-check-proxy-check/ "This script retrieves a URL via a specified proxy server and alerts (using the standard Nagios conventions) if the request fails.“ We’re running a couple of services through a proxy server for a number of good, and to be honest a couple of not so good but mandated, reasons. The Check Proxy Check Nagios Plugin ensures that if the proxy goes down in a way that stops us pulling pages through it we know. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/jmeter-short-review/ Thu, 14 Aug 2008 08:23:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/jmeter-short-review/ A short review for a short book. Apache JMeter (Packt Publishing) is a good book if you’re new to both IT and testing and want your hand securely held. It introduces you to the basic ideas behind automated testing, takes you step by step through some simple GUI test cases and then doesn’t go any further. It’s a short book and maintains its beginners focus well but it has a very short lifespan (luckily it’s also available as a cheap PDF) and if you’re comfortable with GUIs and basic testing, or willing to click around for a while I’d recommend you dive straight in to the JMeter GUI rather than investing half a day to read this book. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/nagios-disk-check-mount-points/ Wed, 13 Aug 2008 22:54:17 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/nagios-disk-check-mount-points/ If you mount filesystems under a specific mount point, and monitor them with Nagios, then be sure you understand what happens if the underlying file system goes away. With: /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_disk -w 15% -c 10% -p /a_mount_point you’ll get the value from the containing file system. In this case /. If you’d rather know that your chosen mount point has actually gone away, and that you’re no longer checking what you thought you were, then add the -E option to the command. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/testing-no-internet-access-nagios/ Wed, 13 Aug 2008 22:50:52 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/testing-no-internet-access-nagios/ We’ve recently had to deliberately disable some machines this week to ensure they can’t connect out to the internet - we’re building testing versions of some of our more restricted secure environments and this is one of the steps. It was actually easier to do with IPTables than I thought (mostly because I didn’t have to do it - my co-worker did) but once the work was done we needed to ensure it didn’t accidently get broken so that networking was functional again. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/rules-of-releases/ Tue, 12 Aug 2008 23:12:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/rules-of-releases/ You’ve gathered the requirements, written the code, debugged it, received the new requirements, rewritten the code, got more change requests, reached a ‘compromise’ with QA (and hidden the bodies) and now you want to have the sysadmins do the release. Don’t be like everyone else - when it comes to releases too many people fail at the last mile and make obvious mistakes. In an attempt to save myself some pain (and have something to point co-workers at) here are some of the software release principles that I hold dear. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/no-yapc-eu-208-for-me/ Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:35:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/no-yapc-eu-208-for-me/ Since I’ve been asked where about at the conference I am I should probably mention that I’m not attending YAPC::EU this year. Despite the excellent job the organisers did last year at the Nordic Perl Workshop a combination of factors stopped me going back to Copenhagen. The first one (and it’s shallow but true) is that I’ve been there now. I like conferences in places I’ve never been before. If I’m going to spend a chunk of my own cash on travel I want to grab an extra day or two and have a wonder around. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/dpkg-provides-annouce/ Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:13:54 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/dpkg-provides-annouce/ I’ve never really felt as proficient with apt and dpkg as I did with RPM. There always seems to be another option I’ve never seen before. Luckily there are also big holes in my knowledge of yum to make me feel well rounded. After reading yum options you may not know exist and spending a while puzzling out how to get the same results in Debian (apt-file seems to be the closest fit but I never got the invocation right) I decided to write dpkg-provides. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/sysadmin-muffin-day-2008/ Fri, 25 Jul 2008 12:43:16 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/sysadmin-muffin-day-2008/ And not just on the waist line. Not the worst sysadmin appreciation day ever. I do now have this feeling of dread as I wait for the other shoe to drop though. https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/bootstrapping-kickstart/ Fri, 11 Jul 2008 23:22:07 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/bootstrapping-kickstart/ Having spent a (very) little time over the last month fiddling with an existing FAI setup (which is used to install Debian machines) one amazingly insightful feature of Kickstart (a provisioning tool for Redhat and Fedora) has earned a place in my heart - /root/anaconda-ks.cfg. It might not seem like much, but by having the interactive installer produce a working config that can be reused, the barrier to entry is seriously lowered and makes experimentation much easier. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/replace-yapc-openings/ Fri, 11 Jul 2008 23:19:11 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/replace-yapc-openings/ Over the last couple of years (apart from this year oddly enough) I’ve been to a fair few tech conferences and one of the most annoying things about them (especially YAPCs) are the opening talks. If you’re lucky you get a good keynote. Otherwise you get either a bad sponsor session or even, don’t be afraid - you don’t have to attend, a “Getting the most out of a YAPC” talk. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/generating-test-data-with-ruby-regexs/ Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:29:17 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/generating-test-data-with-ruby-regexs/ While paging through reddit programming recently (seems only fair since they linked to me ;)) I stumbled on to the very nifty Randexp gem, a library that uses regular expression patterns to generate data that would satisfy the pattern. Or in less tech terms - a really good test data generator. # install randexp $ irb require "rubygems" require "randexp" # simple fake phone number - /020(7|8) \d{3} \d{4}/.gen # build a reusable class. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/amazon-lovefilm-rentals/ Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:52:40 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/amazon-lovefilm-rentals/ I’ve been a happy Amazon UK DVD rental customer for the last couple of years. They’ve got a wide selection, the DVDs ship fast, come in separate envelopes and in nice sturdy plastic cases. In nearly 200 DVDs I’ve had three that were unplayable and only one that got lost in transit - a replacement for which was sent the same day. ‘Luckily’ for me Amazons DVD rentals are now handled by LoveFilm. https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/monolithic-networking/ Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:43:12 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/monolithic-networking/ When it comes to config files the Debian people and I agree on basic principles - we’re both keen on applications having a directory where you drop multiple config files to allow for easier deployment and management. Even if they do sometimes seem a little… over zealous (Debian developers? Never!) and you end up with the split Exim4 configs. So one of the little quirks that I’d like an answer to is, why does Debian have a single big interfaces file and no support for a directory of files? https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/yslow-cli-wish/ Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:59:09 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/yslow-cli-wish/ The title pretty much says it all, I’d like a command line version of YSlow! (what is it with Yahoo and !s) that I can run from cron and import in to a nice spreadsheet for trending and site comparisons. I don’t have XUL on my list of things to play with so I’ll give it a couple of months and watch someone else implement it. Hopefully. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/more-memory-than-sense/ Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:55:03 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/more-memory-than-sense/ My recent bugbear is - servers with inaccessible memory. You go and spec a nice new server with say 8Gb of RAM (a little box), you install Debian, you start adding applications to the machine and then a couple of months later some anal sysadmin comes along, does a free -m and mutters about under-specced virtualization servers when he sees total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3287 225 3062 0 24 149 For those of you not paying attention - the machine isn’t using over half of it’s memory. https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/back-in-to-the-fold-200807/ Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:46:01 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/back-in-to-the-fold-200807/ It’s been a while since I posted anything here but now seems like as good a time as any to get back in to the wider world of tech. Where’s a good place to start? Since this years YAPC::EU only has two or three talks I want to see I’ve decided to use the cash (and holiday time) and invest them in to PyCon UK instead. https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/frigging-local-installs-with-dpkg/ Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:44:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/frigging-local-installs-with-dpkg/ I’ve had a couple of people mail asking about my “frigging apt” comment in a previous post (the last paragraph). It’s actually as simple as the comment implies. Here’s an example - wget http://ftp.dk.debian.org/debian/pool/contrib/v/vmware-package/vmware-package_0.22_i386.deb dpkg -i vmware-package_0.22_i386.deb apt-get install -f # get prompted about installing lots of packages I don’t have any really well thought out reasons to not like this approach - in the few cases I’ve tried it I’ve found it to work; it just feels a little… icky. https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/rebuilding-debian-packages/ Tue, 15 Apr 2008 09:11:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/rebuilding-debian-packages/ Ever wanted a Debian package to be just a -little- bit different? Here’s how. While most of the software we’re pulling in from Debian is fine for our uses there are a couple of applications that we’d like to be a little different than the stock versions. Rather than go away and package them ourselves (which would require a lot more packing skills and time than I currently have - improving those skills is one of the reasons I’m doing this series) it’s possible to download a source version of a Debian package, make a small amendment and then repackage it for personal use. https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/creating-debian-virtual-packages/ Tue, 15 Apr 2008 09:05:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/creating-debian-virtual-packages/ Now that we have a local apt repository we can start to fill it with our own custom goodness. One of the first things I’m going to need is virtual packages. At work we’ll be using them to pull reusable components together in to a number of full applications (and using the apt mechanisms to force upgrades when a component changes) and to group Nagios plugins (we’ll be packaging some of those in a later blog post) in to sensible sections; we’re going to have a lot of Nagios plugins. https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/personal-apt-repo-initial/ Tue, 15 Apr 2008 09:01:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/personal-apt-repo-initial/ Ever wanted your own apt-repo? If not hit the back button about…. now. My new employers are going to be very Debian heavy on the systems side of the project I’m on so I’m currently in the process of sharpening my Debian specific skills (I’ve always tried to avoid Unix solutions that were tied to a single OS or distro but in this case we might as well do it The Debian Way). https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/unemployed-200803/ Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:40:27 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/unemployed-200803/ I’m far happier than I should be to announce that as of about 39 minutes ago I am once more unemployed. My two month contract finished on time and I’m looking forward to being a strain on society for the entire weekend. I start a new role Monday morning (not sure what I can and can’t say about it yet) but I’m looking forward to getting my teeth in to their technical challenges rather than just advising. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/earthshakes-2008/ Wed, 27 Feb 2008 01:14:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/earthshakes-2008/ I’ve just been woken up by the flat moving. Cups rattling, shelves wobbling and my ceiling light clinking against itself. Felt very much like the aftershocks of the earthquake we had a couple of years ago. Here’s hoping no one’s hurt. Update: BBC coverage. So I wasn’t the only one to notice then. https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/times-films-2008/ Thu, 17 Jan 2008 20:38:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/times-films-2008/ I’ve just had a skim through the Times onlines 50 movies of 2008 and while I was picking my handful of must sees (Cloverfield, Indy 4, and Hellboy 2) I noticed a couple of interesting comments While I’m actually very fan boy about the idea of an Avengers movie (mentioned in the “The Incredible Hulk” comments) I felt a cold shiver of dread when I read 'Hayden Christensen, who has also just signed to star in the long-awaited movie version of William Gibson’s prescient sci-fi classic Neuromancer,‘. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/losug-jan08/ Thu, 17 Jan 2008 20:33:38 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/losug-jan08/ I attended the Advances in OpenSolaris Network Administration talk hosted by LOSUG over at London Bridge last night. And no one mentioned MySQL. I came out of the session with a couple of pages of notes but two things really stuck out - the talk covered the new developments as a sequential feature list rather than showing you something cool or interesting and then explaining how the new technologies made it possible. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/neward-chromatic-predictions/ Wed, 16 Jan 2008 11:36:37 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/neward-chromatic-predictions/ Ted Neward is the latest person to get linked to in the ongoing campaign to prove that parrot isn’t dead, sleeping or pining for the fjords (sorry, couldn’t resist). While chromatic rebuffs some of Teds points I can’t help but think something is missing - a little outside perspective. chromatic rightfully points out that the project isn’t dead (and has actually been pretty visible in the perl sphere since the start of the year) but look at it from more of an outsiders angle - unless you are already in the perl community it’s not obviously moving. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/three-things-1/ Tue, 15 Jan 2008 19:48:31 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/three-things-1/ This weeks three things are - MySQL 5.1(.20+) can log errors via syslog (finally) IBM Blades run quite well despite being very wet. (don't ask) Amazon Prime is too helpful. (Wooo individual book orders) https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/hellboy-sword-of-storms-short/ Tue, 15 Jan 2008 19:36:44 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/hellboy-sword-of-storms-short/ I liked the original Hellboy, it had great casting, an OK story and Selma Blair being hot. Well, technically on fire, but we’ll let that slip. I was expecting great thing from the first of the animated Hellboy films - special effects are great but you can go completely overboard with the monsters in an animated film. Instead I spent a couple of hours watching Hellboy Sword of Storms plod along at a very slow pace. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/escrow-proof-of-ownership/ Tue, 15 Jan 2008 19:28:08 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/escrow-proof-of-ownership/ I own a lot of old comics, piles of DVDs and a somewhat smaller (but still decent size stack) of audio CDs. These take up a lot of physical space, the comics decrease in quality, they all attract dust and are a pain to dig through when I want to find that one song on a compilation CD from 2002. Or was it 2001? I have a lot of data - iso images and virtual machines are among the biggest disk eaters. https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/i-am-legend-short-review/ Tue, 08 Jan 2008 23:48:41 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/i-am-legend-short-review/ I’ve watched the original Omega Man, enjoyed the Kiwi perspective (named The Quiet Earth) and now I’ve seen Robert Neville Will Smith style - and it wasn’t bad. The plot is mostly unchanged (although explained through flashbacks), the pacing is decent and the feeling of being alone is well conveyed - the DVD store scene is a great glimpse of a man about to lose it. The zombie/mutant hordes are a lot more visually impressive than those in the Omega Man (20 years of special effects and it shows) but their near mindless nature does change the tone and pace a bit. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/ora-books-password/ Tue, 08 Jan 2008 23:12:43 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/ora-books-password/ It’s not that widely known but O'Reilly offer a user group discount - it’s 35% off the cover price and free delivery so it’s often cheaper than you can get the books new from anywhere else. A few days ago I wanted to order a couple of books and because there are no conferences this month (and so no lovely Josette) I signed up online. The process itself was quick, easy and painless but one step stuck out in my mind - “Password cannot contain special characters or spaces”. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/bash-puzzles-brace-expansion-20080101/ Tue, 08 Jan 2008 21:34:56 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/bash-puzzles-brace-expansion-20080101/ There is nothing like other peoples code to highlight all those little gaps in your knowledge of a programming language. I know what the first one does: $ mkdir -p {projectone_,projecttwo_,projectthree_}log $ ls -1 projectone_log projectthree_log projecttwo_log And I was a confident (and a little bit happy) about knowing what the second one does: $ mkdir -p {project_one,}log $ ls -1 log project_onelog But I had no clue about this one. https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/three-out-of-three-200801/ Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:57:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/three-out-of-three-200801/ Thanks to everyone who sent me leads and links to relevant job adverts but since I posted that I was out of work I’ve started a two month contract that began this week and runs until the end of Feb. It’s my first contract role (and it’s not a typical one by any stretch) and it’s taking a little time to get used to considering I’ve spent most of my working life as a permie. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/the-empty-envelope/ Fri, 04 Jan 2008 23:38:21 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/the-empty-envelope/ This is a weird one (and a bit of a long shot) but someone kindly sent me a letter this week, well I assume they did, as I only got an envelope. If it was you then please drop me an email. I’m not ignoring, you I just don’t know who you are or what you wanted. Not knowing is going to bug me now. https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/yslow-grade-a/ Wed, 02 Jan 2008 22:52:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/yslow-grade-a/ I spent a couple of hours running the YSlow FireFox extension against the main website for one of my little side projects and I couldn’t stop fiddling with the sites config until I got the score up. Improving a category until you get an ‘A’ gives you that same moment of satisfaction as all your tests passing or a file restore working perfectly. Due to not being amazingly wealthy I cheated with the content delivery network stage and just overrode it with the sites own name. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/linux-journal-offensive-adverts/ Wed, 02 Jan 2008 16:40:12 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/linux-journal-offensive-adverts/ Linux Journal is getting some coverage again, last time was an advert, this time it’s a headline about Perl that Andy Lester didn’t like and caused him to post that "The Linux Journal owes the open source community, especially the Perl community, a big apology.“ You can read the full complaint yourself over at use.perl 2.0 - sorry - Perl Buzz ;) I like his post, despite the fact he’s got a valid point the delivery irks me more than the underlying issue. https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/perl510-my-favourite-three/ Tue, 01 Jan 2008 11:59:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/perl510-my-favourite-three/ Since the release of Perl 5.10 (back on 2007/12/18) there have been a fair few articles discussing all the shiny new features - including smart matching, a built-in switch and state variables but my favourite three haven’t really received much coverage. So I’ll add to the pile of blog posts. First up is a tiny (from the outside anyway) change that may have the biggest impact of all the new features on my day to day perl - the display of the actual name of uninitialized variables. https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/new-day-new-year-new-job-hang-on/ Tue, 01 Jan 2008 11:01:28 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/new-day-new-year-new-job-hang-on/ As of 6PM yesterday (or midnight - depending on how you interpret my employment contract) my current role is redundant and I’m no longer a member of the working world. It was a mostly good 28 months and I was lucky enough to work with some damn smart people. This wasn’t unexpected. Between the Register articles and a generously lengthened consultation period most of us were pretty sure we’d be on the market again soon. https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/yapc-2007-maybe/ Sun, 26 Aug 2007 23:52:57 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/yapc-2007-maybe/ I’ve been quiet recently for “medical reasons”. I’ve been suffering from a pain in the side that seems to strike strongly when I’m sitting, laying or standing up - yes, that doesn’t leave a lot :) It’s present most of the time but tolerable unless I sit in certain positions or chairs. It’s not been too bad at work as the office has very nice seats but I drastically reduced my time spent online (my home desk setup seems to annoy it) while I waited to find out what’s wrong. https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/pfacter-facts/ Tue, 14 Aug 2007 20:46:56 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/pfacter-facts/ While dabbling with Puppet I’ve spent a fair amount of time investigating facter, one of the tools (although puppet uses it as a library) it’s built on. While I quite like the format it uses to define a fact I’m hampered by my lack of ruby experience; simple things take me longer than they should. So when I noticed Pfacter while looking for a module on CPAN recently I thought I’d have a look at how it could be done in perl. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/commented-config-files/ Mon, 25 Jun 2007 22:32:07 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/commented-config-files/ The current trend with config files is to fill them with comments (let’s ignore the fact this isn’t a substitute for documentation) and while this is helpful watching people arrow through them line by line looking for active options drives me nuts. If you’re using vim (as all good people do ;)) you can jump from uncommented directive to uncommented directive with /^[^#] as a search. Pressing n will then move you to the next uncommented option. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/have-card-will-travel/ Sun, 24 Jun 2007 11:47:59 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/have-card-will-travel/ It’s been a long week that began with half the systems team coming down with colds and ended with no water at home and dealing with plumbers. A number of little road blocks cropped up and late Friday night I decided to do the adult thing - and ran away. I’ve not really had a non-tech break since January so about 10 Friday night I grabbed my “conference kit” (I’ve learned to pack for short trips both quickly and lightly - and with only cheap items) I went and bought a ticket to the coast, used the wireless in the train station to find a small “hotel” (that’s a glamourous term for where I ended up staying) and buggered off to enjoy the beach for two days. https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/indian-nights/ Mon, 11 Jun 2007 01:37:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/indian-nights/ A tech friend of mine has spent the last four months in Chennai doing the ground work for his first VC backed start-up. He’s got a years funding (at Chennai costs), he’s just got the building (including decent aircon and a generator - which were apparently harder to get than you’d think) and now he needs to grow his tech team from five to about thirty over the next couple of months. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/nagios-cgis/ Sun, 03 Jun 2007 11:51:41 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/nagios-cgis/ While working on my Nagios display tools I wanted to modify our existing Nagios deployments to easily link the information in but after a quick dig I discovered that something was very wrong - the Nagios CGIs are written in C. While shell and perl are my current languages of choice I can write (a very little and very basic) C but the idea of customising webpages in it, especially pages this critical to the company, stopped me in my tracks. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/simple-nagios-trends/ Sun, 03 Jun 2007 11:29:21 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/simple-nagios-trends/ Continuing the release of my Nagios code - here’s my Nagios Simple Trender. It parses Nagios logs and builds a horizontal barchart for host outages, service warnings and criticals. It’s nothing fancy (and the results are a little unpretty) but it does make the attention seeking services and hosts very easy to find. While the tool isn’t that technically complex I’ve found it useful in justifying my time on certain parts of the infrastructure. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/nagios-tag-cloud/ Sun, 03 Jun 2007 11:08:25 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/nagios-tag-cloud/ We use the Nagios monitoring system at work (in fact we use four installs of it for physically isolated networks) and while it’s damn useful (and service checks are easy to create or extend) it’s a little lacking in higher level trending and visualisation tools. Well, at least the very old version we run suffers from this. Thankfully I work for a company that invests time in its core tools. Over the last couple of hackdays I’ve written two small scripts for parsing Nagios logfiles and presenting the information in a different, slightly more grouped way. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/perks-of-home-logout/ Sun, 03 Jun 2007 10:47:29 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/perks-of-home-logout/ It’s not a well kept secret but I’m still surprised by how many people have never encountered .bash_logout. Its purpose is pretty simple, if you use the BASH shell it’ll be executed when you log out (see, a well named file!) So what’s it for? Well, I use mine to invalidate any sudo sessions I’ve got open (sudo -k), clear the screen -in case it’s a local session - and nuke a history file or two. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/little-code-200706/ Sat, 02 Jun 2007 10:27:22 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/little-code-200706/ When I worked as a developer I played around with servers and infrastructure in my spare time, now I get paid to worry about that kind of stuff I quite enjoy writing the occasional useless piece of code. This weeks were a patch (well it started as a patch) to Statistics::Lite to make it pass its tests. And then I got distracted in to re-writing its test script from Test.pm to Test::More. https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/perl6-daemon-percentages/ Fri, 01 Jun 2007 22:21:03 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/perl6-daemon-percentages/ After heading to the Nordic Perl Workshop and watching sessions by Jonathan Worthington and brian d foy I decided to have a little play with Perl 6 and see if I could port my Daemon Percentages script (Perl 5 and Ruby versions already exist) to Perl 6. Thanks to material in the slides from the above sessions and asking a couple of questions in #perl6 I got a basically working Daemon percentages Perl 6 script running on my Windows desktop under pugs in a couple of hours (I had problems finding an example of the substitution). https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/suns-black-box-london/ Thu, 17 May 2007 20:09:34 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/suns-black-box-london/ Project Blackbox is in London for a single day. And I didn’t get a place. Gah. It looks so shiny… https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/status-update-200705/ Mon, 14 May 2007 22:02:18 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/status-update-200705/ I went to the Nordic Perl Workshop. I had a great time. I also got sunburn. The legal issues surrounding my grandfathers estate are heating up again. Which takes a lot of my time and energy (and money). Builders have been in and redone the kitchen in the flat. It flooded a couple of months ago and now looks shiny and new again. Which means I’ve not been able to move about in here much for the last week or so. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/bad-budgeting/ Tue, 08 May 2007 21:27:47 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/bad-budgeting/ The topic of budgets came up in the office today (the team I work in wants to spend more than we have - of course - but SUN thumpers are so shiny…) and I was reminded of a tactic used by one of my previous bosses in a VC backed company. The systems team were assigned an amount for the year that was too low for the planned upgrades (which had been signed off) and was a suspiciously round number. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/df-output-ordering/ Sun, 06 May 2007 12:46:10 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/df-output-ordering/ Sometimes questions come up that you know you should know the answer to but you just don’t. My recent one was “how does df choose the output order?” The man page doesn’t mention the logic behind it and a quick strace shows it pulls its data from /proc/mounts (which you’d expect) and returns the output in the same order. So logically the question becomes how does /proc/mounts order things? It’s not exactly an important question but I can see how this ends - and it involves source code. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/dear-company-woot-07/ Sun, 06 May 2007 12:39:23 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/dear-company-woot-07/ The Workshop On Offensive Technologies (WOOT 07) might be the most interesting new conference this year. If it plays its cards right it’ll be a good mix of the more underground groups, infosec professionals and security think tanks. We need more events like this in the UK. Don’t know how nice I’ll have to be to management to try and get a ticket but it’ll probably be worth it. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/scifi-selection-may07/ Thu, 03 May 2007 19:12:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/scifi-selection-may07/ In one of those serenity^Wserendipitous moments I seem to have an abundance of Science Fiction close to hand. Thanks to Richard I’ve got tickets to see Spider-man 3, Amazon DVD rental have sent me Metropolis, A Scanner Darkly and Triangle. Paul grabbed tickets for the London SciFi weekend showing of Quatermass and I’m now the proud owner of the whole Deep Space Nine run. Sometimes it’s good to be a geek. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/deferring-defects/ Sat, 21 Apr 2007 17:41:03 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/deferring-defects/ Autonomics refer to the ability of computer systems to be self-managing. – autonomics.ca Here’s one that has been bothering me. Suppose you have a recurring problem that your “autonomic solution” can handle every time it occurs without any one knowing. At what point does the fact there is a treatable issue propagate up to a real person? While an automatic “fix and tell me later” approach helps change your work from fire fighting to planned tasks what classifies a temporary problem as being important enough to warrant you investigating it? https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/requests-three-important-details/ Sat, 21 Apr 2007 17:28:55 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/requests-three-important-details/ I’m a sysadmin, half my working life seems to be spent handling other peoples requests (which is why I’m trying to move over to infrastructure work - where I can hopefully concentrate on something for three whole minutes). While chatting with a junior admin at a tech talk in the week the following three tips came up: Use a ticketing system. This one comes up a lot but it’s true, never dropping someones request is well worth the time spent setting it up. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/database-provisioning-papers/ Sat, 21 Apr 2007 16:57:40 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/database-provisioning-papers/ It’s been a week of databases, replication, provisioning and planning for automation. While winding down (it’s an on-call weekend) I found some links I’d marked for future reading. If you’re interested in database provisioning (especially read only replicated slaves), practical autonomics and how they could potentially be useful in a real environment then these papers make for an interesting ten minutes It doesn’t take a massive leap in imagination to see how a similar approach could be used in to horizontally scale web servers in conjunction with an intelligent monitoring system or load balancer. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/ipv6experiment/ Tue, 17 Apr 2007 22:11:12 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/ipv6experiment/ I don’t normally write short posts with a single link but the The Great IPv6 Experiment amused me. In an attempt to crack the chicken and the egg adoption problem they have put up an IPv6 only website full of porn. They say porn pushes technical innovation. We’ll see. Although probably not until the videos are over. https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/sunshine-short-review/ Tue, 17 Apr 2007 21:44:36 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/sunshine-short-review/ I wanted to like Sunshine, I really did. A new sci-fi film by the writer and directors of 28 Days Later (a very entertaining film) should have been enough to keep me going until Spider-Man 3 is released. Instead it was a seriously dull and predictable two hours. The sun is going out (hip hip hip hurray?) so a small group of scientists are sent to detonate a bomb that’ll kick start it. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/no-whinging-systems-fight-back/ Tue, 17 Apr 2007 21:32:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/no-whinging-systems-fight-back/ After my little whine I logged in to do my last checks for the evening to discover that one of our webservers had died due to a hard drive going bang, our production environment Nagios box had lost one of its network connections and a chunk of our SAN kit was complaining about power issues. Turns out that most of these were due to a power surge that killed a network switch and three of the racks power strips. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/fractally-crap/ Mon, 16 Apr 2007 22:47:27 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/fractally-crap/ A Fractal is “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be subdivided in parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole" – Wikipedia - Fractal Fractally Crap - a system where any piece, when looked at individually, is every bit as broken, badly planned and undocumented as the rest. And yes, I know that if you pile rubbish on rubbish then you get… (strangely enough) rubbish but you can normally find the occasional little gem or ray of sunshine. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/bad-virus-bad/ Fri, 06 Apr 2007 13:48:05 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/bad-virus-bad/ I’ve had a cold / flu for the last month or so that I’ve not been able to fully shake off. I took a weeks holiday from work to relax and kill the damn thing only to be told by the doctor it’s not a cold or the flu, it’s a viral infection. Which will shift on its own, just not for a while. I was told the usual (give it time and lots of rest) and so I’m posting this as a quick and dirty way of explaining why I’ve not responded to your $FOO https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/sysadmins-rule-the-world/ Sat, 31 Mar 2007 23:57:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/sysadmins-rule-the-world/ There is something immensely isolating about working alone in a very secure, huge data centre, at 4am on a Sunday morning in an isolated “business park” in rural Scotland that only a few people will ever understand. The mind wanders, your ears strain to hear things over the quite loud air conditioning and just five minutes in daylight with a can of diet coke and someone to talk to would make the last 48 hours seem tolerable. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/chris-blizzard-releases-the-kittens/ Sat, 31 Mar 2007 16:34:55 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/chris-blizzard-releases-the-kittens/ Yes, I’m completely behind with this one but it’s Linux geek funny (the images are CC licensed by Chris Blizzard). It is also a sneaky test of the planet.gllug.org image handeling. And then to the Debian and Ubuntu versions. https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/automated-slow-typing-take-two/ Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:02:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/automated-slow-typing-take-two/ In my Simulating Typing in Perl post I included a small chunk of perl for varying the typing speed of a fake user. While it works it did have some oddities that were noticeable by a sharp eyed viewer. Thanks to a pointer from Mark Fowler I’ve now revised the script slightly and included String::KeyboardDistance. This nifty module knows how far away keys on the keyboard are from each other and so helps to smooth the delays out a little; for example the string ‘aaaaa’ is now typed much faster than before (because there is no travel involved) where as ‘qpqpqpq’ will be slower due to the finger movement - although I’m not bothered enough to make repeated sequences faster. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/marooned-in-real-time/ Wed, 28 Mar 2007 23:32:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/marooned-in-real-time/ Marooned In Realtime was the first Vinge book I read and it has prompted me to start looking for all his others. A small number of time travellers (that can only go forward) awaken to find out humanity is gone. Amid a plan to gather all the other travellers together and kick start the human race one of the more powerful techs dies in odd circumstances, a 9000 year old traveller returns, aliens might be waiting to finish us off and an ex-detective is ordered to lead a manhunt to find out just what happened to the projects architect and biggest supporter (who may have been murdered by old age). https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/truenames-short-review/ Wed, 28 Mar 2007 23:08:17 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/truenames-short-review/ This is more like it, True Names by Vernor Vinge is a great mix of sci-fi and fantasy. Technical wizards join forces in cyberspace to oppose the “Great Adversary”. When one of them is compromised and turned in the real world a hunt for the most dangerous of the online personas is launched, leading to a great chase and some nicely described online battled. I’m not doing it justice, just click the above link dammit. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/blood-music-short-review/ Wed, 28 Mar 2007 22:53:49 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/blood-music-short-review/ I’ve been on a sci-fi novel kick again recently and despite its short page count Blood Music by Greg Bear was the one I found slowest to finish from my first batch. A rogue biotechnologist starts his own experiments in to biological computers based on his own lymphocytes while on the company clock. He gets caught, ignores all precautions and injects himself with them. They then become intelligent and start spreading. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/bonded-nic-challenge/ Wed, 28 Mar 2007 00:06:50 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/bonded-nic-challenge/ Here is another one for the sysadmins in the audience: How … … many of your servers have multiple network ports in the back? … many of them have bonding (teaming for the Windows people) enabled? … do you know when one interface goes down if the machine stays connected? … long does it take for you to be notified? … do you know if they start flapping? … many have their bonded interfaces plugged in to different switches? https://www.unixdaemon.net/gui/vmware-free-converter-first-thoughts/ Tue, 27 Mar 2007 23:48:19 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/gui/vmware-free-converter-first-thoughts/ While we’re a Xen shop I’ve always been a VMWare fan and I had the chance to take a look at the free (as in beer) VMWare Converter Starter today. We’ve got a couple of old Windows machines with no installation documents or run books so when working towards making them reproducible grabbing a whole system image is a great first step. The first machine I tried it on has a very unhappy hard drive (yes, it’s my work laptop) and the converter refused to play past 5% of the disk; me thinks it’s time to verify my backups. https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/automated-slow-typing/ Tue, 27 Mar 2007 20:11:28 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/automated-slow-typing/ You’d think it would be easy - have a program type a previously written program at a human speed (minus the typos). Vim has record and reply functionality but it’s done with typical vim efficiency: yes, instantly. At EuroOSCON a couple of years ago Damian Conway handed out a presentation tidbit, he uses the hand_print function from IO::Prompt to make himself look like a master typist. Well, he could just have been saying that to make us feel better, maybe he can type that fast… Anyway, I tried a simple example using the module: https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/missed-puppet-muppets/ Mon, 26 Mar 2007 22:23:47 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/missed-puppet-muppets/ I’ve been in bed for most of the last week and a half (apart from two very short staffed days in the office) with the cold / flu bug that seems to stalk through our office on permanent rotation. Apart from the general feeling ill and lots of sleeping I missed a GLLUG and the first London Puppet Muppets meeting. But I did decide to go to the 2007 Nordic Perl Workshop, an event I’ve managed to miss for the last three years. https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/frank-millers-300-short-review/ Mon, 26 Mar 2007 22:13:37 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/frank-millers-300-short-review/ I’ve never read the comic, I didn’t recognise any of the cast and quite enjoyed 300 as a not very challenging film. Lots of very cool fight scenes, an acceptable amount of plot and a great ‘arrows blotting out the sun’ scene. Oh, and a war rhino. What else is there to say? The fight scenes are bloody but not especially gory, the Spartans are portrayed with the right amount of bad-ass nature and it had a number of Sin Cityesque deformed villains in it. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/top-anything-lists/ Mon, 26 Mar 2007 22:04:13 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/top-anything-lists/ Digg People: Please note that “Top $FOO of all time lists” should not be completely comprised of $FOO's from the last two years. You should also dock points for all uppercase words, txtsp3k, leet speak and every use of ‘AMAZING!!111’ and its ilk. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/monolithic-config-management/ Mon, 26 Mar 2007 22:02:17 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/monolithic-config-management/ This came up in conversation with a developer at the Google OpenSource Jam so I thought I’d mention it while it is fresh in my mind (update: at which point I forgot to move it to the published directory. Doh). Breaking up config files isn’t done just to annoy people, it’s done to make automated and mass management easier. A solid practical example is the Debian Apache configs. Historically most distros (and too many current ones) used a single config file for Apache. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/google-london-opensource-jam-02/ Mon, 26 Mar 2007 22:00:06 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/google-london-opensource-jam-02/ I recently went to the second Google London OpenSource Jam over at Belgrave House. I’ve been aware of some of the London Google evenings but I’ve never made the effort to go, how ever there were a couple of people I’ve not seen for ages on the attendee list for this one so I decided to sign up. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting but what I got was more than a little weird, part pre-2000 dotcom and part group hug; it wasn’t really my kind of event. https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/log-dispatch-twitter/ Wed, 21 Mar 2007 17:08:50 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/log-dispatch-twitter/ For reasons that are too dull to post about (yes, even on THIS blog!) I spent some time today looking at Log::Dispatch. Bob (the afore mentioned bigger boy) then made^Wsuggested I integrate it with the shining example of wasted time that is Twitter. So I (not very) proudly present: Log::Dispatch::Twitter! Now, where’s the build system source code… https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/wonderful-world-of-kernel-module-removing/ Wed, 21 Mar 2007 10:09:33 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/wonderful-world-of-kernel-module-removing/ All I wanted to do was stop the IPv6 kernel module from starting on boot. It shouldn’t be hard, it shouldn’t be difficult and despite the early hour of the day, it shouldn’t require me to google. But it seems that it does, as a start point the Planete Beranger Disable IPv6 post shows the many different ways to solve the problem. Unfortunately it seems that the Debian Etch install I’m testing on doesn’t like: https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/playing-with-facter/ Wed, 14 Mar 2007 23:20:18 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/playing-with-facter/ I’m on-call tonight so I invested some time in facter, “A cross-platform Ruby library for retrieving facts from operating systems.” While facter is an interesting command line program (its extension mechanism is quite nice) its main claim to fame is that it’s used by puppet (which I’m slowly evaluating as a CFEngine replacement) to determine facts about a machine. While the docs are a little light on the ground the tgz contains a couple of examples and after some playing around I think I’ve got a basic Linux Bonding fact ready. https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/proc-block-dump/ Wed, 14 Mar 2007 18:18:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/proc-block-dump/ Over at the top-like command for disk io thread on GLLUG Kostas Georgiou mentioned a Linux /proc file entry I’d never heard of before, and after some digging it looks like it could be useful when debugging certain IO problems. Assuming you have 2.6.6 or above - or a vendor patched kernel. When you activate the option with a echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump as root (read the article and consider turning syslog off first) the kernel starts to log which processes are accessing which disk blocks and inodes. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/daemon-percentages-and-ruby-autovivification/ Mon, 12 Mar 2007 21:06:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/daemon-percentages-and-ruby-autovivification/ Both Jim Weirich and Ben Summers were kind enough to email me about my Daemon Logging Percentages and Playing with Ruby Idioms post. They sent me an explanation on how to do the hash assignment in a way I find much nicer, so with no more delays I present - Option 4: tally = Hash.new(0) tally[daemon] += 1 It really is that simple - and I still missed it by a mile. https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/outlaw-short-review/ Mon, 12 Mar 2007 20:59:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/outlaw-short-review/ Tonight I saw Outlaw. It starts out showing how people feel let down and abandoned by the law and the fact it seems to treat criminals better than the victims. It’s a great idea, the topic is perfectly timed and it’s only spoiled by a shoddy execution (no pun intended). It soon turns in to a badly plotted gang film that is amazingly one sided - the outlaws are never really developed so their point is lost, it is full of cliches and pretty dull. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/twitter-and-bash-bad-ideas/ Sun, 11 Mar 2007 13:55:51 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/twitter-and-bash-bad-ideas/ I’m not sure about the basic idea behind Twitter but after signing up, having a little look and noticing the Net::Twitter CPAN module I decided to implement a really bad idea… #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; use warnings; use Net::Twitter; my $bot = Net::Twitter->new( username => "username", password => "password" ); chomp(my $doing = <>); $doing =~ s/^\s+\d+\s+//; $bot->update($doing); To make it ‘useful’ you’ll need to run the following in your bash shell: PROMPT_COMMAND='history | tail -n 1 | /path/to/twitter_post. https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/ghost-rider-review/ Sun, 11 Mar 2007 12:38:21 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/ghost-rider-review/ Ghost Rider took a lot longer to reach our screens than it should have, and considering the amount of re-work involved it isn’t that good. Very middle of the road (haha), only see it if you’re a comic book geek, bored or want another chance to see Nicolas Cage not have expressions. 4/10. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/busy-feb/ Sun, 11 Mar 2007 12:34:35 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/busy-feb/ I was more than a little slack in my online activities in February. Between getting back from LCA and preparing for FOSDEM (tip: sleep a lot before you go) I also managed to have curry with both David Cantrells, see Luke Kanies present Puppet at GLLUG, attend a London PM Heretics, a Lonix and two other meetings that don’t have real names yet. And reach another birthday. I’m not going to UKUUG in Manchester (I need some time at home) but I’ve been prodded in to potentially organising another GLLUG evening and a London PM tech meet, Brummie. https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/daemon-percentages-and-playing-with-ruby/ Sat, 10 Mar 2007 23:19:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/daemon-percentages-and-playing-with-ruby/ While digging in to some large log files recently I needed to work out which daemons were causing the most noise, so I wrote a little perl script called daemon_percentages.pl. It was short, ran quickly and did what I wanted. And then my lunch plans were cancelled due to rain. With nothing but boredom, a newly compiled version of ruby and the google homepage at my side I decided to write a version in ruby. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/frdns-revisions/ Sat, 10 Mar 2007 22:46:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/frdns-revisions/ I originally wrote frdns to find and warn about inconsistencies in forward and reverse DNS records. At the time I was also using a tool called hawk to show both IPs that didn’t have a reverse record and reverse records that didn’t have a responding IP address associated with them (we had a lot of orphaned records). While hawk did the job it required a MySQL instance, a daemon process and an apache server to function - which was a PITA when it had to be moved to another server. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/importance-levels/ Sat, 10 Mar 2007 16:05:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/importance-levels/ When you’re first introduced to an environment you’ll have the ever fun task of working out which machines should get the most time; and that order seldom matches which machines actually need the most attention. To help me prioritise I’ve worked out a simple importance rating system to show where I spend my time. Below is a simplified version. I use it to assign a single importance number to each machine, and then I allocate a certain amount of time each day to work on the issues, requests and improvements I’ve got in my todo list for that level. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/cron-commandments/ Sat, 10 Mar 2007 15:59:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/cron-commandments/ Although it’s a rare Unix machine that doesn’t run at least a couple of custom cronjobs it’s an even more special snowflake that does them properly. Below are some of the more common problems I’ve seen and my thoughts on them. Always use a script, never a bare command line. A parenthesis wrapped command-line in a crontab sends shivers down my spine. Nothing says "I didn't really think this through" and " https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/puppet-muppets-initial-post/ Sat, 10 Mar 2007 00:30:01 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/puppet-muppets-initial-post/ I’m a lurker on the Puppet mailing list and after some discussions John Arundel has stepped up and done the organising for the first Puppet London Users Meet - Thursday, March 22. I’m not using Puppet yet but I’m thinking of heading along to hear peoples adoption stories. I’ve also been thinking about the lack of a sysadmin community in London since GLLUG became a lot more newbie friendly and SAGE-WISE faded out. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/disk-delvings/ Fri, 09 Mar 2007 09:21:57 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/disk-delvings/ “The Google team found that 36% of the failed drives did not exhibit a single SMART-monitored failure. They concluded that SMART data is almost useless for predicting the failure of a single drive.” – StorageMojo - Google’s Disk Failure Experience There have been two excellent papers on disk drive failures released recently, the Dugg and Dotted Google paper - Failure trends in a large disk drive population (warning: PDF) and the also excellent but less hyped Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you? https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/disk-usage-challenge/ Fri, 09 Mar 2007 08:48:32 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/disk-usage-challenge/ Here’s one for the sysadmins in the crowd; if you were asked to show the following how long would it take you to gather the information? Which of your file systems have the fastest growth rate? Which are the most under-utilised? Which haven't changed by more than 5% over the last month? If you use Nagios you can cheat and work out the full drive size from the free space and percentage used reported by the disk checks, but that’s… icky. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/ls-and-the-missing-argument/ Fri, 09 Mar 2007 08:34:30 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/ls-and-the-missing-argument/ When it comes to command line options GNU ls already uses most of the alphabet, so for my own sanity can someone implement a -j that doesn’t change the behaviour much from a ls -alh? It’s my most common typo and I’m willing to offer beer to remove the problem. I could learn to type better but this is easier ;) https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/the-road-to-fosdem-2007/ Thu, 22 Feb 2007 23:18:24 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/the-road-to-fosdem-2007/ Tomorrow sees the unofficial start of FOSDEM 2007. A ride on Eurostar, meet up with some of the London techs, food and then to the usual pub in the evening - it’s the only way for a Linux geek to spend a Friday night in February. This year we don’t have RMS (no song! Oh YES!) and I’ve now (twice) seen the talk I was most looking forward to (Puppet - good talk) so I think I’ll be spending more time in the dev rooms and less in the main tracks. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/another-year-and-the-first-decade/ Tue, 20 Feb 2007 04:53:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/another-year-and-the-first-decade/ So, another full year of my life is over and done. As years go it’s not been the best one. Family troubles, time (and money, lots of money) spent dealing with lawyers and the passing of my grandfather, someone I saw nearly daily and often find myself thinking about, have all conspired to stop that annoying smile I often get. This post is a little more indulgent than usual but it’s my birthday and I’m full of cold caffine and napalmesque curry - so tough! https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/host-table-ping-script/ Thu, 01 Feb 2007 07:01:50 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/host-table-ping-script/ I’m not too keen on yesterdays UGU tip of the day and it doesn’t take much to make it work a chunk better, so I thought I’d whine about it on my blog. Here’s the original snippet: grep -v "#" /etc/hosts | awk '{print $1}' | while read host do ping -c 1 $host done But this has some very fixable caveats. It doesn’t deal with blank lines, it’ll try and ping IPv6 addresses (and too many distros put IPv6 entries in the host table these days - even if you disable the IPv6 options) and it will ignore any lines that have a comment, even if the comment is after the field we want. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/firefox-baseball-cap/ Fri, 19 Jan 2007 00:02:39 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/firefox-baseball-cap/ And it’s probably missing me by now, a beer will be purchased for the finder. This is what blogs are really for ;) https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/five-things-that-wont-die/ Thu, 18 Jan 2007 23:56:45 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/five-things-that-wont-die/ I’ve been tagged by Dave Cross so here are some things that you probably don’t know about me but I’m not too worried about sharing. Although they ain’t very juicy. I simultaneously broke both my wrists while playing football in secondary school - it involved a concrete pitch and a diving goal keeper. In addition to hurting like hell for what seemed like forever it was also the last time I actually played football. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/the-oz-dmca/ Thu, 18 Jan 2007 00:16:14 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/the-oz-dmca/ My first session of the day (I was lucky enough to spend a big chunk of the real first one talking to Richard Weideman, the Education Programme Manager at Canonical) was recommended to me by all the local people I know at the conference - and it was as good as they said. Unlike most people who speak on these topics at Linux / OpenSource / Free Software conferences, Kimberlee Weatherall IS a lawyer (IP) and was actively involved in the amendments to the Australian laws. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/lca-day-2-sessions-afternoon/ Wed, 17 Jan 2007 22:28:36 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/lca-day-2-sessions-afternoon/ I was back in the LinuxChix room for the next (two separate half) session. Jacinta Richardson gave a short, pragmatic and quite practical, primer on social networking. The material was solid if basic - although from looking around while she spoke it seemed to be perfectly targeted to the majority of the people in the room - much note taking was going on. Val Henson then presented on salary negotiation and how to close the pay gap. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/lca-day-2-sessions-morning/ Wed, 17 Jan 2007 22:22:35 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/lca-day-2-sessions-morning/ My second day of talks began with the ever enjoyable Jono Bacon (a fellow Brit and all round top guy) introducing Jokosher, a new sound editing project for GNOME. He covered how it came to be (a mobilising of some of the LUG Radio audience) and took the audience through some of its features (with some very Slayeresque backing music). The session went well and the audience soon feel in to a rapport with him. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/watch-them-theyre-organised/ Wed, 17 Jan 2007 03:57:56 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/watch-them-theyre-organised/ Over and above the actual attending and enjoying of talks I’ve got another reason to be here, to see how they organise events on this side of the planet and to see how the wider communities seem to be doing. I’ve been chatting to a number of locals who are involved in different groups and the level of cooperation is embarrassingly good compared to what we’ve got at home. I sat in on the Linux Australia AGM last night and I’ve now got a short list of people to hassle about how they’ve managed to get certain projects off the ground; so if you’re an LA board member watch out for the sunburnt pom with a list of “How’d ya…” questions. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/morning-wake-up-alarms-yes-alarms/ Wed, 17 Jan 2007 03:10:17 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/morning-wake-up-alarms-yes-alarms/ I’ve been running on an ever diminishing amount of battery since yesterday morning, which was when my VAIO power adaptor decided to go boom. And it did go boom. If you’ve heard stories about a strange foreign man setting off the smoke alarms in one of Sydneys highest regarded hotels then they may be true. I’m not going to comment. EVER. So this morning I made an unplanned trip to the Sydney Sony Centre and spent 200AUD on a new transformer. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/public-transport-and-the-beach/ Mon, 15 Jan 2007 22:57:15 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/public-transport-and-the-beach/ I was about ten minutes late for the start of the Tuesday opening talk, although I’m finding it hard to feel guilty about it. I got on the wrong bus and ended up on a sunny beach where I had a nice bacon roll and a cold diet coke while I waited for the right bus. I’ve been commuting pretty much every work day for my entire adult life and I’ve got to say this is the first time I’ve ended up on a beach. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/lca-day-1-sessions-afternoon/ Mon, 15 Jan 2007 22:55:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/lca-day-1-sessions-afternoon/ Getting back from lunch with more time to spare than I expected I continued hunting Jon Oxer. His Self Healing MySQL Schema talk was interesting but I’m not sure we’d ever use it. In essence he keeps a copy of his schema with the relevant application module (as a reference) and, using error trapping, any time a query hits certain error conditions, such as a table not existing, it looks up the reference schema and if it knows about it then it creates it on the fly. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/lca-day-1-sessions-morning/ Mon, 15 Jan 2007 22:52:32 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/lca-day-1-sessions-morning/ The first session on my list was Pia Waugh on Open Source in Australian Education, I wasn’t that interested in the topic (Aus is a long way from home) but I was looking forward to seeing her present, I’ve been told she’s a great speaker (nothing like raising the audiences expectations ;)) but I’ve never been able to pin people down on any details on her style; so I thought I’d have a look-see. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/aus-not-so-big-on-bandwidth/ Mon, 15 Jan 2007 22:48:28 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/aus-not-so-big-on-bandwidth/ My hotel has two connectivity options, I can either sit in the lounge and pay by the minute to use a machine any one could have installed anything on or I can pay silly money to get wireless for a couple of hours - and to add insult to injury if you buy a days worth you get a cap on how much you can download. Starbucks has never looked so appealing! https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/and-so-it-begins-lca2007/ Mon, 15 Jan 2007 22:46:48 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/and-so-it-begins-lca2007/ After trying to get out here for an LCA over the last three years I finally made it for Sydney 2007, and so far so good. The venue is huge, the University of New South Wales is full of big, open airy spaces between buildings and it’s lovely to walk around. The rooms themselves were a little hard to find at first (the LCA team put a lot of signs up in the first break which really helped) but they’re functional and have people presenting in them so what more can I ask for? https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/worlds-most-optimistic-smuggler/ Sun, 14 Jan 2007 20:34:09 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/worlds-most-optimistic-smuggler/ I’m starting to realise that the custom agencies of the world take one look at me as I pass through and assume that I’m possibly the worlds most naive and optimistic smuggler. It seems to be the combination of being (sorta) young, travelling light, and alone, to a country for only a couple of days that triggers every flag they’ve got. I can imagine the conversation “He’s only got one bag. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/change-and-version-control-are-different/ Mon, 08 Jan 2007 22:22:56 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/change-and-version-control-are-different/ And now to one of my pet annoyances… Change Control is a formal process used to ensure a product, service or process is only modified in line with the identified necessary change. – Wikipedia - change control Revision control (also known as version control, source control or (source) code management (SCM)) is the management of multiple revisions of the same unit of information. – Wikipedia - revision control As you can tell from the different definitions these two terms do not mean the same thing. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/delicious-deduper/ Sun, 07 Jan 2007 20:40:08 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/delicious-deduper/ I like del.icio.us and I’ve been using it for a long while now, but what used to be one of the more handy features, the ability to subscribe to a tag, like ‘ruby’ or ‘linux’, has gradually become less useful as more and more people find old links or repost the same link. Again. And again. And, well, you get the idea. So I wrote the del.icio.us de.dup.er script, a small perl cgi that sits between you and del. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/mail-down-and-joe-jobbing/ Sun, 07 Jan 2007 20:17:06 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/mail-down-and-joe-jobbing/ If you’ve tried to email me recently then you may have noticed that my mail server has been down a lot (or just that I’ve not responded). Over the last 10 days Unixdaemon.net was used as the reply-to and bounce addresses in a LOT of spam, not an uncommon form of a Joe Job but an annoying one one the less. The last couple of weeks have been manic and so, while it was a little drastic, the easiest way to prevent my inbox from flooding (and I mean flooding) was to turn my SMTP server off. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/open-source-question-karma/ Sun, 07 Jan 2007 20:09:27 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/open-source-question-karma/ I answer a couple of emails that contained questions about code I’ve written and in return I get a shiny new release of WebService::YouTube which fixes a bug I hit. Gotta love the ‘net. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/extending-pkwatcher/ Thu, 04 Jan 2007 20:44:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/extending-pkwatcher/ So now I’ve Announced PkgWatcher people are actually starting to use it, the optimistic curs! The first question’s already come in and it’s one I can actually answer: how do you extend it to work on other operating systems? It’s actually pretty easy, first you need to make an addition in installed_packages. This function works out which OS you’re running on and returns the respective subroutine that understands your package manager. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/pkgwatcher-release/ Tue, 02 Jan 2007 22:42:49 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/pkgwatcher-release/ When it comes to servers, some packages should be everywhere, some should be banned and there are always the edge cases - be it a build host that requires GCC or a webserver that needs a full complement of packaged perl modules. While a decent system imaging or ad-hoc change system will help keep the discrepancies down nothing beats a system level check that verifies your assumptions. And PgkWatcher is that check. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/bank-tld/ Mon, 01 Jan 2007 11:32:01 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/bank-tld/ Why don’t we have a .bank or .bank.country_code TLD that’s regulated by the same people that regulate the banks themselves? Most countries, with the notable exception of the US (which has multiple National regulators and a second tier of State ones), have a single body regulating all the banks so why not use their established trust metrics (you must be at least this tall to be a bank) to determine who can have a . https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/short-reviews-moodle-and-desperation/ Mon, 01 Jan 2007 11:08:16 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/short-reviews-moodle-and-desperation/ Cisco Routers for the Desperate (No Starch Press): If you’ve tech savvy but Cisco challenged then this books for you. It’s not a one stop shop but it covers almost everything you need to get started. We’ve just bought an office copy so I can have mine back. 8/10 – Cisco Routers for the Desperate book review Using Moodle (O’Reilly): Don’t bother, read the online docs or the application help pages instead, they contain pretty much the same amount of information. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/cisco-routers-for-the-desperate/ Mon, 04 Dec 2006 21:00:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/cisco-routers-for-the-desperate/ Author: Michael Lucas ISBN: 1593270496 Publisher: No Starch Press There is a special place on my shelves for slender books that are focused on a single topic, offer practical advice, are pragmatic in their coverage and engagingly written. “Cisco Routers for the Desperate” (CRftD) meets all four criteria. Most sysadmins inherit a couple of Cisco routers and treat them as (forest green) black boxes. We don’t need to touch them very often and when we do the lack of familiarity makes the experience one of dread. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/conference-start-times/ Sat, 02 Dec 2006 11:06:24 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/conference-start-times/ Technical conferences shouldn’t start before 10am. Although I’m no expert I’ve attended a lot and helped organise a few events and this has become one of my rules. Now let’s see if I can convince you with some of my ‘whys’. Firstly (and this is close to my heart) the stereotype of geeks working late at night isn’t without a touch of truth, a lot of us are night owls and cherish the opportunity to grab an extra hour or so in the morning. https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/should-i-release-yss/ Thu, 23 Nov 2006 00:59:26 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/should-i-release-yss/ I wrote the WebService::Yahoo::SpellingSuggestion perl module for one of my little side projects. It was easy to wrap, seemed to work fine when I did a few tests by hand and didn’t take very long to be CPANised; I’m trying to stay in good habits and treat all my internal modules as if they’d be released - I just skimp on the tests a bit. Which I know is bad. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/ms-virtual-labs-first-try/ Wed, 22 Nov 2006 20:29:28 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/ms-virtual-labs-first-try/ I worked through the MS Technet Virtual Lab Express: Introduction to ISA 2006 Beta demo last night and while the product doesn’t really interest me (I couldn’t deploy a Microsoft firewall and keep a straight face) the lab itself was interesting. You enter an email address, download an ActiveX control and wait five minutes for the lab to prepare itself. You then connect, via something that looks like Terminal Services, to four machines. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/lpw-2006-is-go/ Mon, 20 Nov 2006 20:05:29 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/lpw-2006-is-go/ I’ve been very slack in mentioning that the 2006 London Perl Workshop is go! It’s being held at Westminster (because they pretty much rock) and we’re looking for potential speakers. If you’ve got something interesting to say about perl please have a look at the Call for papers and seriously consider submitting a talk. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/css-changes/ Mon, 20 Nov 2006 20:05:29 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/css-changes/ I’ve re-written bits of the category and archive Blosxom plugins to output CSS friendly markup. Which I’ve added some CSS to. The changes are mostly non-intrusive (and most of my traffic comes through RSS readers anyway) but if I’ve painfully broken anything for your browser of choice drop me a note. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/forensic-discovery/ Mon, 06 Nov 2006 11:51:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/forensic-discovery/ Authors: Dan Farmer, Wietse Venema ISBN: 020163497X Publisher: Addison Wesley Forensic Discovery is a small book that packs a big punch. In just over 200 pages it presents more information than books three times its size (and weight). The book is divided in to three main sections. The first, “Basic Concepts”, explains two of the books core ideas, the order of volatility, how it influences the gathering of evidence, and the importance of time based information. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/nagios-plugins-listing-2006/ Tue, 17 Oct 2006 19:45:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/nagios-plugins-listing-2006/ The Nagios monitoring system is a great example of Free Software, powerful, flexible and easy to extend. While it comes with a lot of functionality out of the box you’ll occasionally want to write you own Nagios plugin; which isn’t too hard to do. The plugins below have all been written by me to help keep my systems under control. They’re functional, released under the GPL and hopefully useful to someone other than me. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/check-disk-checker/ Mon, 16 Oct 2006 22:04:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/check-disk-checker/ You start off with a couple of partitions. You add a MySQL instance and put it on a new logical volume. You break its logging out to a different volume group for performance reasons. You take a snapshot for query tuning and mount that. You add a chunk of disk for a short experiment you were going to try… thanks to legacy, laziness and easy to use LUNs you eventually end up with more mount points than you know what to do with. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/flu-2006-10/ Sun, 15 Oct 2006 21:55:02 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/flu-2006-10/ …I just look like it. I’ve spent the last week and a bit wrapped up in bed fighting the flu (and it won). I’ve been a good boy and stayed off-line in an attempt to keep the headaches tolerable so now I have the joy of nearly a fortnights backed up emails; and the same again in my work accounts. I’ll be (slowly) working my way through the pile from tomorrow. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/second-gen-rss-readers/ Wed, 04 Oct 2006 22:36:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/second-gen-rss-readers/ I’m subscribed to a lot of RSS and Atom feeds. I’ve tried online readers but I never found any that could match the user experience of SharpReader so I stuck with it on the desktop. But now I’m starting to want some functionality that none of the readers I’ve looked at seem to include. Firstly the easy stuff, when was the last article posted on a blog? When was the last time I clicked through it? https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/transcribing-comics-and-the-mechanical-turk/ Tue, 03 Oct 2006 22:32:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/transcribing-comics-and-the-mechanical-turk/ There are a couple of webcomics I read on a daily basis (a couple a week in the case of MegaTokyo) and recently I’ve found myself wanting to link to a couple of different strips in blog postings; and then discovered that they’re almost impossible to search through. None of the webcomics I read regularly have any kind of strip content search. You can’t see who was in which strip, you can’t search on the punchlines - which is what I want - and, apart from a couple of sites which have a one sentence summary, you can’t get any more context about any days issue than the time it was uploaded. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/closing-2005-2006-pip/ Mon, 02 Oct 2006 23:32:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/closing-2005-2006-pip/ Each year I put a small todo list up on Unixdaemon and see how many of the goals I can meet. The 2005/2006 Pragmatic Investment Plan is now closed so it’s time for a quick look back. First up we have the writing of articles. I’ll come to this in a separate post as I’m still not happy with what I want to say. Training courses are an easy one. I did two main courses and I can’t remember much from either of them. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/mounted-disk-check/ Sun, 01 Oct 2006 23:01:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/mounted-disk-check/ For my own use as much as anyone elses… One of the problems that’s haunted me at least once per company I’ve worked at as a tech is “the disappearing partition”. It’s there, it’s accessible, and it should be persistent across boots. But it isn’t! The machine reboots and then you discover that the database partition is no longer visible. The check mounted disks Nagios plugin looks at the mounted partitions and compares them to what’s in /etc/fstab (minus a couple of things like cd drives, floppy disks, swap partitions etc). https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/clerks2-short-review/ Fri, 29 Sep 2006 08:42:20 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/clerks2-short-review/ I’m a big Kevin Smith fan and Clerks 2 more than met my expectations. Great dialogue, some top-notch one liners, inside jokes (for both comic and View Askew fans) and more story than he’s usually given credit for. A couple of things stood out in a bad way though, the choice of music seemed very slapdash, some of it really hit but a lot of it seemed to detract from the scenes. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/under-your-skin/ Fri, 29 Sep 2006 08:40:59 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/under-your-skin/ When you meet someone you click with things are good. As things start to progress you learn about each other, become more involved in each others life and you discover what makes you both tick. In some cases this is a wonderful thing and can bring you closer, in other cases this is the last exit ramp off the road that leads to the boiling of cute bunnies (no one ever boiled an ugly bunny - there’s no point). https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/children-of-men-short-review/ Fri, 29 Sep 2006 08:24:58 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/children-of-men-short-review/ I ended my sudden bout of cinema going with Children of Men, a very British Sci-fi films about a world that has no children. No screaming on buses, running riot in restaurants or being herded along the street in an annoying and impossible to pass snake of tiny, whiny voices. But the film paints it as more of a bad thing. Includes Spoilers: As you’d expect this changes during the course of the film and it turns in to a woman (and unborn baby) hunt through a Britain that’s known terrorism, treats immigrants a scant few steps above how the Nazis treated Jewish people and has some freedom fighters / terrorists that don’t know where their line is anymore. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/pissed-off-with-ps/ Fri, 29 Sep 2006 08:03:29 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/pissed-off-with-ps/ ps is an incredibly flexible command but it also has a checkered maintenance history in the Linux world. Yesterday I needed to output just the username, the command and any arguments passed to it. And it was hell. After reading through the man page a couple of times I settled on the following: ps -e -o user,args. But this doesn’t work. It shows the command and the full arguments but it trunks the username at 8 characters (which doesn’t help with things like exim on Debian - which has a username of Debian-exim). https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/scalable-web-sites-short-review/ Sun, 24 Sep 2006 18:35:45 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/scalable-web-sites-short-review/ I really liked Building Scalable Web Sites, its topic coverage is impressive - the author obviously knows what he’s doing - it’s written in a practical, easy to follow style and the text explains the theory while remaining pragmatic. There are few books on the market that contain this much useful information in what has always been an under-documented “niche” and it’s sure to save every admin at least a few scalability related headaches. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/time-management-sysadmins-short-review/ Sat, 23 Sep 2006 17:56:39 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/time-management-sysadmins-short-review/ "What do you think of the Getting Things Done book?" "I'll worry about time management when a tech publisher has a book on it." "Have you seen Time Management for System Administrators?" Queue the sound of Amazon.co.uk being loading in FireFox I’m happiest when I’m bouncing between lots of different tasks - whether they’re all independent or part of a larger project. This is great in an emergency or when I’m working in a small team with a decent workload but not so good when it comes to simultaneously juggling small, quick turn around requests with longer, concentration demanding projects. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/uk-svn-meeting-200609/ Thu, 21 Sep 2006 22:05:08 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/uk-svn-meeting-200609/ Today I was fortunate enough to head down to the JP Morgan building in John Winter street for, my first and, the second UK Subversion User Group Meeting. First up the audience, it was in the high twenties, which surprised me, and included a lot of people in suits; only a handful of us were casually dressed in jeans, untucked shirts or trainers. I didn’t get to stay too long afterwards to chat, although my employer was gracious enough to allow a couple of hours in the middle of the day to attend and I didn’t want to push my luck too far. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/javascript-room-at-fosdem-2007/ Thu, 21 Sep 2006 09:03:27 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/javascript-room-at-fosdem-2007/ If I was a bad man I’d suggest it might be time for a separate Javascript developers room at FOSDEM 2007 (looks like the 24-25th February 2007). They had a couple of talks on JS related subjects last year (Dojo and Selenium) and they seemed to go well. dConstruct and the London Javascript nights have proved the interest is there… And you’d have a bundle of the Mozilla people at the same conference as potential speakers. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/visio-and-mbsa/ Thu, 21 Sep 2006 08:38:48 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/visio-and-mbsa/ I’m not a huge fan of Visio but the ability to connect the MBSA to individual hosts and trigger scans is very neat. I’m also assuming that you can use the Visio scripting interface to mark machines that fail as a different colour. Full details over at the Visio Connector for MBSA article. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/twentyfour-hour-office/ Thu, 21 Sep 2006 08:27:10 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/twentyfour-hour-office/ Your business success will depend on the extent to which programmers essentially live at your office. For this to be a common choice, your office had better be nicer than the average programmer’s home. – Philip Greenspun Although the idea of working more hours is currently on the wane this remains one of my favourite quotes, it nicely summarises my start up experiences. One of the weird things about my current job is that it’s the first technology company I’ve ever worked that actually closes its offices. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/perl-testing-developers-notebook-short-review/ Mon, 18 Sep 2006 21:05:20 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/perl-testing-developers-notebook-short-review/ The Perl Testing Developers Notebook (PTDN) is the first of the O’Reilly Developers Notebook series I’ve read. The format’s good, a mix of the cookbook and hacks series, but does the substance match the style? At nine short chapters this book packs a fair amount in. It starts with how to write, run and read tests in chapters 1 and 2. Moving on to using Devel::Cover (a chunk of chapter 3) and, in chapter 4, introducing Test modules that’ll help you cover your bases before releasing a module (or depending on your perspective make you jump through cargo coding hoops. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/delicious-stalking/ Mon, 18 Sep 2006 20:36:48 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/delicious-stalking/ A couple of months ago a friend of mine changed jobs and went to work with some mutual techie acquaintances. What made this job interesting to me was the confidential nature of the project and how little he was allowed to say about it. In one of my flippant comments I mentioned that if I REALLY wanted to know I could find out what he was working on. And the bet was made. https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/doa-short-review/ Sun, 17 Sep 2006 14:34:22 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/doa-short-review/ I was completely unprepared for DOA, I’d heard nothing about it, seen no trailers and didn’t know it was based on a game (which I’ve never played) - if I’d have known anything about it I’d have stayed well clear. Which would have been a shame. I missed the first five minutes or so of this film so I’m not sure if they actually explained the, um, plot? In essence there is a fighting competition where “the best representatives of each style” come together and kick the shite out of each other. https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/crank-short-review/ Sun, 17 Sep 2006 14:33:08 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/crank-short-review/ Jason Statham has found himself a Hollywood niche, action films that don’t set the box office on fire but provide a decent level of “leave your brain at home” entertainment. The Transporter movies and now Crank are shining examples. Despite the trailers (and my expectations) Crank isn’t as action packed as I’d expected, in between a number of fight scenes there is a surprising amount of plot and amusing dialogue. While the plot itself isn’t exactly original the films constant changing from one scene to another and some decent dialogue makes it a lot less painful than it could have been. https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/dnd2-short-review/ Sun, 17 Sep 2006 14:33:08 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/dnd2-short-review/ When I was at school I was an avid Dungeons and Dragons player, over the years I’ve lost contact with most of it (the occasional novel, issue of Dragon or, very rarely, a source book is as close as I get these days) but one of the few things I did see was the first Dungeons and Dragons film. Which was BAD. But I’d waited so long that I watched it. https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/severance-short-review/ Sun, 17 Sep 2006 11:05:31 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/severance-short-review/ Severance had a lot of potential, it could have been Dog Solders meets The Office, but this time with The Office actually being funny. Instead, it’s an OK paced generic slasher film with a lot of attempted humour - only a handful of which hits the mark. Laura Harris puts in a decent performance, Tim McInnerny is completely wasted (if you’ve seen him in Spooks or Blackadder you know he can act when given decent material) and Danny Dyer does an acceptable job as the very two dimensional everyman. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/ten-career-commandments-short-review/ Sun, 17 Sep 2006 10:52:23 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/ten-career-commandments-short-review/ The Ten Career Commandments isn’t my usual kind of book, I got stuck in a friends office waiting for him to finish up for the day and ended up reading it because it was the only thing on the desk, and they only had a 2Mb office ‘net connection - the barbarians ;) The Ten Career Commandments is an easy read that will best serve people just starting out in the world of work. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/failover-pairs-rant/ Thu, 14 Sep 2006 00:33:01 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/failover-pairs-rant/ Let’s cover the basics, if you’ve got two machines working as an identical failover pair then THEY SHOULD BE IDENTICAL. Adding services, hell, adding nearly anything, to only one of them is a mistake. You’ve now created a bias on which one you need running and you can no longer assume they’ll both do the same thing in the same situation. Which defeats the whole point of having them. This might seem obvious, but the number of people who break this simple rule never fail to make that pretty little vein in my neck dance. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/provisioning-fresh-installs/ Wed, 13 Sep 2006 08:45:28 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/provisioning-fresh-installs/ Once a machine has settled in to a rack how long does it take you to turn it in to a working server? How many of these steps are automated? The longer you can go without making manual changes the more comfortable you can be that the machine’s running as it’s supposed to be. What little tweaks do people make once the machine is up? How do you know they’ve been done correctly on each machine? https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/visible-ops-short-review/ Mon, 11 Sep 2006 21:23:41 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/visible-ops-short-review/ When it comes to system administration, the system part can refer to the paperwork, processes and procedures as much as actual machines. Among the modern admins worries are such evil beasties as section 404 of Sarbanes Oxley, the data protection act, log retention for the lovely police state powers of our government and, in some industries, ISO17799, BS15000 and other similar standards. One of the topics I’ve been interested in recently is the ITIL approach. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/dynamic-languages-and-big-players/ Mon, 11 Sep 2006 21:03:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/dynamic-languages-and-big-players/ Over the last week both Ruby and Python have had moments in the sunshine, between Jim Hugunins (now of Microsoft) IronPython 1.0 release and Sun hiring JRuby developers it’s nice to see the bigger players notice how far dynamic languages have come. So what do the little languages that can get from this? It’s a decent sized list - a huge range of well written libraries (both .NET and Java have a ton of supporting code available and a lot of it is damn good), a large potential user base (especially for IronPython) and enterprise recognition; while more forward thinking developers know all about the benefits of dynamic languages there are a lot of late adopters that are about to see the shiny things for the first time. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/not-the-techa-kulcha/ Sat, 09 Sep 2006 14:25:44 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/not-the-techa-kulcha/ I’ve been very remiss about blogging the July Ask Later evening, organised by Steve Coast and Tom Carden. The format was different to any presentations I’ve seen before, each speaker had 20 seconds to present each of their 20 slides, and no way of altering the timing. BWHAHAHA. The first speaker had me worried, without trying to sound harsh, his timing was off and my fears about sudden rushing as a slide changed before he was finished and awkward silences in between came flooding back to me. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/three-release-rules/ Sat, 09 Sep 2006 13:40:23 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/three-release-rules/ Here are three nice, simple, general rules regarding releases that you should try and stick to. If you don’t then you’re running on luck and eventually you’ll get called while doing something way more fun than deploying yet another bug fixing release. No releases on the day before a weekend / national holiday. No releases within two hours of the official end of your work day. No releases before you go away on holiday. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/best-advert-2006/ Sat, 09 Sep 2006 13:10:48 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/best-advert-2006/ I know the title of this post might seem a little premature but it’s going to take something amazing to beat Skys skateboarding advert. The last couple of times I’ve been to the cinema I’ve seen an advert for Sky that features some stunning skateboarding by Danny Way, the adverts footage was taken from a documentary on him, with Regina Spektor - US providing the music. Mute the skateboarding clip, hide the US window and watch along, it’s very cool. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/sqlserver-owning-and-password-cracking/ Wed, 06 Sep 2006 23:59:51 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/sqlserver-owning-and-password-cracking/ Watch it be done in under five minutes in the MS SQL Preauth Attack, Pwdump and John the Ripper video. Surprising? No. Fun to watch? Yes! Every now and again it’s nice to be reminded our systems are not as secure as we’d like to think. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/event-shot-sept-2006/ Wed, 06 Sep 2006 23:27:03 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/event-shot-sept-2006/ Here’s a link shot to some of the events I want to try and get to over the next two months, they’ve mostly not been very well advertised: Steve Coast on Geospatial Open Source Activity - hosted by the BCS on September 9th. I've not kept up with Steves bundle of projects (OpenStreetmap and OpenPostcodes among a scary number of others) so I want to get along and see what he's been up to. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/startup-success-2006/ Wed, 06 Sep 2006 00:38:21 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/startup-success-2006/ Guy Kawasaki has a link to the Startup Success 2006 Recording on his blog. From the good humoured and funny snipes at LinkedIns Reid Hoffman to some great tidbits of information (“Expensable not approvable” and “Convince the fewest number of people possible to buy it”) from Joe Kraus it’s well worth watching, even at over an hour long. I was also impressed with Guy in his role as moderator, I’ve been to a lot of conferences over the years and he’s one of the smoothest moderators I’ve seen. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/perl-debugger-pocket-ref-short-review/ Tue, 05 Sep 2006 21:11:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/perl-debugger-pocket-ref-short-review/ A book about a debugging program is never going to be that exciting. At best it’ll be both comprehensive and concise, two things that don’t have to be mutually exclusive, at worst it’ll be a dull rehash of the perldoc. Which type is this one? The Perl Debugger Pocket Reference (PDRB) starts with some basic practises to help you avoid debugging (the usual use strict and use warnings) before walking through two very basic debugger sessions and then on to the bulk of the book, the command reference. https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/shorten-smallr-initial/ Mon, 04 Sep 2006 00:16:43 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/shorten-smallr-initial/ I’ve just uploaded the initial release of WWW::Shorten::Smallr to CPAN and it should be making its way through the mirrors right about now. The module itself is simple, it shrinks the given URL using the http://smallr.com/ web site. I wrote this for two reasons, firstly smallr is the official link shortener of one of the mailing lists I frequent and I wanted it available from the Vim Shortener I wrote. Secondly I wanted to have another play around with Module::Build. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/check-open-ports-nagios-check/ Sun, 03 Sep 2006 12:56:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/check-open-ports-nagios-check/ A machine should run a defined set of ports, if any of them are not listening you’ve got a problem. If any others are open then you’ve potentially got an even bigger problem. The Check Open Ports Nagios Check accepts a list of IPv4 TCP and UDP ports and reports if any of the expected ones go away or any others are detected as listening. This also partially scratches one of my own itches, I’ve had a couple of daemons (MySQL in particular) start after a package upgrade without my knowing it. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/bugzilla-tag-blosxom-plugin/ Sat, 02 Sep 2006 16:22:19 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/bugzilla-tag-blosxom-plugin/ One of the small developer blogs I host has a number of people linking to, and complaining about, the bugs present in different Free Software projects. After watching one of them open a text file, dig through the links, pull out the wrong one and eventually get the right URL I decided to write a small Blosxom plugin to make the process easier. The Bugzilla Tag Blosxom plugin lets you define shortcuts to a number of Bugzilla servers, and a default one, which you can then link to using the following syntax in your blosxom posts: https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/nagios-debian-package-updates-initial/ Fri, 01 Sep 2006 23:57:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/nagios-debian-package-updates-initial/ I’ve recently needed a way to see, via the Nagios web front end, which Debian machines need their packages updating. So I wrote the check_debian_updates.sh Nagios plugin. This is the initial release (which hasn’t been hit too hard yet) so be careful about deploying it anywhere but your testing environment for now. I’ve played with it in my small test environment and it seems to work so feel free to have a look at it. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/is-perl-installed/ Wed, 23 Aug 2006 01:39:27 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/is-perl-installed/ Over at use.perl.org Ovid recently posted How to tell if Perl is installed on your computer , an entry that points to a shell script that must die. Go and read the script in the post, I’ll wait. Note: this isn’t his code and he’s blame free, he just found it and started waving it like a red flag so the anal shell scripters among us have something to moan about :) https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/raymond-strikes-again-ipods/ Wed, 23 Aug 2006 01:22:24 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/raymond-strikes-again-ipods/ The Register is one of the sites covering ESRs Linux / iPod-compatibility rant and he’s managed to confuse himself, other people and the issues. Once again. Firstly we have this request that the “community”, most of whom cringe when he starts talking, start compromising on closed source platforms and formats. Apparently the OpenSource movement hasn’t given up enough rights yet and he’d like us to back down and hand over a couple more. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/going-to-yapc-eu-2006/ Wed, 23 Aug 2006 00:36:08 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/going-to-yapc-eu-2006/ And you should be too! YAPC::Europe 2006 is my first YAPC since 2001; when I stopped working as a Perl developer I started spending my cash and holiday time on more relevant conferences. Now I’m working in a heavily perl shop they’ve been gracious enough to pay for my attendance in Birmingham. Where they have curry. Lots of curry. And a Perl conference, but I should get my priorities right ;) https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/basic-accessibility-analyzer-ie-plugin/ Wed, 23 Aug 2006 00:34:46 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/basic-accessibility-analyzer-ie-plugin/ I’m happy to announce the first release of the Basic Accessibility Analyzer IE Plugin. This IE plugin wraps the service provided by Peter Krantz and has already found some quirks in my own site. The full list of what it checks can be found here. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/enable-icmp-dammit/ Wed, 23 Aug 2006 00:34:46 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/enable-icmp-dammit/ When designing internal firewalls and filtering policies PLEASE stop and think about ICMP Echo Request and ICMP Echo Reply (the ICMP types used by ping). If you turn these off you’re not really gaining any real security (especially on your internal network, and to be honest you want to think long and hard about what turning it off on the external facing machines gets you) and you’re making life much harder than it needs to be in the long run. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/firefox-extension-weirdness/ Wed, 23 Aug 2006 00:34:46 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/firefox-extension-weirdness/ I use a LOT of FireFox extensions and in an attempt to slim my install down I disabled the less used ones so I could remove them in a week or so if I hadn’t needed them. The first stage was easy, right click the extensions in the Extensions menu and choose “disable”. I then carried on using FireFox as normal. I didn’t need the extensions removed immediately so I didn’t restart it. https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/evening-kevin-smith-review/ Wed, 23 Aug 2006 00:34:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/evening-kevin-smith-review/ I’ve been watching my way through Kevin Smiths back catalogue of work recently and one of the forgotten highlights of my DVD collection is An Evening with Kevin Smith. Although the format’s pretty simple, Kevin Smith engaging the audience in Q&A sessions in a number of American colleges, the material is polished, the delivery near perfect and the speaker charismatic. Over three hours of footage he fields questions on pretty much everything, his films, loves and life. https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/snakes-on-mutherfckin-plane/ Wed, 23 Aug 2006 00:34:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/snakes-on-mutherfckin-plane/ How could I resist a film called Snakes on a Plane, featuring one of the masters of over acting, Samuel L. Jackson, that had some of its scenes re-shot to be funnier, yes, funnier, based on anonymous internet posts on movie forums? Well, obviously I couldn’t. I’m honestly not sure why I bothered. I like good films, I also like REALLY bad films, I have a soft-spot for the old Godzilla movies for instance, but this film wasn’t good and it wasn’t that bad. https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/sciam-developer-com-gmscripts/ Tue, 22 Aug 2006 22:01:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/sciam-developer-com-gmscripts/ The overly long title has most of the details. I’ve created a print friendly redirect Greasemonkey script for both Developer.com and Scientific American.com. Hope they are useful. https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/azumi-2-review/ Thu, 17 Aug 2006 00:30:43 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/azumi-2-review/ Azumi 2: Death or Love is a pretty standard Japanese sword fighting film with impressive wirework, well choreographed action scenes, very little plot and a pretty lead, in this case Aya Ueto. It follows on directly from the first film, between the continuation of the plot, a number of the same characters and, aside from a few small flashbacks, it makes no attempt to welcome new viewers. Although as a sequel why should it? https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/show-windows-disk-usage/ Wed, 16 Aug 2006 22:11:36 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/show-windows-disk-usage/ One of my favourite Windows applications is WinDirStat, a great little utility that breaks down disk usage by file and folder and shows it using a treemap. The tree map is possibly the best way of displaying this kind of information, in addition to the obvious “block size is relative to the file size” you also get colour coded file types (you soon learn to spot clusters of mp3s…) and easy right click access to most of the functionality you’ll want to use while investigating disk hogs. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/local-mail-check-released/ Wed, 16 Aug 2006 21:11:21 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/local-mail-check-released/ One of the annoyances of my (working) life is the build up of mail in obscurely named mailboxes on different machines. While the typical aim is to have all hosts sending their local mail to a central point (for mass filtering and deleting^Wlogging) you - firstly - have to actually implement this change (normally on machines with lots of different mailservers - yum!) and then add a check to ensure that it never gets broken in the future. https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/alien-vs-predator/ Wed, 16 Aug 2006 21:10:45 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/alien-vs-predator/ What can I say, one of the most intriguing ideas for a ‘vs’ film. Two of the best alien menaces from the 80s. A big budget. A cast of complete unknowns. A really shite film. While the film needed a human element to get the audience involved the director took it too far and ended up with a human / Predator buddy cop feel by the end of the film. The action scenes were dull, no where near the standard of Aliens and mainstream nature of the two namesakes means a lot of the shock and surprise was lost even before this heavy handed attempt to scare the audience. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/hits-and-misses-200608/ Wed, 16 Aug 2006 21:10:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/hits-and-misses-200608/ The hit: I recently got sent away to the 2006 Exim Course in Cambridge. The main presenter, Dr Philip Hazel, who’s also the author of Exim, was a good presenter. The material seemed well rehearsed, nicely paced and covered a fair amount of ground over the three days - he also knows pretty much everything about Exim so the audience questions were always quickly answered. There were also two guest speakers, who had an hour each. https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/meta-yaml-to-doap/ Wed, 16 Aug 2006 20:33:59 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/meta-yaml-to-doap/ Last year I was quite interested in the Description of a Project (DOAP) project. I added DOAP files to all my Sourceforge projects, wrote some little util scripts, contributed DOAP files to a couple of the Free software projects I use that had asked for them… and then promptly forgot all about it. A couple of recent posts about the Python Package index and DOAP interested me enough to dig out one of my half-finished scripts, it’s the (very messy) first pass of a CPAN META. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/incompetents-and-security-200608/ Wed, 16 Aug 2006 20:32:10 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/incompetents-and-security-200608/ “You do not secure the liberty of our country and value of our democracy by undermining them. That’s the road to hell. – Lord Phillips of Sudbury (source: BBC News - “Police decryption powers ‘flawed’“ I don’t normally post on politics or law because I’m not an expert and, to be honest (judging by my apache logs), they’re only interesting to a small fraction of the people that stop by here. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/lrug-presentations-200608/ Wed, 16 Aug 2006 20:32:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/lrug-presentations-200608/ Although I’ve been remarkably slack and only managed to make it to a couple of the meetings, the London Ruby User Group Presentation Archive allows me (and you…) to have a peek at what’s been presented. The highlight of the current talks, in my opinion, is “Ruby on Rails from the other side of the tracks” by Tom Armitage - if you do any kind of website work it’s worth a couple of minutes of your time. https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/firefox2-microsummaries-initial-view/ Thu, 20 Jul 2006 13:18:56 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/firefox2-microsummaries-initial-view/ Microsummaries are regularly-updated succinct summaries of web pages. They are compact enough to fit in the space available to a bookmark label, provide more useful information about pages than static page titles, and are regularly updated as new information becomes available. – Microsummaries - Mozilla Wiki I’ve spent a little while playing with them now and while I like them, smarter page titles are nice, they have their limits. Firstly, they are not the easiest things to install. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/unixdaemon-net-mozsearch/ Wed, 19 Jul 2006 13:35:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/unixdaemon-net-mozsearch/ I ended up writing a number of Unofficial Mycroft Searches for FireFox1 and Mozilla and now I’ve started to have a play with FireFox 2 Beta 1, one of the FireFox features I thought I’d investigate first is the new MozSearch search plugins. I’ve not dug too deeply yet (I’m on training so I’m playing in the breaks) but I have pulled a basic search together for UnixDaemon. If you’re running a FireFox2 Beta head over to the UnixDaemon. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/want-zone-logging/ Tue, 18 Jul 2006 22:04:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/want-zone-logging/ One of the great things about Apache is that you can override most of the configuration settings on a server, virtual host or directory level. This fine grained customisation makes it both flexible and damn powerful. Unfortunately the people behind bind don’t seem to have grabbed on to this idea. A prime example is bind logging. I want to log all queries to a domain I want to retire (actually a number of domains I want to retire…); but bind doesn’t allow this. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/star-spotting/ Mon, 17 Jul 2006 19:29:30 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/star-spotting/ If you’re of a certain age (the same one as me :)) then you may fondly remember As If. It was broadcast on T4 (when T4 was still tolerable) and was on late enough that you were awake from the Saturday night clubbing… Compared to most of the pap targeting the late teens / early twenties market at the time it was well written, funny and was blessed with good casting. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/html-tidy-firefox-command-line/ Sat, 15 Jul 2006 15:00:15 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/html-tidy-firefox-command-line/ Tidy is a great little HTML lint tool, that goes a lot further than the W3C Validator, but it requires you to remember to run it. The FireFox HTML Validator extension uses tidy and the FireFox status bar at the bottom of the screen to show you tidy output from the current page. This extension removes the need to run tidy by hand, you get it for free on every page you visit, but it does mean you need to visit any pages you want to run tidy against once you get spoiled by its output. https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/superman-returns-comments/ Sat, 15 Jul 2006 14:08:01 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/superman-returns-comments/ I’m not a huge fan of the Man of Steel, I find his comics boring, the Christopher Reeve films were watchable but nothing that stands out from my childhood and Smallville is mostly dull. I’d heard the hype about Superman Returns and considering how well the second X-Men film went I thought I’d give it ago. On opening day. Because it’s a comic book based film dammit. And Spiderman 3 is taking TOO LONG. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/three-find-donts-part1/ Sat, 15 Jul 2006 12:36:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/three-find-donts-part1/ Hell is other peoples code. – Not quite Sartre. I don’t mind using other peoples code. I’ll even submit patches if I find a problem, but discovering the same mistakes in almost half-a-dozen projects is enough to drive me insane. Here are three common red flags involving the find command and how to get around them: If you want to be portable, don't use GNU/Linuxisms. Compare these two commands - find -name "*. https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/dl-movie-happening/ Sat, 15 Jul 2006 09:30:18 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/dl-movie-happening/ I played a lot of ADnD at school, and while I only took part in a couple of short DragonLance campaigns, I’m a Forgotten Realms man, the books written by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman really grabbed me. Over the years, where ever ADnD fans gathered in sleepy, huddled masses, the topic of a DragonLance movie would occasionally crop up and we’d all say how great it’d be but that it’s never happen; looks like we were wrong… https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/webcomics-and-deadtrees/ Sat, 15 Jul 2006 09:14:16 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/webcomics-and-deadtrees/ Another day, another Amazon package… This time it had both the laugh out loud funny Penny Arcade - attack of the Bacon Robots and the ever impressive Megatokyo: Volume 4. In addition to the comics the Penny Arcade book has a short paragraph of commentary for each cartoon and, fortunately, they’re as funny as the cartoons themselves. While Volume 4 of Megatokyo isn’t as amusing as the first couple of volumes, and no where near as funny as PA, it’s evolving in to a great story full of impressive art. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/lessons-from-lpm/ Mon, 10 Jul 2006 18:10:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/lessons-from-lpm/ The March 2006 London PM Tech meet went well, we had 35 people turn up and most of them came along to the pub afterwards. While everything seemed to go according to plan there are three things anyone hosting an event should know… Firstly get a copy of all the slides on a single machine (if possible - if you have speakers using magic point, keynote and Powerpoint good luck…). This will make lightening talks run a lot smoother, saves you trying seven laptops with the projector and stops people from bringing their own electronic baby, with a full head of wires, up to the podium. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/jeff-barr-london-200607/ Sun, 09 Jul 2006 11:50:02 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/jeff-barr-london-200607/ Jeff Barr, who we were lucky enough to have deliver an excellent and entertaining talk a couple of months ago, is coming back through London in July. This time he’s interested in having some 1 to 1 chats with developers using Amazons Webservices. More details are on the Amazon Web Services Blog - Calling London blog post. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/eventshot-200607/ Sun, 09 Jul 2006 11:34:13 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/eventshot-200607/ I’d originally planned to get to all of these, and even though I’m no longer sure which ones I’ll be able to attend I thought I should at least mention them: LUG Radio Live 2006 - Sat 22nd and Sun 23rd July 2006. Jono Bacon and one of the most talked about events from last year (which I’m gutted I missed). This is going to be excellent. YAPC::Europe 2006 - Brummie Edition - 30th August to 1st September 2006. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/apache-etags-and-clusters/ Sun, 09 Jul 2006 11:13:43 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/apache-etags-and-clusters/ This one’s as much for my own memory as for everyone else, I’ve already used it at two companies and had to rediscover it at each… If you have a number of load balanced apache servers serving the same site and you use ETags to help reduce the number of page requests make sure that the generated ETag doesn’t consult the file inode; these will hardly ever be the same across servers - unless you build from a gold image - and will cause the client to download the page again each time it hits a different server. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/unprompted-work/ Sun, 09 Jul 2006 11:04:09 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/unprompted-work/ How much of your work is done based on a request? Does the task you’re working on have a an RT ticket, a Bugilla id or story ID associated with it? If it doesn’t should you be doing the work at all? Even some of the more routine tasks can fit in this model, rather than remembering to check for the expiry dates of SSL certs or domain names have scripts that check and put any actions in to RT for you. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/shorter-bash-copy-command/ Wed, 28 Jun 2006 18:47:59 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/shorter-bash-copy-command/ Making a backup copy of a file is a pretty common thing to do (although you should be using RCS for a lot of these…). If you’re using a machine with a GUI then copy and pasting the file name twice, with an extension on the end, is pretty simple. If you’re either a keyboard jockey or without a mouse you can make your life easier with these two short cuts: https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/userscripts-deletions/ Wed, 28 Jun 2006 18:35:17 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/userscripts-deletions/ If you’ve tried to use any of my Greasemonkey scripts over at Dean Wilsons Userscripts.org Profile then you’ve been out of luck until recently. During a linky session I managed to hit the “delete script link” on each and every script I’d uploaded. The delete link (which I didn’t notice) didn’t require any confirmation so it managed to get everything. I spent a little time last night re-adding the scripts (I have copies on my own site) so they’re now available again. https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/xmen3-short-review/ Wed, 28 Jun 2006 18:26:51 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/xmen3-short-review/ When I was a teen I read a fair amount of X-Men comics (and I’ve started again now Joss Whedon is writing Astonishing X-Men) so they are close to my heart, while the first film felt like a prologue, the second film did them justice and the third gives them a decent send off. I’m not going to spoil any of the plot but Storm gets a decent showing this time, Halle Berry - who has six toes on her left foot, made some (deserved) noise about Storm being down played in previous films. https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/backgrounds-big-maps-gm/ Wed, 28 Jun 2006 18:16:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/backgrounds-big-maps-gm/ I’ve added a couple of new scripts to my Greasemonkey Script collection. Remove Background Image does exactly what you’d expect. Add an @include like for your site of choice and refresh the page to make it go away. The second one’s based on a Streetmap trick Wookie Bob showed me. StreetMap 5x5 grid changes the map you’re looking at to a 5x5 grid view you can only usually get by hacking the URL. https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/file-find-rule-vcs-patch/ Wed, 28 Jun 2006 18:04:21 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/file-find-rule-vcs-patch/ The File::Find::Rule::VCS module excludes certain directories, artifacts from version control systems, from your File::Find::Rule queries. While it’s aware of the big two (subversion and CVS) today I needed a version that was aware - and can ignore - RCS directories. So I hacked the module and tada, we now have a File::Find::Rule::VCS RCS support patch. I’ve sent a copy to the module author but I’m putting it here as well in case it gets rejected. https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/rss-backlog/ Mon, 26 Jun 2006 18:37:42 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/rss-backlog/ The work is done, the script is written and from this Sunday night my RSS aggregator will kill any post that’s from before noon on Saturday. This is all part of my (proably pointless) attempt to prevent backlogs and pile ups of unread things. I’m not going to release any of the (very hacky) scripts as they all assume lots about their running environment but I thought I’d mention it in case I can inspire anyone (Lee) to clear out their queues every now and again. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/amazon-oreilly-recommends/ Mon, 26 Jun 2006 18:18:25 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/amazon-oreilly-recommends/ Amazon sent me one of the more amusing recommendations I’ve ever had: Greetings from Amazon.co.uk, We've noticed that customers who have purchased books by Rael Dornfest have also ordered "Adolf Hitler: A Portrait" by Michael Fitzgerald. I know O’Reilly are not the most popular of companies since the web 2.0 incident but I didn’t think they’d fallen that far… :) https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/aide-agony/ Mon, 26 Jun 2006 18:15:51 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/aide-agony/ When it comes to host-based intrusion detection I’m most familiar with the Tripwire OpenSource Edition, while shopping around for a HIDS to deploy on a play box I decided to try AIDE. And got stopped at one of the first hurdles. Tripwire has an interactive update mechanism, it runs a scan (based on your config file) and then prompts you to except, reject or mark changes as pending - within one operation. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/stepping-down-ukuug/ Mon, 26 Jun 2006 18:10:20 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/stepping-down-ukuug/ Due to some other, recently appearing, demands on my spare (and not so spare) time I’ve had to drastically cut back on the amount of time I spend working with different Free and Open groups. One of the biggest casualties of this has been the UKUUG. I no longer have the time available to make any meaningful contributions so I’ve stepped down from the UKUUG council. As a group they’re doing a lot of interesting work, and some great conferences, so it’s worth looking at their site every now and again. https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/brick-the-film/ Sun, 28 May 2006 12:05:20 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/movies/brick-the-film/ I saw a description of Brick when I was looking for the X-Men 3 release date and it grabbed my attention pretty quickly. “A modern day film noir sit in a high-school” seemed very Whedon. And now that he’s got nothing on the air I’m finding it harder to get my regular dose of Joss. The film itself was great, very stylishly shot, featured a solid performance from the “hero” and had great dialogue. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/web-20-service-mark/ Sun, 28 May 2006 11:57:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/web-20-service-mark/ I’m not a lawyer, so this is based on my uneducated understanding, but from what I can gather, if you use the phrase Web 2.0 in the name of a conference then O’Reilly and CMP are within their rights to send you a Cease and Desist. Even if it’s a non-profit Web 2.0 conference like IT@Cork. Who now have coverage of their event I’d kill for :) I think what’s annoyed a lot of people is that they’ve been dupped in to promoting a clumsy, easy to mock, phrase that’s never been more than a marketing term. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/moz-europe-event-skills/ Tue, 23 May 2006 23:30:20 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/moz-europe-event-skills/ I’ve seen two posts today, each of them about technical events, that caught my interest and deserve a comment. The Farm on the Rails Seminar Admissions Test is something I’ve thought about in the past and never come to a conclusion about; how do you do an advanced event without pissing people off? The Pragmatic Studio’s Advanced Rails Studio approach is to ask for demonstration code, a site or a decent write up of previous experience. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/today-dammint-rant/ Fri, 19 May 2006 07:56:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/today-dammint-rant/ If you say, “I need this by the end of today. At the absolute latest!” (or some close variation) which of these do you think is most likely outcome? I admire your spontaneous creativity and willingness to “motivate” people in to achieving your goals or I think you can’t plan for shit and have no ability to manage your time or projects? Want a hint? https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/security-date-terms/ Fri, 19 May 2006 04:35:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/security-date-terms/ Booty Call: "Booty calls can be used by one partner of an ended relationship to obtain sex from the ex-partner, due to lingering emotions and feelings of a need for continued physical connection.“ This one’s pretty obvious, it’s a replay attack. You’ve already gone through the authorisation and authentication processes and now you’re reusing previously obtained credentials to obtain access to a resource. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/linux-journal-addelivery/ Sun, 14 May 2006 15:32:33 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/linux-journal-addelivery/ While I’m thinking about magazines I’m going to complain about Linux Journal. I’ve been a reader for over six years now and apart from the horrible “Cooking with Linux” columns (where Marcel Gagme badly pretends to be a French restaurateur) I’ve been happy with the content. Mick Bauer’s “Paranoid Penguin” and “At The Forge” by Reuven Lerner have long been highlights. Recently the magazines tone seems to have changed a lot. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/event-email-address-policy/ Sun, 14 May 2006 15:10:48 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/event-email-address-policy/ I’ve had a couple of people ask what I do with peoples emails addresses once they’ve sent me a request to sign-up/register. In an attempt to prove I’m not making millions with them (but if you know a way, I’m open… :)) I thought I’d document the reasons I ask for email addresses and what I do with them afterwards. The reasons I ask for them are pretty simple: so I can adjust the venue if we need somewhere with a bigger capacity. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/magazine-rules/ Sun, 14 May 2006 14:49:32 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/magazine-rules/ I’ve recently had to get rid of a bundle of magazine back issues, some of them from as far back as November 1999 (sysadmin mag, an article on Expect that I’ve still not read…) and I’ve decided to put a couple of rules in place to help keep things sane: Any magazine over three months old goes. No more than 20 magazines in the pile at any time. The first rule serves two purposes, it stops me saying “I’ll read that on the weekend” month after month, and it helps keep my information up to date. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/aws-jeffreybarr/ Mon, 08 May 2006 23:07:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/aws-jeffreybarr/ When you think about Web Services you think about Amazon. And that’s how good a job Jeff Barr, web services evangelist at Amazon, does! Speaking in London on May 15th, for one night only, we’re fortunate to have Jeff presenting on their stable of Web Services: AWS, S3 and the mechanical turk. Come along and listen to the ideas, views and experiences of someone uniquely positioned in one of the biggest and most advanced companies offering developer access to Web Services. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/slither-movie/ Wed, 03 May 2006 22:41:02 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/slither-movie/ I finally got around to seeing Slither. It’s (a small) part horror, (large) part bad comedy and an enjoyable hour and a bit. The gore isn’t as bad as I thought it’d be from reading interviews with the director and it reminded me of Eight Legged Freaks, another funny bad B-movie that I enjoyed. Oh, and it’s got Nathan Fillion in it. It’s not the role that’s going to make his career but he does put on a respectable showing. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/advent-children/ Wed, 03 May 2006 08:38:41 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/advent-children/ I’m pretty sure I had a reason for adding Final Fantasy VII - Advent Children to my Amazon DVD rental queue, but when it arrived in the post I couldn’t think of it. I’ve never played the game so I went in to the film cold and have to say that it was actually a decent watch, even for a newbie. The plot makes a little sense, the voice cast were forgettable but some of the animated fight scenes were amazing. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/gmaps-tag-initial/ Tue, 02 May 2006 23:58:53 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/gmaps-tag-initial/ Linking to Google maps is nice. Jumping through the hoops to get the target URL isn’t so much. This plugin allows you to use either a raw postcode (it’s built for the UK) or a named location that will get expanded out to a full Google Maps URL. You can use any of these short cuts: <gmap "office"> <a href="gmap:EC1V 3QR"> <gmap>EC1V 3QR</gmap> For full details have a look at the Google Maps Tag Blosxom Plugin source. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/london-js-night-200605/ Mon, 01 May 2006 14:32:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/london-js-night-200605/ I seem to be partly involved in the first London JavaScript Night, there’s not much to say about it really, other than we’ve got two top notch speakers. The full details are online and if you want to attend then sign up! https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/small-giants/ Mon, 17 Apr 2006 10:26:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/small-giants/ Author: Bo Burlingham ISBN: 1591840937 Publisher: Portfolio It’s difficult to spend much time on the ‘net and not come away with the impression that in business small is the new big. Companies like 37 Signals and The Pragmatic Programmers Agile publishing are proving that nimble and smart can make a decent living even in a world inhabited by lumbering behemoths. While there are numerous examples of challenging the big boys at their own game, a second type of small business is starting to get some coverage. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/nondesigners-design-book/ Tue, 04 Apr 2006 23:55:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/nondesigners-design-book/ Author: Robin Williams ISBN: 1566091594 Publisher: Peachpit Press One of the great habits in the world of computers is a love of naming things. Patterns, refactoring techniques, types of security hole, all of these become easier to research and discuss once you have a common vocabulary. This book applies the same principle to basic design. It improves your design skills by helping you identify and recognise good and bad examples of the core principles. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/change-management/ Tue, 04 Apr 2006 00:07:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/change-management/ Author: Claudia Baca ISBN: 0782144101 Publisher: Sybex Inc.,U.S. (Habour Light Press line) Change management is like version control: your projects don’t need it to survive but it does help stack the odds in your favour. Once you’ve worked within a well designed process you won’t want to do without it. Unfortunately the ability to create a change management system isn’t one that many techs have, myself included, so I went in search of a decent book on the topic that I could borrow ideas from. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/peopleware/ Mon, 03 Apr 2006 21:04:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/peopleware/ Authors: Tom DeMarco, Timothy Lister ISBN: 0932633439 Publisher: Dorset House Publishing Co "Your business success will depend on the extent to which programmers essentially live at your office. For this to be a common choice, your office had better be nicer than the average programmer’s home. There are two ways to achieve this result. One is to hire programmers who live in extremely shabby apartments. The other is to create a nice office. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/database-relational-model/ Mon, 03 Apr 2006 21:04:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/database-relational-model/ Author: C.J. Date ISBN: 0201612941 Publisher: Addison Wesley You can almost see the racks of database books from the back of the shop. While the shelves are often dominated by the cheap looking orange Oracle Press books, their black cover range is much nicer, or the red and black Microsoft Press tomes you’ll also find a respectable number written by C.J Date. One of the fields most renowned experts. What you won’t find are many books written by E. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/hiatus-2006-03/ Tue, 14 Mar 2006 12:21:20 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/hiatus-2006-03/ I’m not going to be about much until May. The site’ll be pretty quiet and don’t expect much in the way of email or phone replies. Dean https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/live-clipboard-ozzie/ Thu, 09 Mar 2006 19:18:29 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/live-clipboard-ozzie/ It’s an evolution rather than a revolution but Ray Ozzies introduction to Live Clipboard over at spaces.msn.com is an interesting read. The Live Clipboard Screencasts are also worth viewing. What I find more interesting than the actual Live Clipboard stuff itself (which is pretty neat) is that Microsoft has noticed, and seems to like, Microformats… It might just be me but that seems odd. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/willison-etech2006-javascript/ Thu, 09 Mar 2006 19:12:34 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/willison-etech2006-javascript/ Simon never fails to impress as a speaker and his Javascript tutorial is one of the most talked about sessions from this years Etech. Judging by the quality of the JavaScript tutorial material he’s put up on his own site I can see why. Read the PDF first and then go through the slides. They are well worth the time. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/linda-smith-rip/ Thu, 09 Mar 2006 18:59:21 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/linda-smith-rip/ I’m behind on actual (non-slashdot covered) news again so it came as quite a shock to find out that Linda Smith, who never failed to amuse, passed away in February. Whether on TV or radio she always raised a smile. Her death is a loss to all fans of good comedy. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/google-recruitment/ Thu, 09 Mar 2006 18:48:07 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/google-recruitment/ Both Dave Cross and Slashdot have recently commented on Googles problems hiring engineers. I’ve been quite surprised at how much effort I’ve seen them expend on it recently. From a stall of overly enthusiastic people at FOSDEM, to speakers at UKUUG and the Vint Cerf recruitment tour they’re more than willing to throw resources at the problem. Just before Christmas I got an email from Google recruitment asking if I’d be interested in going for an interview, and you know what? https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/bash-quotes-cli/ Wed, 08 Mar 2006 21:11:32 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/bash-quotes-cli/ One of my guilty pleasures is reading through IRC quotes. I hate to think how much time I’ve spent reading my way through bash.org and qdb.us. While playing with Template::Extract today I found myself needing a simple, structured site to experiment with. And it resulted in the bash_quotes command line tool. The script is pretty simple, if you call it without an argument it gets the quotes from the “Latest” page. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/lpi-lug-study-group/ Wed, 08 Mar 2006 20:53:24 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/lpi-lug-study-group/ This years FOSDEM had some representatives from the LPI conducting exams. LPI also did something similar at last years Linux Expo, and each time people seemed to really like the chance to take the exams cheaply and discuss their preparation with other candidates before the session. And then come out bonded from the pressure :) To me this seems to be a perfect opportunity for some group collaboration at a LUG level. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/apparmor-talk-happened/ Wed, 08 Mar 2006 20:49:35 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/apparmor-talk-happened/ With a mere two days notice the London Linux/Unix community managed to pull together an impressive 22 people to see Crispin Cowan, chief architect of AppArmor (and previously CTO and co-founder of Immunix) present AppArmor. The talk went down well, you can now get a video of the material from the FOSDEM AppArmor presentation and see for yourself, and afterwards the speaker came out to the pub and managed to keep a crowd entertained until the witching hour. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/know-they-open-ports/ Wed, 08 Mar 2006 20:45:33 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/know-they-open-ports/ Which ports do your servers have open right now? How did you check? Netstat? Are you really sure that it’s doing the right thing? What the host claims to be exporting isn’t always the same as what other hosts on the network see. When did your DNS server start exposing that TCP port? Has it always been there? I want a tool that keeps track of what ports a machine has open and shows me changes (and tracks when things change). https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/london-pm-march-2006/ Tue, 07 Mar 2006 18:01:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/london-pm-march-2006/ After a previous false start I’m pleased to announce the March London Perl Mongers technical meeting will actually be happening! Presenting on the night are the two main speakers - Dave Cross : "What's Wrong With ORM?" Richard Jones : "OCaml for Perl Programmers" And a Cornish handful of quality lightning talks (5 minutes each) - Alistair McGlinchy : "Net::SNMP and Cisco" Leon Brocard : "Make real things with PDF::API2" Nicholas Clark : "The Perl Foundation, their money, and how to get it. https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/virgin-net-mail/ Sat, 04 Mar 2006 19:54:57 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/virgin-net-mail/ If you want to contact me then please use the gmail address given on the About Me page. While dean.wilson3@virgin.net was my main address for a number of years (about seven) it’s been getting less and less use over the last 18 months, I now send all my mail via a different address, and it’s finally time to put it to sleep. It’s gone as of the end of February. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/crispincowan-in-london/ Tue, 28 Feb 2006 00:38:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/crispincowan-in-london/ Update: It’s on! The talk starts at 19:00 on 2006-02-28 and is being held at the Fotango offices. For one night only Crispin Cowan, chief architect of AppArmor (and previously CTO and co-founder of Immunix) will be available to give his excellent talk on AppArmor to a lucky London audience. What’s the catch? It’s tomorrow (Tuesday 28th of Feb) or nothing! Crispin is only in London for a couple of days and has a single slot in his diary, and he’s graciously said he’d give his talk if we’re interested. https://www.unixdaemon.net/network/webservice-google-sets-initial-release/ Tue, 21 Feb 2006 18:47:08 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/network/webservice-google-sets-initial-release/ The initial release of WebService::Google::Sets is now available from CPAN. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/past-gllug-rable/ Sat, 18 Feb 2006 15:46:16 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/past-gllug-rable/ The way that GLLUG events are organised has changed again recently and bought it more inline with how things used to be done. When I first joined GLLUG the meetings (speakers and venue) were mostly organised by a fearsome man (who was rabid about his privacy so I won’t mention his name) who had a nack for getting good speakers but no skill at organising (most meetings were announced about a week before they happened) or promoting them. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/mac-laptop-failures/ Sat, 18 Feb 2006 14:45:58 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/mac-laptop-failures/ I’m not a Mac fan, I tried. I really did. After Paul Graham declared Macs supreme and the worthy of attention David Heinemeier Hansson bashed Windows developers I pulled my old iBook out of the cupboard and gave it another couple of weeks. And then went right back to my Dell Latitude running Windows (and Linux in VMWare). While this is old ground for me what’s recently bought my Mac hating to the forefront is the stupidly high number of hardware failures Mac laptops seem to have. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/initial-frdns-release/ Sat, 18 Feb 2006 14:19:37 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/initial-frdns-release/ The frdns.pl forward and reverse DNS checking script is one of those little mistake catchers that allow you to work with a safety net. In this case it checks that your deployed forward and reverse DNS records are present and correct; it checks the results from real DNS queries, not by zone file parsing. frdns.pl accepts a CIDR range and polls each IP for a reverse DNS record. If it gets one it’ll try to forward resolve the name and compare the two results. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/cidr-pinger/ Thu, 09 Feb 2006 00:18:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/cidr-pinger/ I needed a command line tool to ping a number of CIDR network ranges, show me the status of each IP address and give me a return time for those that responded. I now have cidr_pinger.pl. It’s not as fast as a ‘nmap -sP blah/24’ but it does give me a return time. Although it only took ten minutes work with the ever incredible CPAN I’m putting it on here so I don’t have to write it again… https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/mass-deploy-firefox-extensions/ Wed, 08 Feb 2006 18:15:50 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/mass-deploy-firefox-extensions/ Adding FireFox extensions through the GUI one-by-one is, if you ignore memory leaks, one of the browsers most annoying quirks. Fortunately, modern versions of the browser allow you to drop a number of xpi files in to your “extensions” directory and install them as a batch when you start FireFox. Of course you need local copies to do this but that’s where a little bit of perl web spidering comes in… https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/undeadly-addons-and-imdb-images-gm/ Tue, 07 Feb 2006 23:36:43 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/undeadly-addons-and-imdb-images-gm/ I’ve got a couple of new Greasemonkey scripts I’ve been using. First up is Expand Undeadly/OpenBSD Journal Comments. Which does just that. I’ve also started using the Mozilla.org Add-on Pages - 100 results per page script after I started to go insane from constantly clicking for more results. The last plugin from the batch was never finished as someone else had already gotten around to it! Google Images in IMDb was just waiting to be written. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/extend-firefox-finalists-2006/ Tue, 07 Feb 2006 00:33:19 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/extend-firefox-finalists-2006/ As the title says, Mozilla.org has announced the Extend Firefox Finalists. Of the 18 plugins that have made it to the last round I’m already using five of them so I’m pretty happy with the list. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/patching-config-file-locations/ Mon, 06 Feb 2006 23:33:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/patching-config-file-locations/ While discussing the FIA via SSH article, one of my comments got some feedback; the comment was sudos config potentially giving the game away. A number of people suggested the same solution, patch where the source looks for the config file and compile it yourself. The idea is that you put a fake config file in the usual place, patch the source to use a different location and then compile the application. https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/javascript-debugging-in-firefox/ Sun, 05 Feb 2006 14:50:25 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/javascript-debugging-in-firefox/ Since being bitten by the Greasemonkey bug I’ve found dozens of ways to write broken and invalid JavaScript. While the JavaScript console that comes bundled with FireFox has helped track them down it’s come up short on a number of occasions. Fortunately we’ve now got FireBug, a per page JavaScript console with a bundle of extras. Including an integrated element inspector and XMLHttpRequest sniffer that shows you any AJAX traffic. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/doomed-in-crowds-on-mars/ Sun, 05 Feb 2006 00:16:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/doomed-in-crowds-on-mars/ I’m on call this weekend so I’m pretty limited in what I can get up to. At least that’s my excuse for watching TV… First up I saw the movie adaptation of Doom. I’ve blogged about the Doom movie before and unfortunately I was right. It was bloody terrible. Almost no plot, insanely bad voice acting from Rosamund Pike and lots of pointless corridors. The only highlight was the first person section that gave a nod to the original franchise. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/ssh-fia-sysadmin/ Sat, 04 Feb 2006 20:28:51 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/ssh-fia-sysadmin/ Hal Pomeranz has an interesting article on File Integrity Assessment via SSH over at sysadmin magazine (well worth a subscription). At my last job a couple of us discussed doing something similar so I enjoyed the article; it’s nice to see someone actually implement the damn thing. The basic idea addresses one of the implicit weaknesses with FIA tools. You give the attacker an obvious target to try and subvert. While there are little tricks you can employ to make their life harder (add a false positive so if they replace the binary with a fake it doesn’t report everything you’d expect etc. https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/foxpose-and-nocs/ Fri, 03 Feb 2006 18:35:52 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/foxpose-and-nocs/ What do multiple Nagios status pages, network traffic graphs and RT incident queues have in common? They’re all tabs I have open throughout the day. Because any of them can change at anytime, watching them has been always been a PITA. I used to get around this with a custom kludge that drove IE through a set series of pages. On the upside it worked. On the downside the periodic flicker of page changes drove me nuts. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/return-codes-and-long-prompts/ Thu, 02 Feb 2006 23:28:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/return-codes-and-long-prompts/ Once you’ve been using a tool for a while you often reach a plateau where it’s “good enough” and you stop looking for ways to tweak it. I’ve been using bash for a number of years and I’ve got set in my ways; until I sat next to a co-worker who uses zsh. My first Linux machine had a 14” monitor that could only do low resolutions. Screen space was at a premium and every character was precious. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/preserve-bash-loop-formatting/ Wed, 01 Feb 2006 23:58:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/preserve-bash-loop-formatting/ If you’re a heavy bash user you’ll often find yourself writing short snippets of code on the command line. Typically they’ll be based around a main loop and you’ll end up entering them over multiple lines to keep them readable. Unfortunately when you try reuse the command, by retrieving it from the bash command history, it’ll be transformed in to one semicolon laden unreadable mass. Unless you read on… One of the options bash allows you to set is ‘lithist’. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/bash-terminate-on-timeout/ Sat, 28 Jan 2006 20:57:56 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/bash-terminate-on-timeout/ One of the lesser known features of bash is ‘$TMOUT’. When assigned a positive number this variable has two functions. When used in a script TMOUT is the timeout value for the ‘select’ command and the ‘read’ built-in. When used in an interactive shell, and assigned a positive number, $TMOUT is the number of seconds bash will wait (after outputting the prompt) before it terminates; typically killing the users session. This is often used to ensure that unused root prompts are not left logged in for more than a minute or two without auto-closing. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/over-mounting/ Sat, 28 Jan 2006 19:46:25 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/over-mounting/ A topic that’s been discussed to great length on one of (many) Linux lists I lurk on has been that of mounting one file over another. It’s easier to show this with an example: $ cat password dwilson:password $ cat fakepassword attacker:fakepassword (root) $ mount --bind fake_password password $ cat password attacker:fakepassword While this requires root access (or flimsy mount permissions) to execute, it is a nasty little trick. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/blosxom-ia-feeds/ Sat, 28 Jan 2006 16:30:35 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/blosxom-ia-feeds/ The Blosxom Immediate Action Feeds Plugin adds a number of links to the bottom of each blosxom post; both HTML and RSS flavours. These links allow easy interaction with a number of online services. This version of the plugin adds links for del.icio.us, Digg and reddit. When one of the links is clicked it takes the user to the site and attempts to autofill as many of the required fields as possible. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/blosxom-digg-me/ Sat, 28 Jan 2006 14:32:18 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/blosxom-digg-me/ The digg_me plugin changes each post (both RSS and HTML flavours) and adds a clickable link that takes you to a pre-populated “Submit a story to Digg” page. And fills in the URL and title for you. The Digg Me! source code is pretty simple (mostly the same as the Reddit and del.icio.us plugins) but you’ll probably need to change the ‘$post_url’ to suit your sites permalink format. The code’s GPL'd and I’ve tested it on my own site so it mostly works. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/google-sets-initial-release/ Sat, 28 Jan 2006 14:20:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/google-sets-initial-release/ Google labs is one of the ‘Nets open secrets. It’s a site that gathers up some of Googles ideas for new sites and services and allows people to have a play with them. One of the services, Google Sets, has been quite useful to me recently. So I wrote the GoogleSets Command Line Interface. The basic premise (of both the site and script) is simple, you give it a list and it tries to expand it. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/blosxom-submit-to-reddit/ Sat, 28 Jan 2006 12:13:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/blosxom-submit-to-reddit/ One of the great things about putting code online is that anyone can contact you about it. Sometimes you get a “thank you”, sometimes corrections and occasionally requests to make it do something else. My add_to_delicious Blosxom plugin post caused a couple of damn lazy Blosxom users (although it’s perl based so they may consider this praise :)) to ask for versions for a couple of other sites. The first of these, submit to reddit is now done. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/event-queue-200601/ Sat, 28 Jan 2006 11:19:12 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/event-queue-200601/ I’ve not been able to get to any tech events since early November so I’m feeling more than a little out of touch. Fortunately the next couple of months will make up for the lack of geek conversation. We’ve got a London PM tech meet on Feb the 16th (I’ll link to it as as soon as I get the announcements out). The ever incredible FOSDEM on the 25th and 26th (with the usual Friday night warm up) of Feb. https://www.unixdaemon.net/network/parasitic-traceroute/ Sat, 28 Jan 2006 10:53:23 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/network/parasitic-traceroute/ Dan Kaminskys Paketto Keiretsu is a collection of small networking tools that contain some great ideas. This week I needed to work out where an encrypted tunnel was actually going, not where the untrusted OS said it was going, and paratrace was a great little app to have in my toolkit. While none of the tools are essential (or going to be needed that often) they do fill a pretty lonely niche. https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/gimages-large-defaults/ Wed, 04 Jan 2006 00:05:07 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/gimages-large-defaults/ I’ve recently been looking for some decent images I can display on a projector. I’m not a very artistic person so I’ve done the imaginative thing and gone on an Internet scavenger hunt. While Google images is actually a decent image search engine it’s got a couple of annoying quirks that I’ve been able to work around with a little application of Greasemonkey. Firstly, when you click an image, you get sent to the containing page. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/backup-rcs-directories/ Sun, 01 Jan 2006 13:18:50 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/backup-rcs-directories/ Source control is an essential part of a smart techies life. While the bigger version control systems are mostly useful to developers (SVK rocks) some of the simpler ones can often be found in the sysadmins toolkit. A couple of companies I’ve worked for have been heavy users of RCS on their servers and while it’s made configuration safer (and easier to revert) its lack of a central repository is often an unaddressed weakness. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/blosxom-add-to-delicious-plugin/ Sun, 01 Jan 2006 11:53:08 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/blosxom-add-to-delicious-plugin/ The add_to_delicious plugin was inspired by an xml.com article, called Putting RSS to Work: Immediate Action Feeds, which made the very sensible suggestion of allowing you to “do things” to RSS items without leaving your aggregator. This plugin changes each post (both RSS and HTML flavours) and adds a clickable link that takes you to a pre-populated “add link to del.icio.us” page. The add_to_delicious source code is pretty simple but you’ll probably need to change the ‘$post_url’ to suit your sites permalink format. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/look-back-at-2005/ Sat, 31 Dec 2005 18:38:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/look-back-at-2005/ 2005 was a very mixed year for me, it had some memorable high spots and a couple of tear jerking moments. The year started off with me moving all my sites, email and everything else I put online from a shared machine to my own bytemark box after the shared host I was using got cracked through someones broken web app install. Digging through my backups and verifying nothing had been tampered with was a fun way to spend my hols. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/frameworks-200511-done/ Fri, 18 Nov 2005 00:58:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/frameworks-200511-done/ The day seemed to get worse by the hour, first the pub phoned to cancel my booked room, they’d let me have it for free but then someone offered them a 1000 pound for the night so they dropped my reservation, and then we had a double booked room at the venue and had to kick out the occupants. After these hickups two of the speakers arrived and things actually started to fit together. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/frameworks-night-moved/ Sat, 12 Nov 2005 20:37:25 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/frameworks-night-moved/ It’s a little late in the day to change any of the details but I’ve had to move the venue from Morgan Stanley in Cabot Square to the New Cavendish Street campus of Westminster University (Streetmap). Some of you may recognise the venue, we hold a lot of GLLUGs there. The reason for the move is a great one, the demand for seats has far surpassed my expectations. The original venue had room for 100 people, 120 at a push. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/subpar-sudo-article/ Sat, 12 Nov 2005 16:33:51 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/subpar-sudo-article/ I like sudo, it allows you to give people (and automated jobs) more privileges without having to hand out the root password. One of the more important aspects of its use is restricting the commands a user can run. After all, limiting peoples access to rootly powers doesn’t help much if they can just shell out to bash or edit the shadow file (or other important files) and locally escalate their privileges. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/opencon-2005-openbsd-slides/ Sat, 12 Nov 2005 15:53:49 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/opencon-2005-openbsd-slides/ The OpenCON 2005 OpenBSD Slides are now available and linked to from undeadly.org. When ever the OpenBSD people get together and present on security it’s worth ten minutes of the admins day to have a look for the new ideas, after all they’ll often appear ever where else over the next year. The highlights of this batch include an overview of how the congestion indicator works and allows you to log in even when getting DoSed, the changes to the ports and package tools (which are moving to Perl! https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/out-cold/ Sat, 12 Nov 2005 12:38:21 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/out-cold/ I’ve been out of action for the last week and a bit due to illness, this may have something to do with all the windows where I live being removed and left out overnight by incompetent, unprepared builders. Nothing like trying to sleep through a minor gale. In WINTER. When it’s raining. And you have NO WINDOWS! On the plus side I know my email system’s working fine, I’ve got a big enough backlog to prove that. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/frameworks-2005-11-annoucement/ Tue, 01 Nov 2005 23:56:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/frameworks-2005-11-annoucement/ Update: the venue has changed! Please see the London Frameworks Night Update page. I’m pleased to announce that on the 17th of November, starting at 19:00 and being held in Morgan Stanley at Cabot Square, is the first ever London Web Frameworks evening! We were incredibly lucky with the line up and we’re proud to present: Matt Trout - Catalyst Catalyst core developer and author of DBIx::Class. Simon Willison - Django https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/frameworks-night-short/ Thu, 27 Oct 2005 22:55:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/frameworks-night-short/ Update: the venue has changed! Please see the London Frameworks Night Update page. I’m delighted to announce that the London Web Frameworks night will actually be happening! It’s due to happen on the 17th of November and starts at 19:00. Thanks to Ben Evans we’ve got a venue (Morgan Stanley at Cabot Square) and we’ve got three damn fine speakers. Presenting Django we’ve got Simon Willison. Showcasing Rails is Matt Biddulph and to cover Catalyst we’ve got Matt Trout, one of its developers. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/conway-oscon-keynote/ Thu, 20 Oct 2005 09:58:47 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/conway-oscon-keynote/ Damian Conway, who had a number of happy customers in his “Presentation Akido” tutorial, has just managed to raise the ante for all other keynote speakers. His keynote, an amazingly coherent group of geek jokes and parodies of keynotes we’ve seen so far, was the funniest thing at the the conference. And they’ve got Jeff Waugh here! I don’t know if it’s been recorded but if it has someone needs to leak it now. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/off-to-eurooscon/ Sun, 16 Oct 2005 09:02:14 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/off-to-eurooscon/ I head off to Amsterdam today for EuroOSCON, I’m booked in to the tutorials so there is no way I can make it in time tomorrow morning. This is my first O’Reilly conference (Euro FOO Camp wasn’t a normal con) and I’m a little nervous. I’ve got no idea what to expect. Still half the “fun” is wandering around lost trying to spot friendly faces among the sea of ThinkGeek T-Shirts. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/jeffwaugh-at-gllug/ Sat, 15 Oct 2005 11:02:52 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/jeffwaugh-at-gllug/ Last night was the first ever week night GLLUG. We were lucky enough to have Jeff Waugh come and speak to us as part of his BadgerBadgerBadger tour (although he didn’t do the dance :)). He presented some of the recent innovations and newer projects in the Gnome ecosphere before moving on to an overview of Ubuntu and its infrastructure. I only know the basics about Ubuntu (I had a play with the warthog release) but from the presentation last night it was easy to see that it’s not just the software which is important. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/wheres-that-number/ Thu, 13 Oct 2005 19:21:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/wheres-that-number/ Update: I no longer run the code required for this to work. I’ve only left the post up as a little reminder to myself. Every been given a number and thought ‘I wonder where that is?’ or seen an area code you didn’t recognise and want to know where it is? No? Oh, OK. If on the other hand the answer was yes to either of those then I’d like to present the “UK number mapper” (yes the name’s bad…). https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/ascii-matrix/ Thu, 13 Oct 2005 00:28:14 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/ascii-matrix/ Just WOW. And get a life dammit ;) https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/wheres-the-number-v01/ Wed, 12 Oct 2005 22:23:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/wheres-the-number-v01/ After a pretty much technology free day at work I wanted to actually do something hands on before the day was over. After a flurry of reading and deleting of of blog posts it looked like the buzz word of the day was (still) Google Maps. So off I went. With the aid of the excellent Number::Phone and the not too bad Geo::Google, which can’t seem to handle Scottish towns, I put together a small script which displays the town a phone number is from using Google Maps. https://www.unixdaemon.net/network/windows-ethernet-bonding/ Tue, 11 Oct 2005 21:08:49 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/network/windows-ethernet-bonding/ I spent a while today trying to get my head around Ethernet bonding, under Windows 2000 Server, on an IBM machine. Firstly a tangent, IBM has a great site with a lot of good content. And a bloody rubbish search engine and no overview on how anything fits together. I know organising that much data must take a lot of clue but hey, this is IBM! One of the few places that still actually does research. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/frame-works-night-200511/ Mon, 10 Oct 2005 22:42:09 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/frame-works-night-200511/ I normally think of a topic, gather a list of potential speakers, send out some emails and then keep my fingers crossed. This time I’m attempting to put together an evening of talks on the topic of web frameworks in dynamic languages. I’m hoping to get someone to speak on Django, Rails and either Maypole or Catalyst (I don’t know much about either) and a then put them in a room with a crowd of Perl, Python and Ruby developers and see if we can start some conversations. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/book-reviews-live/ Sun, 09 Oct 2005 19:20:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/book-reviews-live/ I’ve finally gotten around to bringing my book reviews (mostly for London PM) in to my main site. You can now see my reviews on the book reviews page. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/jeff-waugh-is-on/ Sat, 08 Oct 2005 14:52:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/jeff-waugh-is-on/ In the past I posted about the possibility of Jeff Waugh coming to GLLUG and I can now happily confirm he will be joining us on October 14th for the evening. This is a day after the next Ubuntu release so we might get the first talk on the shiny new features before we go for food and drink at the near by Greenman pub. This GLLUG will be a lot shorter than the usual and will be more socially focused as it’s on a Friday evening. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/pip-2006-restart/ Sat, 08 Oct 2005 14:34:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/pip-2006-restart/ After a rubbish first start (just two entries in four months) I decided to scrap my 2005/2006 Pragmatic Investment Plan and start again. Between insanity both professionally, I changed jobs, and in my personal life nothing seemed to be moving. And sometimes you just need to wipe the slate clean and start again. I kicked back off with the Linux Expo and FUDCon, both of which were excellent and will be covered in another post and by buying some more books. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/go-it-alone/ Sat, 08 Oct 2005 14:18:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/go-it-alone/ Author: Geoff Burch ISBN: 1841124702 Publisher: Capstone Publishing Ltd The authors of an unhealthy amount of business books seem to live in a world of external sunshine and abundance. Every sales call results in a gentle hug and every request for money a blank cheque. This book isn’t like that. Although it bills itself as a “guerilla guide to setting up on your own”, it’s more an overview of the practical , often overlooked, aspects of becoming self-employed. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/selling-with-nlp/ Sat, 08 Oct 2005 13:59:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/selling-with-nlp/ Author: Kerry L. Johnson ISBN: 1857880471 Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing When it comes to sales people there are two main types, those that believe in win/win selling and the ones who don’t get my money; and hopefully have bad things happen to them. “Selling with NLP” (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) aims to provide salespeople with the skills required to increase rapport with their clients and help them understand the customers needs rather than just the wants. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/identity-20/ Sat, 08 Oct 2005 10:09:52 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/identity-20/ I finally got around to watching the entertaining and very well rehearsed OSCON 2005 Identity 2.0 Keynote by Dick Hardt. The presentation itself is very catchy; a large number of very short slides that stop you getting bored (very Lessig). I hate to think how long he spent getting them together. My favourite was the MS Passport slide, which, slide-by-slide, summarises the whole story of Passport in a single element. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/serenity-here-and-now/ Thu, 06 Oct 2005 22:05:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/serenity-here-and-now/ After the Linux expo at Olympia (more to come on this later) I made a manic dash across London to the only cinema I knew of that was showing early previews of Joss Whedons Serenity. I managed to get there just as the adverts finished and settled in for a very long awaited couple of hours. And I wasn’t disappointed. I’m not going to give anything away but the film is very good, not mind blowing like some of the early reviews have claimed but it’s the best written Sci-Fi I’ve seen in a long time. https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/pip-jul2005-jul2006/ Wed, 05 Oct 2005 23:22:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/pip-jul2005-jul2006/ The aim is to, at the least, achieve all these goals. The time allocated is from October 6th 2005 to midnight October 5th 2006. I’ve archived my 2004/2005 PiP and it can now be found on the 2004/2005 Pragmatic Investment Plan page. Note: This page is actually getting a surprisingly high amount of traffic so I thought I should add some comments and an attribution. The original idea for a Pragmatic Investment Plan comes from Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, the Pragmatic Programmers, to be specific the very interesting slides from the How To Keep Your Job presentation, if you’ve never seen them and you work in a technology field then I suggest you spend some quality time with them, they might just save your salary in years to come. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/writing-procedures-anachronism/ Wed, 05 Oct 2005 23:21:13 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/writing-procedures-anachronism/ Today I was taken through a couple of system tasks that were both in-depth and pretty time consuming. And like a good lad I wrote down instructions fine grained enough to go through the task on my own. Now firstly this means if I missed anything I have to go through it again and make corrections. Secondly I wrote them by hand. Which was a mistake. After I’d finished the oddness of what I’d just done came to me. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/smarter-than-me/ Wed, 05 Oct 2005 23:13:42 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/smarter-than-me/ At the last couple of places I’ve worked I’ve ended up being the only real sysadmin in the company. While this gives you a fair amount of control over what you’re doing from hour to hour, it also means you don’t have any one with the same professional interests to bounce ideas off or sanity check you; caveat: most Perl developers I’ve worked with have a pretty comprehensive knowledge of UNIX. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/serenity-friday/ Tue, 04 Oct 2005 20:18:58 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/serenity-friday/ I’ve been waiting for this one for a while and it’s almost on us. The weird thing is it’s starting to become difficult to not found out what happens in the film. When it was only the occasional geek seeing an early screener or preview I could spot the posts and ignore them. now it’s on general release in the US the sheer quantity of reviews, spoilers and discussions on the film is becoming ridiculous. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/murphy-gpl-linux/ Tue, 04 Oct 2005 19:59:05 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/murphy-gpl-linux/ Over at ZDNet Paul Murphy has a rather annoying post about whether the GPL impedes Linux more than it helps. The short answer is: No. The slightly longer version is “who cares?” Linux has become an incredible phenomenon, it’s used in some of the biggest companies on the planet (Google, Oracle, Novell), it runs large chunks of the net and has an amazing community of very smart people moving it forward. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/friendship-inbalance/ Tue, 04 Oct 2005 09:45:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/friendship-inbalance/ In any friendship, hell any relationship, the most important thing is equality. Each party has certain expectations, if they don’t match those of the other person then things will eventually come to a head. In a relationship the same principles apply, but what they each offer may be very different and appear unbalanced on first glance. This is often the deal with “old rich guy” with “young attractive women” relationships. As long as they both understand what they’re going to put in (no pun intended) and get out then they can work. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/toorcon-2005-slides/ Sun, 02 Oct 2005 10:39:02 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/toorcon-2005-slides/ I’ve never been able to get to a Toorcon but from reading the Toorcon 2005 slides it seems they have a number of quality speakers. The three highlights from this years sessions seem to be Introducing the Bastille Hardening Assessment Tool by Jay Beale, How Big is that Foot in the Door by Foofus and Simple Nomads How Hackers Get Caught. The intro to Bastille does both a good job of explaining why you should care about hardening, which includes some great quotes: The NSA’s Information Assurance Directorate evaluated a system locked-down following CIS’s Windows 2000 guide. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/playing-with-rollyo/ Sun, 02 Oct 2005 09:37:29 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/playing-with-rollyo/ I’ve spent a couple of minutes (yep, very in-depth :)) playing with Rollyo, a way to run searches over multiple sites. The site’s pretty slick (and looks quite Basecamp/37signals inspired) but I can’t help but think I’ve been here before… Mozilla, and FireFox with a plugin, have something called the search sidebar. This little piece of magic allows you to run a search over multiple sites at the same time and integrates the results; each site search is implemented using a mycroft search plugin. https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/planet-outage-20050929/ Thu, 29 Sep 2005 18:56:50 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/planet-outage-20050929/ In what is just another in a long line of things that have been sent to test me over the last couple of weeks, today one of my sites got hit by a group of machines trying to do not nice things. The result? A load of 56 and a very slow machine. I stopped apache for a while, put some “measures” in place and we’re back up running. I’ve never bothered to make blosxom cache or anything to keep the load low, not having that much traffic always achieved the same goal, but I’ll try and pencil some time in to take a look. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/planet-and-rss091/ Sun, 25 Sep 2005 14:46:54 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/planet-and-rss091/ One of the little bits of trivia I learned while setting up PlanetGLLUG was how the planet software deals with RSS 0.9 feeds. The original “specification” for this version didn’t require each entry/post to have a date associated with it; although a lot of feeds work around this by either using the later revisions or including the Dublin Core name-space and dates. This causes the planet software to add every item in the RSS feed to the planet with the same date, the one on which it first pulls in the entries. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/ukuug-2005-agm/ Sun, 25 Sep 2005 13:34:46 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/ukuug-2005-agm/ A busy Thursday night began with the UKUUG AGM. With just over twenty people present Ray Miller, council chairman, went through the details for the last year. While the full information will be available in the minutes (which should be in the next UKUUG news letter) there are a couple of points that I feel warrant a mention. Firstly was some great news. Alasdair Kergon, who pretty much singlehandedly organises the Linux conference each year, was made an honourary UKUUG member. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/meeting-via-pledgebank/ Sat, 24 Sep 2005 10:43:48 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/meeting-via-pledgebank/ One of the great things about sites like PledgeBank is that they provide a single service and they they do it well enough that it can be bent slightly to serve another purpose. I organise the occasional meeting for techies and one of the few major worries is “what happens if no one turns up?”. It’s not a complex fear but it can result in some sleepless nights. It’s not even just a case of “will I look like an idiot if this goes wrong? https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/kprobes-finally-get-it/ Sat, 24 Sep 2005 10:00:42 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/kprobes-finally-get-it/ Back in April of 2001 GLLUG had a meeting, in the CFC preview cinema, which featured a talk by Richard Moore of IBM. Now the speaker obviously knew his stuff, he was a little dry but obviously passionate and enthusiastic about his material. The topic was a new way of debugging the Linux Kernel; it was called DProbes. Now while I understood most of the talk, I’m not a kernel guy so bits were over my head, the idea seemed like a good, if quite ambitious one. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/planet-and-iis-resources-update/ Sat, 24 Sep 2005 09:45:15 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/planet-and-iis-resources-update/ Well Planet GLLUG has been running for a couple of days without any glitches, except for some, er, interesting, HTML running from one persons postings to another. I’ve also replaced some of the images with much better versions contributed from Simon Morris. Now some (maybe) interesting tidbits: 43.8% of the visitors to PlanetGLLUG are using Linux vs the 42.1% that are running Windows; it’s always nice to see people dogfooding. Even more surprising is that the most popular web browser used by the Windows viewers is… FireFox! https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/iis-resources-gm/ Tue, 20 Sep 2005 23:29:05 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/iis-resources-gm/ I’ve got the first version of the IIS-Resources Printer Friendly Articles GreaseMonkey script written and uploaded. It takes you to the correct print page, minus the adverts, but it’s currently got a problem in that the onload handler kicks up a print dialogue (on Windows at least). If anyone has any ideas how to stop it doing this please let me know. https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/the-reg-print-gm-fix/ Tue, 20 Sep 2005 22:52:49 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/the-reg-print-gm-fix/ I noticed a bug in my TheRegister Printer Friendly Articles Greasemonkey plugin a couple of days ago. The odd thing was the bug was a major one that I never saw based upon my browsing habits. I no longer read TheReg, I’m subscribed to its RSS feed instead. I only bother opening the stories I’m interested in. While this saves me time it also means I never go to its front page. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/kim-polese-oscon2005-audio/ Tue, 20 Sep 2005 20:48:37 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/kim-polese-oscon2005-audio/ Over at IT Conversations is a recording of Kim Polese’s OSCON 2005 keynote. Better known to many people as the public face of Marimba, the push technology that was shoved away, her new employers seem a lot more interesting. The basic idea is to test and certify stacks of software, seemingly from the kernel up, and then presumably get paid to add desired items to the testing. It might just be me but this sounds fascinating. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/planet-gllug-initial/ Tue, 20 Sep 2005 20:36:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/planet-gllug-initial/ I’m involved in the GLLUG user group. One of the ideas that came up recently (it was actually discussed on a non- GLLUG list!) was about starting a “Planet”. A Planet is a collection of posts from different blogs (pulled together from different feeds) and put on a single page (also available via different feed formats…). And now we have one; behold Planet GLLUG. The initial release is a trial in a number of ways. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/cursed-colds/ Tue, 20 Sep 2005 20:23:09 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/cursed-colds/ Over the last week or so I’ve been suffering from a cold that just won’t shake loose. It started with headaches, which stopped me from reading or using a monitor, and has reduced back to the point where I sound funny (yes, more than usual…) and have a sore throat. The weird thing is that it seems to have screwed up my sleep patterns. I’m going to bed early, waking up for a couple of hours and then drifting back off. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/house-rocks/ Sun, 18 Sep 2005 23:08:46 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/house-rocks/ I used to be a big fan of C.S.I, the original, not the spin-offs, but as the series continued to come it moved away from the science and quirks and more in to the weekly “soap opera” I lost my interest in it. Fortunately there’s now a new contender for it’s place in my very limited TV schedule. House, M.D. The title character, Dr. Gregory House, is played damn well by Hugh Laurie, a British actor best known in the UK for his comedy work. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/stargate-series2-mckay/ Sun, 18 Sep 2005 23:08:46 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/stargate-series2-mckay/ I’ve been a Stargate fan since the first series (the ninth series is a ‘little’ flat but that’s a different post) and I dutifully watched Atlantis when it started, and was pretty much disappointed. The plots are mostly from the early Stargate episodes and the characters are too similar to the old SG1 team. Except McKay, who I really liked. Arrogant, cowardly, selfish, brilliant and with a dry, sarcastic wit he was the reason I managed to hang on for half a series. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/butterfly-effect/ Sun, 18 Sep 2005 01:35:45 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/butterfly-effect/ I’ve just watched The Butterfly Effect - Directors Cut and I have to say it’s not as bad as I was expecting. The plot outline, from IMDB, is pretty snappy: “A young man (Ashton Kutcher) blacks out harmful memories of significant events of his life. As he grows up he finds a way to remember these lost memories and a supernatural way to alter his life.” What made the film interesting was its pretty bleak view of changing the past. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/applying-for-ukuug/ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 16:52:35 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/applying-for-ukuug/ I’ve been a member of the UKUUG for a couple of years know and I’m a great fan of their conferences. They always manage to get a good venue, a decent crowd and a lot of top notch speakers. I, on the other hand, have just about managed to get two GLLUGs up and running and almost had a coronary at each one. In an attempt to learn more about how the big boys plan and organise these kinds of events I’ve applied for a seat on the UKUUG council. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/personal-mba/ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 15:37:19 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/personal-mba/ Traditionally there has always been two easily identifiable people in a tech start-up, the beard and the suit. I’m a beard, well a shaven one… which I guess makes me a chin… But I’m digressing. One of the great things about the ‘net is that it’s so easy to stroll in to someone else’s world. With people like Seth Godin and Hugh Macleod posting their thoughts (and a decent RSS aggregator) I can get an insight in to the marketing world. https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/firefox-pdfs/ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 14:31:40 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/firefox-pdfs/ When it comes to presenting information on the ‘Net PDF files do little but annoy me, fortunately I’m not alone in thinking PDFs in websites suck. I understand that you might need to have a very controlled form that people can print off. Fine, but take me to a HTML page with a link explaining what the PDF is for. And don’t even think about giving me important information in PDF format by default; HTML with a link to a higher quality version maybe. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/event-dump-20050917/ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 13:35:23 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/event-dump-20050917/ I try to get to a lot of technical conferences, you meet cool people, you learn lots and (this is going to sound bad…) it gives you a chance to measure yourself against your peers who actually care about what they do. Not just the 9-5 people that don’t even own a home PC. In the next couple of months there’s a small torrent of events coming up and I’m going to see how many I can get to. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/the-reading-list-20050917/ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 13:02:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/the-reading-list-20050917/ I always seem to have a huge pile of books to read and an inability to actually read them in any order. This months pile includes: Behind Closed Doors. I’m a big fan of the Pragmatic Programmers books and this one is no different. It covers the things that we’re thankful good managers already know and gives us something to throw at^Wto the bad ones. I’m most of the way through it and it’s a 7/10. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/pledgebank-rss/ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 12:40:20 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/pledgebank-rss/ I like the PledgeBank site, it’s a great idea and it’s promoting some good causes (UK Digital Rights is one of them) but it was a pain to keep going back and reading the comments… If only we had a way of subscribing to the comments… maybe using a form of XML that has a number of specs… ;) After sending in a single email asking for RSS feeds of the comments and waiting no more then seven of our earth days they’ve added them. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/plugin-adverts/ Sat, 17 Sep 2005 11:52:09 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/plugin-adverts/ Back in August I added Google adwords to the IE Plugins page. If at all possible I plan to keep the site advert free but the IE Plugins, with the possible exception of my blogs atom feed, are the biggest bandwidth consumers by a fair way. This was my first foray in to the world of Google ads and I’ve picked up some very useful information. Firstly adding adverts, and viewing the reports, is incredibly easy. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/badger-badger-tour-2005/ Sat, 03 Sep 2005 17:24:47 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/badger-badger-tour-2005/ Ubuntu’s Jeff Waugh is going to be a very busy man. Before he even gets to the first O’Reilly EuroOSCON, which is being held in Amsterdam in October, he’s stopping off at a Gnome convention, LUG meetings and we’re hoping to get him out for an evening in London. Details are a bit slim at the moment, I don’t have a venue or a confirmed plan for the evening, but with a little luck we’ll get Jeff to talk about Ubuntu, Linux on the desktop and what it’s like being Debians agile sibling and then go for food and drink. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/backstage-extended/ Sat, 03 Sep 2005 10:30:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/backstage-extended/ While sitting in the BBC backstage session at OpenTech I had an idea for an entry to the competition. Which I then forgot about. After an email from a friend recently asking if I’d done anything for it and pointing out I only had three days left I decided to have a coding day on Saturday and try and get a prototype working and submitted. And then the BBC Backstage competition deadline is extended! https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/backstage-with-perl/ Fri, 02 Sep 2005 23:29:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/backstage-with-perl/ As most of you ‘net savvy people know, the BBC has put a number of feeds online under the banner of BBC Backstage. While it’s nice to see organisations like the BBC offering this kind of data (and the front man, Ben Metcalfe seems a nice, and interesting guy) the initial release of one of the more interesting bits of data, the TV Anytime TV and radio data, only had a Java API available for using it. https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/theregister-printer-gm/ Thu, 01 Sep 2005 21:53:38 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/theregister-printer-gm/ I’m a big fan of The Register but I can’t stand multi-page articles. I’ve put a little Greasemonkey script together to make sure I don’t have to deal with them. The The Register Printer Friendly Articles script is now online and ready for use. I hope someone else finds it useful. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/planning-to-fail-ba/ Sun, 21 Aug 2005 23:56:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/planning-to-fail-ba/ Do Cool Shit Every Damn Day Or Die Trying From Tom Peters. In an attempt to do just that, well the first two bits anyway, I’m currently planning my next project; this one is a little different, I know I’m going to fail. It’s not very often you embark on a project not to succeed but to see where and how you screw it up. Sometimes a challenge is just too big and outside of your area of expertise. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/vimshortener-update-200508/ Sun, 21 Aug 2005 23:35:51 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/vimshortener-update-200508/ I’ve made a couple of small changes to my Vim URL Shortener script. It now uses WWW::Shorten instead of WWW::MakeAShorterLink, it’s documentation has been tided up a bit and the vim script now replaces all occurrences of the selected URL in a single sweep. It’s not a major upgrade so don’t rush to update. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/miniproject-vim-shorten/ Sun, 21 Aug 2005 23:34:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/miniproject-vim-shorten/ As the amount of content available online grows, the length of the URL's required to access it seems determined to keep up. This little bundle of a vim script and some Perl code will convert a long URL into a shorter one (using MakeAShorterLink) at the press of a single button. While the masl.pl script can be used on the command line to shorten URL's if you’re lucky enough to use mutt as your email reader and vim as the editor within it you can easily shorten target addresses so they slip under the magic 75 character limit that differentiates visited URL's from my home pages. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/blosxom-tagcloud/ Sun, 21 Aug 2005 00:26:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/blosxom-tagcloud/ Ever wanted a tag cloud of your Blosxom posts? With just this blosxom-tagcloud.pl script (and three Perl modules from CPAN) you can have one that integrates itself with your Blosxom footer and even allows easy merging of the tag cloud and any static text/HTML you’ve used in the past. I’ve uploaded the initial version of the code and I’ve put up a Blosxom TagCloud page with some more information. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/cpan-search-results-gm/ Sat, 20 Aug 2005 18:55:14 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/cpan-search-results-gm/ I’ve put another little chunk of JavaScript up in the Unixdaemon Greasemonkey Script repository. This one has makes the CPAN search show 100 results per page. The full CPAN Search - 100 results per page script is now available under the GPL. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/starting-with-geo-google/ Thu, 18 Aug 2005 23:40:50 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/starting-with-geo-google/ I’ve been having a fiddle with the Geo::Google perl module today, the simple explanation is that the module performs geographical queries using Google Maps. And it works well. Just it’s not very accurate… Geo::Google takes an address and returns a longitude and latitude from Google Maps. With these you can create points on your own GMap applications. After feeding it a dozen addresses with different levels of completeness (full postcode, partial postcode, city and town, just city etc. https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/debian-upgrades/ Thu, 18 Aug 2005 18:29:33 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/debian-upgrades/ I’ve just finished upgrading the server that hosts my mail and websites from Debian woody to sarge. The upgrade itself was pretty painless (except for apache vanishing…) and should now allow me to install modern perl modules without a lot of messing around. If you’ve tried to mail me and got a bounce then please retry, everything should be working again now. Of course if it isn’t then you can’t email me to let me know anyway ;) https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/securityfocus-printer-gm/ Mon, 15 Aug 2005 20:49:38 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/securityfocus-printer-gm/ I’ve added another little Greasemonkey script, this time for SecurityFocus. If you navigate to an article it’ll notice and shunt you to the printer friendly version instead. This way you get the whole thing on one page and drop the adverts. It’s called SecurityFocus PrinterFriendly Articles and it’s ready for use. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/about-a-girl/ Mon, 15 Aug 2005 00:21:10 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/about-a-girl/ This isn’t one of my usual postings, if you’re here just for the tech then hit delete now. You’ve been warned. Every now and again you meet someone that simply shines. A person that makes your spirit soar by walking in the room and can brighten your day with but a casual smile. If you’re very fortunate, you’ll spend time together and she’ll be someone who continues to grow in your estimation while you worry ever more about how you appear in hers. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/oreilly-delicious-links/ Sun, 14 Aug 2005 20:49:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/oreilly-delicious-links/ I’m a big del.icio.us fan, it’s saved me storing my bookmarks in three different formats and provides easy access from anywhere; all for free. I was however surprised to see “Bookmark with del.icio.us” links in the articles on both O’Reilly’s ONLamp and perl.com sites. Still anything that gets the service more exposure can’t be a bad thing. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/useperl-nested-comments/ Sun, 14 Aug 2005 20:47:56 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/useperl-nested-comments/ I like use.perl.org and mostly use it to read the journals. I don’t like to login in and I don’t like having to expand the comments so I can see them all in one page. So I wrote the use.perl.org nested comments greasemonkey script. And now I don’t have to :) https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/gm-ora-print/ Sat, 13 Aug 2005 12:06:13 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/gm-ora-print/ I’ve been doing some fiddling with Greasemonkey recently (I need to buy a modern book on JavaScript, mine are all four/five years old and the landscape has some what changed!) and I’ve found some quite useful user scripts. My favourite one so far is a mostly innocuous script called theO’Reilly Network Printer Friendly Redirect. It does pretty much what you’d expect, instead of getting an article cut across four or five pages it shows the complete version in a single page. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/linux-emporium/ Thu, 04 Aug 2005 23:59:01 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/linux-emporium/ For years now when I’ve needed a bundle of CD’s done quickly and I can’t be bothered to do the whole thing myself I’ve used the Linux Emporium. They are cheap, quick and know their market. Today I was lucky enough to meet the man who runs it and see part of the operation (a pretty big CD duplicator!) Steve is doing a lot of the thankless leg-work and maintaining the infrastructure we’re going to be using (including the wireless network I’m posting this through) and he deserves some kudos for his efforts. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/pre-ukuug-linux2005/ Thu, 04 Aug 2005 13:53:48 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/pre-ukuug-linux2005/ The UKUUG tutorials are usually both top notch and start too early for most people to travel to the venue on the day. At every conference past the first one attended the people with more understanding bosses, or in my case holiday time, travel up on the day before and camp down for an early start. Or at least that’s the plan… After being given the run around by some well meaning but uninformed staff, “I’m here to register for the conference. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/euro-oscon-not-for-me/ Mon, 01 Aug 2005 19:43:01 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/euro-oscon-not-for-me/ OSCON in the US is one of the premier OpenSource events. While I’ve never actually been to one, it seems to attract a lot of top notch speakers and, judging from the blog posts written in the aftermath, an interesting and diverse audience of smart people. I was seriously considering going to the US version this year (the dollar vs sterling exchange rate is very favourable at the moment and I’ve never been to the US) but I decided to hold out for the European OSCON instead. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/ajax-title-search/ Mon, 01 Aug 2005 10:35:10 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/ajax-title-search/ As an experiment I’ve put together a simple AJAX(ish, it uses ‘|’ separated values) based search tool for finding words I’ve used in the title of my Blogpost. The beta version can be found on the Blog Title AJAX Search page. If you type in a couple of letters, such as ope, then it should (it’s case-insensitive) match anything with the word open in it for example. The results will then be shown as hyperlinks on the same page without forcing a refresh. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/oreilly-isbn-gm/ Mon, 01 Aug 2005 00:23:27 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/oreilly-isbn-gm/ I got bored of having two windows open and having to copy the ISBN from the O’Reilly site, tab to the amazon.co.uk window, paste in to the search box and press return. And when I was looking at more than a single book it got worse… So in a fit of laziness that cost me two hours I wrote my first Greasemonkey user script; which I called O’Reilly ISBN Link2Amazon.co.uk. The script is pretty simple, it replaces the plain text ISBN on the O’Reilly catalog pages with a link to the book at Amazon. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/scripting-podcasts/ Sun, 31 Jul 2005 16:34:09 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/scripting-podcasts/ I’m a big fan of the “big three” scripting languages, Perl, Python and Ruby, but I don’t get a lot of time to keep up with all the relevant news. Fortunately you can now download and listen to the official Ruby on Rails Podcast or the ever growing Perlcast. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/drm-and-the-power-of-names/ Fri, 29 Jul 2005 15:54:32 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/drm-and-the-power-of-names/ While reading the comments at the Digitial Rights Pledge page I noticed one by D Walker: "Digital Rights” would too easily be muddled up with “Digital Rights Management”, which in itself should be called “Digital Restrictions Management". It’s an ever so small point but I think it’s important; Digital Restrictions Management is a much better name than “Digital Rights Management”. It pushes the point that it’s taking things away from us and is a lot less media friendly… https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/not-so-fantastic-four/ Fri, 29 Jul 2005 14:51:13 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/not-so-fantastic-four/ Over the last couple of years comic book fans have been spoiled by some great big-screen adaptations. Spiderman 1 and 2 (which NEED more witty one-liners from the wall crawler), X-Men 2, HellBoy and Sin City have all been enjoyable and lived up to the franchises that spawned them. We’ve also been witness to some truly dire moments, Catwomen and Electra spring to mind. So where does Fantastic Four fit? https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/testing-sudo-nopasswd/ Fri, 29 Jul 2005 14:33:43 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/testing-sudo-nopasswd/ If you add a NOPASSWD directive in your sudoers file then you can, as you’d expect from its name, use those commands without a password. This is a pretty useful trick that allows you to set up sudo entries that allow commands to be run with different privileges from cron without requiring the setuid flag. However twice this week I’ve seen a similar question asked on mailing lists and I thought I’d stick this entry up, hope google indexes it and saves me from ever seeing it again. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/oreilly-connection/ Fri, 29 Jul 2005 00:16:08 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/oreilly-connection/ There’s something up at connection.oreilly.com… will it be another jobs site or do they have an ace up their collective, animal decorated, sleeves? https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/perl-amazon-wishlist-modules/ Fri, 29 Jul 2005 00:09:38 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/perl-amazon-wishlist-modules/ For a small play project I needed the ability to pull down all the DVDs from a given persons Amazon wishlist. After a quick look on CPAN two main options presented themselves, first up we have WWW::Amazon::Wishlist. The module has an easy to use interface, doesn’t require an Amazon developer token (it’s a naughty screen-scraper) and doesn’t need any XML modules. Unfortunately while it has no problems getting books I couldn’t get it to download any of the DVDs from the wishlist so I moved on. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/closing-another-door/ Thu, 28 Jul 2005 12:15:39 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/closing-another-door/ Yesterday was my last day at my now-previous employers, For the rest of this week I’m on emergency phone support only (which they’ll never have to use as things pretty much work). Next week I’m at the UKUUG conference in Swansea and then a couple of days after I get back I start my new job at one of Londons premier OpenSource and Perl companies. No, not the BBC. ;) https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/opentech-resources/ Tue, 26 Jul 2005 14:59:27 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/opentech-resources/ I’m going to take a break from my session by session breakdown and point out some other resources instead. OpenTech Recordings OpenTech photos on Flickr. I even show up in some; but if you're lucky you won't see notice those ones ;) OpenTech del.icio.us tag. OpenTech Technorati search OpenTech coverage at Newsforge. I really enjoyed OpenTech and the organisers did an excellent job with the venue, speakers and keeping everything moving. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/opentech-motherboard-kerplunk/ Tue, 26 Jul 2005 13:45:24 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/opentech-motherboard-kerplunk/ James Larsson’s talk was a short, media clip packed one in which he presented things you shouldn’t do with hardware. From playing music through a monitor (very cool visual effects) to a very sick mouse-trap made from a broken monitor to removing capacitors from a running system until it crashed the videos were amusing but worrying. This man must never even look at my laptops… https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/opentech-mryahoo/ Tue, 26 Jul 2005 13:24:39 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/opentech-mryahoo/ "Yahoo has gone from not as good as Google to a very interesting company" – Ben Hammersley. To most of us Jeremy Zawodny is Mr Yahoo, he’s the only face we see (and blog we read) from one of the bigger tech companies and while his blog is well worth reading it’s always good to hear someone with his background speak in person. The session covered a lot of small bits and pieces such as the need for a standard way to authenticate to webservices and APIs (without using the whole WS-* stack). https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/opentech-bbc-backstage/ Tue, 26 Jul 2005 13:01:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/opentech-bbc-backstage/ "What are you wearing?” “A kilt.” “No man, that’s a skirt…” “It’s a kilt. I’m telling you…” “Uhhh it’s pink, has flowers and shoulder straps.” “It’s a pretty kilt.“ From: bash.org. The third session of the day was introduced by Ben Hammersley in a kilt. Which he then pulled up as he ran up the stairs and gave the first three rows, and the speaker (who he obviously knew) a view of his arse; fortunately this was after the lunch break. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/opentech-ted-nelson-session/ Tue, 26 Jul 2005 12:07:36 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/opentech-ted-nelson-session/ I’ll be honest, I had no intension of sitting through this session but after buying Perl Testing: A Developer’s Notebook and Perl Best Practices I was too late to even stand in the Media Hacking session so I went back to the big theatre and sat through what was possibly (in my opinion) the worst session of the day. Now I know Ted Nelson is a smart guy and he’s got some very interesting ideas and perspectives but as a speaker I didn’t like him. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/opentech-starting-off/ Tue, 26 Jul 2005 11:53:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/opentech-starting-off/ On Saturday (July 23rd) I made my way across London to the NTK/UKUUG/BBC OpenTech event, carrying on the tradition of NOTCON and sponsored by the BBC it had an impressive list of speakers including Jeremy Zawodny (Yahoos best PR) and Ted Nelson. The crowd was a pretty varied one, along with the usual London Perl Mongers, London Linux users, Debian dudes and UKUUG people there were a lot of people that seemed to be more culture and media orientated. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/uk-digital-rights-pledge/ Tue, 26 Jul 2005 11:06:41 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/uk-digital-rights-pledge/ I was lucky enough to go to the NTK/UKUUG/BBC OpenTech event on Saturday (July 23rd) and one of the sessions discussed whether we need a British digital rights group to help promote and campaign for our freedoms. While I wasn’t in the session (bad Dean!) I can’t not pledge money and consider myself a decent member of the community. In order to start the group off there’s a PledgeBank fund you can sign up for. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/right-to-improve/ Sun, 17 Jul 2005 13:18:34 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/right-to-improve/ The right to improve and better yourself is, in my opinion, one of the most important things a person has. Whether you’re from a repressed minority that is unfairly denied opportunities, a broken home you never want to re-create or ‘just’ a poor family that never seems to get any breaks the hope that you can do better if you’re willing to work hard, persist and keep trying is something you can hold on to in the darker hours, days and, unfortunately sometimes, months. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/bombing-london/ Thu, 07 Jul 2005 19:06:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/bombing-london/ I’m a Londoner by birth, by dwelling and by choice. I’ve travelled through Liverpool Street station, twice almost every weekday, for the last seven years. I work about 5 minutes from Russell Square. I’ve worked in Aldgate and it contains some of my favourite restaurants and fondest memories of friends I no longer see. My new job is at Old Street. To me these weren’t just acts of “random terrorism”, I’m taking them personally. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/missed-opportunities/ Sun, 26 Jun 2005 21:43:12 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/missed-opportunities/ Fate offers you opportunities for a while, and if you don’t take them, Fate says to itself, `Oh I see – this person doesn’t like opportunities,’ and stops giving them to you. – Douglas Coupland I have two (among many) rules, one that goes along the lines “if it doesn’t feel right then don’t do it” and one about opportunities that Douglas Coupland phrased much more eloquently than I ever could. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/bad-designs-crucial-xinetd/ Sun, 12 Jun 2005 16:21:08 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/bad-designs-crucial-xinetd/ Twice today I’ve suddenly stopped what I was doing and thought, they must have set out to make this awkward… The first incident was also the simplest one, in xinetd config files you’ll often find “disable = yes”. Firstly this is insane because you should assume something’s off and people will turn it on if they want it. This is a basic principle that should be stuck to. Secondly the option is strange to read. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/june-11th-gllug/ Sat, 11 Jun 2005 23:35:45 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/june-11th-gllug/ After an initial problem with the projectors that looked like it was about to sink the whole day (if you saw me at that point I looked like I was about to either explode or cry :)) we managed to get the equipment sorted and all four talks (with five speakers) went almost perfectly to plan. The only talk that overran was the Xen talk, which was due to the number of audience questions. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/dive-into-greasemonkey/ Wed, 08 Jun 2005 20:58:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/dive-into-greasemonkey/ Author: Mark Pilgrim Dive Into Greasemonkey Homepage Q: What is Greasemonkey? A: Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to write scripts that alter the web pages you visit. You can use it to make a web site more readable or more usable. You can fix rendering bugs that the site owner can’t be bothered to fix themselves. You can alter pages so they work better with assistive technologies that speak a web page out loud or convert it to Braille. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/sith-and-sin/ Wed, 08 Jun 2005 13:57:55 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/sith-and-sin/ I ended up seeing two films in the cinema yesterday, and for the record going to the cinema during “working hours” doesn’t make it any less busy dammit! After watching both Sin City and Star Wars - Revenge of the Sith I have only a few comments to make. Firstly I enjoyed Sin City more, Sith seemed to be about 45 minutes too long and, despite the gorgeous backdrops and neat fight scenes I found myself clock watching. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/simple-bash-debugging/ Mon, 06 Jun 2005 22:55:01 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/simple-bash-debugging/ The bash shell gets more negative press than it deserves from most “real” programmers. Between the “I can’t see what it’s doing, I need an echo after nearly every line!” and the “Why doesn’t it have a check option like perl’s -c!?” most people that only occasionally dip in to bash end up frustrated by it’s lack of features. All because they can’t be bothered to read the man page… https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/laws-branding-review/ Mon, 06 Jun 2005 22:19:23 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/laws-branding-review/ After the enjoyable and easy to read “22 Immutable Laws of Marketing” (my review) I decided to give “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding” an afternoon of my time. This book is very similar in presentation, format and even writing style to the “Laws of Marketing”. It’s an accessible, easy read in which each law is broken down in to a very short chapter that makes it as enjoyable to dip in to while on the go as it does to read cover to cover. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/22-laws-branding/ Mon, 06 Jun 2005 22:16:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/22-laws-branding/ Authors: Al Ries, Laura Ries ISBN: 1861976954 Publisher: ProfileBooks After the enjoyable and easy to read "22 Immutable Laws of Marketing” (review) I decided to give “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding” an afternoon of my time. This book is very similar in presentation, format and even writing style to the “Laws of Marketing”. It’s an accessible, easy read in which each law is broken down in to a very short chapter that makes it as enjoyable to dip in to while on the go as it does to read cover to cover. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/22-laws-marketing/ Mon, 06 Jun 2005 14:51:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/22-laws-marketing/ Authors: Al Ries, Jack Trout ISBN: 0006383459 Publisher: HarperCollins Marketing books ain’t my usual bedtime reading material but as the Open Source movement continues to forge ever onwards the softer skills are going to become every bit as useful as writing code or documentation. While looking for an accessible book on these dark arts I stumbled on Eric Sinks take on the The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing and just had to read the original. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/gllug-20050611-annoucement/ Sun, 05 Jun 2005 13:48:34 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/gllug-20050611-annoucement/ Is out and hitting mailing lists now. You can find the full details on this very site at the Unixdaemon GLLUG June 2005 page. Organising this meeting has been quite strange, the speakers roster has changed almost completely from my original plan, the dates moved and, because of the summer, a lot of my usual routes of publicity have either cut back or gone off on holiday. I’m actually very proud of the talks we have and the quality of the speakers that have freely given up their Saturday to come and talk so it’s a shame were not getting full exposure. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/gllug-20050611/ Sun, 05 Jun 2005 13:17:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/gllug-20050611/ I’m pleased to announce that the next GLLUG meeting will be held on June 11th between 13:30 and 18:00 at New Cavendish Street campus of Westminster University. This is located in the shadow of the BT Tower. The nearest tube stations are Great Portland Street, Warren Street and Goodge Street. Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Circus are also within easy walking distance. New Cavendish Street campus on Streetmap. This event is FREE to members and non-members. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/bloxsom-raa-tag/ Sun, 05 Jun 2005 12:33:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/bloxsom-raa-tag/ Following on from my cpan_module_tag and some comments from one of my victims/testers I’ve put a version together that translates tag shortcuts to Ruby Application Archive project links. It’s called raa_tag, it’s on my Blosxom Plugins page and it’s GPL'd. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/gllug-svk-talk-added/ Sun, 05 Jun 2005 12:23:04 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/gllug-svk-talk-added/ I’m happy to announce the addition of a talk on SVK by its author, Chia-liang Kao, at the June 2005 GLLUG. He’s graciously volunteered some of his time to take us through the headaches of version control, how SVK removes a number of them and, and this is my favourite bit, how to use it for distributed /etc versioning without any version control artifacts getting spread across the file system. I’ve heard a couple of people make very positive comments about CLK’s previous presentations so this should be good! https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/bloxsom-cpan-module-tag/ Sun, 05 Jun 2005 12:17:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/bloxsom-cpan-module-tag/ This blog is powered by Blosxom and while it is more than adequate for most of my needs, occasionally I feel the need to add some code to make something a little more “Dean” orientated. I’ve put the first one of my “ready for public consumption” Blosxom Plugins up on my Blosxom Plugins page. It’s called cpan_module_tag. cpan_module_tag allows you to link to CPAN modules in your blog posts without performing the tedious steps of looking up the module, getting the URL, putting it in an <a href=”"> etc. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/blosxom-plugins/ Sun, 05 Jun 2005 11:45:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/blosxom-plugins/ Blosxom (pronounced “blossom”) is a lightweight yet feature-packed weblog application designed from the ground up with simplicity, usability, and interoperability in mind. From the Blosxom Homepage. My own Unixdaemon Blog is powered by Blosxom and while it is more than adequate for most of my needs, its small codebase and powerful plugin architecture make it very easy to extend with small chunks of code. Whether you want to change parts of its behaviour or just tweak it to suit your own working style, with half a dozen lines of Perl the customisation oppotunities are amazing. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/blosxom-tagcloud/ Sun, 05 Jun 2005 11:45:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/blosxom-tagcloud/ A tag cloud is a visual depiction of content tags used on a website. Often, more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font or otherwise emphasized. Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag. From the Wikipedia Tag cloud entry. Ever wanted a tag cloud of your Blosxom posts? With just this blosxom-tagcloud.pl script (and three Perl modules from CPAN) you can have one that integrates itself with your Blosxom footer and even allows easy merging of the tag cloud and any static text/HTML you’ve used in the past. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/22-laws-marketing-review/ Thu, 02 Jun 2005 19:41:53 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/22-laws-marketing-review/ While marketing books ain’t my usual bedtime reading material but as the Open Source movement continues to forge ever onwards the softer skills are going to become every bit as useful as writing code or documentation. While looking for an accessible book on these dark arts I stumbled on Eric Sinks take on the The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing and just had to read the original. The “22 Immutable Laws of Marketing” is an extremely accessible book that details, as you’d guess from the title, 22 common elements of marketing that the authors consider to be (near) immutable laws. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/sponsering-fun/ Sat, 21 May 2005 13:55:53 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/sponsering-fun/ My employer uses a lot of OpenSource software and develops custom applications with Perl. It has a very strong tech team with ties to a number of online projects and where possible it likes to give things back. I’ve been lucky enough to have been handed some money with which to show our appreciation to the different OpenSource communities whose work we use. While it’s not a huge amount of money it is both a nice gesture on the companies part (it shows they understand both the advantages we can reap from OpenSource and encourages it’s technical staff to stay in contact with their peers) it’s also one of the highlights of my job. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/gllug-june-2005/ Sat, 21 May 2005 13:41:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/gllug-june-2005/ It will happen! I’ve just been a bit slow in getting information out about it. This is the second GLLUG I’ve put together and while it’s fun it does take a little more planning and effort than I have the time to commit on a continual basis. This time we’re lucky enough to have three talks (at the time of writing this entry!), Matthew Block from Bytemark; the people I rent the UML box that hosts this site from. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/2004-2005-pip/ Sat, 30 Apr 2005 18:04:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/2004-2005-pip/ Last September I decided to put a basic 2004-2005 Pragmatic Investment Plan together to give me some goals and tasks to accomplish over the following 12 months. Eight months in (and after considering shorter PiPs) I’ve decided to mark last years as finished. While I’ve not completed every item on the list I’ve made a pretty good showing and I’m pretty happy that I could have finished on time. Halfway through the period covered by that PiP I changed job and my interests and areas of responsibility changed significantly; that’s why I ended up taking so long to finish some of the easier ones such as the book reviews. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/training-time/ Sat, 30 Apr 2005 15:59:44 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/training-time/ It’s been a long while since I’ve been lucky enough to be sent on a training course for anything so I’d forgotten how depressing they can be. I try and get to as many technical conferences as possible for a number of reasons, the fact that all the people attending want to be there and make a genuine effort to chat and learn is a major one and it’s one of the few times I get to meet some of the people I speak to online in the flesh. https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/aardvark-for-firefox/ Sat, 30 Apr 2005 15:13:33 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/aardvark-for-firefox/ Despite its odd name the Aardvark FireFox Extension is actually damn useful. Once installed, turn it on using Tools->Start Aardvark and move the mouse over the page. As you hover over different parts of the page a red box will outline the current section, show you what HTML tag created it and show the elements “class” or “id” values. What’s less useful but still interesting is that once you’ve selected the element you’re interested in you can do a couple of occasionally useful things to it, remove it, colour the background, remove the element but leave a blank spot etc. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/firewire-clustering/ Sun, 24 Apr 2005 21:20:42 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/firewire-clustering/ I had an interest in shared storage FireWire clustering on Linux for a while. After spending a couple of evenings learning about it and having a little play I ended up with a big text file of links and notes. Below is the slightly more rationalised version of my notes. If I ever need it again I’ll try and write them up properly, in the mean time they might serve as a useful pointer to some other traveller. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/red-book-selling/ Sun, 24 Apr 2005 16:00:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/red-book-selling/ I always feel both a little guilty and odd when discussing books about sales people and selling. While you need money to survive in any business the IT people are normally quite removed from the processes of bringing it in (technical pre-sales is one notable exception). Like most techs I’m not a natural sales person, add to this my intense dislike of pushy sales reps, both in my personal shopping and professionally (cold call me on the phone and I’ll NEVER buy your product) and I’m probably not the ideal audience for this kind of book. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/tipping-point-short/ Sun, 24 Apr 2005 14:41:22 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/tipping-point-short/ I enjoyed the entertaining, if not exactly revolutionary, Blink and went looking for anything else by the same author. The Tipping Point is very similar in style and outcome to Blink; it delves in to an interesting subject in an entertaining way but leaves you feeling a little empty. The book itself is well written and has a pretty wide appeal, the subjects examined and ideas presented cover such a wide range of examples that there is something in it for almost everyone. https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/catching-up/ Sun, 24 Apr 2005 12:19:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/catching-up/ I’ve been out of touch with most of the world (and reality) for most of the last seven days due to personal and professional demands on my (ever so badly managed time). The one thing I’ve concluded is that I need a new, light, laptop and a source code control system that has a sensible off-line mode. The ability to use SSH and the web over my Treo would be a bonus. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/maps-semi-phone-ie/ Thu, 21 Apr 2005 22:31:21 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/maps-semi-phone-ie/ I’ve added two more semi searches to my Mozilla/FireFox search page. First up we have a simple Google Maps (UK) search, I like Google maps and this puts it closer to my reach. Next up we have another phone number lookup from Dave Cantrell, this time for Ireland Phone Info. Note: both of these use existing images as I’m not really the arty type. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/megatokyo-books/ Sun, 17 Apr 2005 17:52:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/megatokyo-books/ I’m a fan of MegaTokyo, it has an interesting (but deathly slow) story, great art, a lot of oddities and some really neat jokes for gamers. In the interest of giving some support back I decided to spend a couple of days roaming through the comic shops of London looking for the three published volumes of strips; it was such a chore :) While I’ve actually read my way from start to current using the online archives the quality of the art is even more visible in the books, while the quality has risen over the years (from a pretty high starting position to be honest) some the drawings are just staggeringly good. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/google-highlight/ Sun, 17 Apr 2005 14:40:40 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/google-highlight/ I’ve added another blosxom plugin to the site, this one is called google_highlight and does what you’d expect. It highlights any Google search terms that lead you here. I’ve had a play and it seems to work fine so I’ve added it to the live site. If you have any problems with it please let me know. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/code-brew-second-attempt/ Sun, 17 Apr 2005 14:36:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/code-brew-second-attempt/ Back in November I read a post by describing the idea of Code Brews. After writing up my own Initial thoughts on Code Brews I got distracted and forgot all about it. Christmas has that effect on me… After spending some time clearing out some old half-written documents I stumbled on the blog entry and decided to try and kick it off again. I’ve sent an email to six London based techs asking if they are interested in doing a sort of show-and-tell and I’m waiting for responses. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/seven-second-marketing-review/ Sun, 17 Apr 2005 14:10:14 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/seven-second-marketing-review/ Ivan Misner has a remarkable reputation in business referral circles as a master networker and a talented author. Unfortunately Seven-Second Marketing: How to Use Memory Hooks to Make You Instantly Stand Out in a Crowd doesn’t seem to reflect this. This slender volume explains the value of a memory hook (or tag-line as some of us know them) before delving in to the different types, such as playing on your name, the nature of your work or using humour and rhyme. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/film-shorts/ Sun, 17 Apr 2005 13:00:43 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/film-shorts/ I’ve spent the last couple of days catching up on some reading and nothing helps the concentration more than having some large CGI explosions in the background :) Over the last couple of days I’ve read three books (short reviews coming soon) and watched a small pile of films. First up is The Chronicles of Riddick, a very dull Sci-Fi film that has a couple of neat Matrix- esque fight scenes, a rubbish plot that you really have to dig to find and seriously under uses both Thandie Newton and Alexa Davalos (Gwen from Angel). https://www.unixdaemon.net/gui/jmemorize-correction-and-retraction/ Sun, 17 Apr 2005 12:20:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/gui/jmemorize-correction-and-retraction/ Back at the end of March I made a comment about jMemorize Cards being stored as binary. Well I was completely wrong and it’s time to retract my statement. Riad Djemili, the author of jMemorize, was kind enough to send me an email pointing out that I was completely wrong (and he was very polite about it!) and that the cards are actually just gzipped XML. Which addresses pretty much the only problem I had with this otherwise very nice piece of software. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/startup-com-file/ Sun, 17 Apr 2005 12:05:15 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/startup-com-file/ I worked at three very different startups (two of which are still doing well) and I have a lot of fond memories of the challenges, environments and people I was fortunate to work with. While I was in the trenches it was very hard to not know about, and to a limited degree get involved in, the other aspects of the business. From gearing up for a week of presentations (in a different time-zone) in an attempt to get more funding that would be hitting the system quite hard to the moments of desperation when almost a dozen people were laid off simultaneously (a sysadmins life is not always a pleasant one). https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/mutt-save-readline/ Sun, 17 Apr 2005 11:35:28 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/mutt-save-readline/ I get a lot of email, personal, mailing-lists and other, odder, sources (CVS commits for example) and the only mail client I’ve ever felt productive in is mutt. It’s a very simple, easy to use, client that hides a staggering amount of power behind a few key-presses; the fact it lets me use vim as my editor is also a killer feature. What makes mutt a joy to use is that every now and then I’ll stumble on to something new that I’ve never noticed before; today that was tab-completion when saving mail. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/ip-addressing-fundamentals-book-review/ Mon, 04 Apr 2005 21:58:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/ip-addressing-fundamentals-book-review/ Author: Mark A Sportack ISBN:1587050676 Publisher: Cisco Press When I first received IP Addressing Fundamentals my first reaction was “340 pages of hard back book to explain subnetting?” but I’m happy to report the books title is a little misleading; it also covers a number of related topics such as multi-cast, DNS and NAT in a clear, accurate and unfortunately overly dry style. The book itself is broken in to five parts: https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/whois-koders-mycroft/ Sat, 02 Apr 2005 11:50:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/whois-koders-mycroft/ I’ve added a whois.sc search to the Mozilla Searches page. It works fine in FireFox or Mozilla but doesn’t work in the sidebar as it will typically return a single result. I’ve also added some Koder.com searches. The Koders.com website crawls and indexes source code from a number of different sites and projects. It then lets you run queries based upon keywords, specific languages and/or licenses, returning the code that matches. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/gmail-ups-size/ Fri, 01 Apr 2005 21:46:32 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/gmail-ups-size/ I’ve been loath to type about the GMail changes made today just in case they were another April Fools-day ‘joke’ (I hate April 1st!) but it does seem they are serious in both raising the storage per person to 2GB per person. This morning, UK time, I was discussing the gradual rise in available storage with a friend and neither of us knew what was going on. The counter on my logged in gmail session just keep increasing for no apparent reason, you have to admit that turning a very basic upgrade in to a puzzling conversation topic is a neat way to get some free PR; oh look, it worked! https://www.unixdaemon.net/gui/whois-sc-ie-addressbar/ Fri, 01 Apr 2005 11:50:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/gui/whois-sc-ie-addressbar/ While it’s often handy to be able to look up the ownership details of a domain name a lot of the online services have implemented little graphical images which you need to read and then type into a text box before you can actually get the results back. I recently found a new one, Whois Source that allows you to specify the domain in the URL. This makes the service both simple to use from the browser and easy to integrate in to third party programs. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/virtually-not-a-mac/ Wed, 30 Mar 2005 11:57:07 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/virtually-not-a-mac/ Every now and again there seems to be a small uprising in the geek Mac using community. Paul Graham seems to be man behind this iteration of the uprising but he’s getting a lot of support from a number of smart people like David Heinemeier Hansson (Rails) who has a couple of choice quotes, this one is my favourite: I would have a hard time imagining hiring a programmer who was still on Windows for 37signals. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/shorter-pips/ Sun, 27 Mar 2005 12:19:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/shorter-pips/ I have my own Pragmatic Investment Plan that I’ve been (remarkably slack) in following. It’s the first one I’ve done and it covers a whole year. Which I’m starting to think is a mistake. My circumstances have changed a fair bit since I wrote that PiP and a number of the tasks, such as learn Mono and write a CPAN module, are no longer very relevant to me and where I’m heading; although the fact I couldn’t pick goals that were valid for a whole year might say something about me :). https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/vanity/ Sun, 27 Mar 2005 02:11:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/vanity/ Over in my Pragmatic Investment Plan I have two items under the topic of vanity. To put something on my site worth reading and to get my site into the first 100 results returned by google. Once my traffic hit a 100,000 unique (not obviously bots) visitors in under three months I considered the first one fulfilled. I’m now, and I realise how sad this is going to sound, very happy to report that at least for this very moment unixdaemon. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/editing-out/ Fri, 25 Mar 2005 11:03:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/editing-out/ Most people know you can change the readline settings to either vi or emacs style key-bindings, but far less people know you can actually open the current, or a previous, command line in your editor of choice using ‘fc’. If you type ‘fc’ on the command line then the previous command will be open in the defined editor; if you want to select a further back command you can use ‘fc pattern’. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/mind-hacks-talk/ Fri, 25 Mar 2005 10:49:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/mind-hacks-talk/ Mind Hacks is an O’Reilly book that examines specific operations of the brain and presents simple experiments (do try this at home :)) to illustrate how it works and how, occasionally, you can fool it. O’Reilly and Foyles held a join event in the Foyles gallery in London where they had both of the books main authors do a short introduction to the topic and explain what the book was about. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/gllug-march-2005-slides/ Fri, 25 Mar 2005 10:40:18 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/gllug-march-2005-slides/ There were three talks at the March GLLUG and I can now happily link to slides from two of them. Bruce Richardson’s Linux HA and Martin Michlmayr’s Quality Issues in Free Software projects. Hopefully these will soon be linked to on the GLLUG website. The first talk of the day, by Pete Ryland, involved a live demo and no slides so there isn’t really anything to link to on that one; until we get the audio recordings sorted anyway. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/fsecure-rootkit-detector/ Fri, 25 Mar 2005 10:31:27 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/fsecure-rootkit-detector/ F-Secure has released a blacklight beta download that is available in both GUI and command-line versions. The full Blacklight details are now online and after a quick play it seems pretty nifty, and most importantly, has a command-line version for automated deployment and scanning. One to watch when it goes gold. https://www.unixdaemon.net/gui/binary-flash-cards/ Fri, 25 Mar 2005 10:25:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/gui/binary-flash-cards/ Update: I was completely wrong about the cards being binary. Please see my jMemorize retraction for details. I saw a piece on jMemorize over at unixreview and decided to have a little play. Quick download, runs from the Jar, OK GUI. Not bad on a cursory glance. I then built a small set of cards as a sample and had a play. Finishing off I saved the card stack and decided to have a look at the file it created, I’d like to generate my flash-cards from existing docs I have so an easy to write format would be excellent. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/danger-quicksand-book/ Sun, 20 Mar 2005 23:57:55 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/danger-quicksand-book/ I stumbled on to the site for Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day through one of the other blogs I read and after reading the first couple of pages was sucked in. The book doesn’t cover anything really ground breaking but where it caught me was pointing out scenarios that I’ve been in and showing that I’m not the insane one for thinking they were odd or out of place. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/clear-in-tray/ Sun, 20 Mar 2005 17:25:46 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/clear-in-tray/ Between being ill, attending FOSDEM, putting a GLLUG on, actually reviewing my review copies of books and a couple of other bits I can’t yet mention, the things requiring my attention have been not-so-slowly piling up. I’ve taken a large chunk of this weekend to clear down the multiple mail boxes, RSS feeds and saved book-marks that I was supposed to read weeks ago. One thing I have noticed is how much more productive I am when using client-side tools I can customise. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/follow-the-malware/ Sat, 19 Mar 2005 11:50:05 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/follow-the-malware/ Tom Liston wrote up an excellent (and scary!) analysis of what happens to an unpatched machine when it goes to a less than reputable site. The full details, part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4 are well worth a read. You’ll be stunned at how much shite comes down from a single executable that the user never even gets a choice whether to run. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/filepkg/ Fri, 18 Mar 2005 00:22:50 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/filepkg/ Filepkg.sh is another one of those scripts borne of a personal itch. I’m spending a fair amount of time cleaning up both Redhat and Debian boxes which have custom software installed, some of it by hand and some via the package management system (we build the packages ourselves). One of the annoyances I’ve come across while determining which files are managed and which were left by us is that while both dpkg and rpm will tell you the package that owns a file, you need to provide the full path of the file you’re asking about to get the information out. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/updating-pip-200503/ Fri, 18 Mar 2005 00:06:05 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/updating-pip-200503/ I’ve finally found the time to do make some updates to my 2004 - 2005 Pragmatic Investment Plan. I’ve posted links to some books reviews, added two technical conferences and listed some scripts that have been down-loaded a fair few times from my site (over 50 downloads was my requirement). While I’m not even half way through the PiP yet (and time’s a ticking!) I’ve started to think about the 2005-2006 version. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/using-sans-and-nas-review/ Wed, 16 Mar 2005 19:15:29 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/using-sans-and-nas-review/ I’ve just finished re-reading Using SANs and NAS from O’Reilly. It’s aged really well, provides an excellent introduction to the common terms, principles and usages. Well worth a read (and quite cheap these days). You can now find the Using SANs and NAS book review on my main site or over at London PM. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/sans-nas-book-review/ Wed, 16 Mar 2005 18:41:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/sans-nas-book-review/ Author: W. Curtis Preston ISBN: 0596001533 Publisher: O’Reilly While storage capacity has grown (almost as fast as the amount of data we want to store!) our ability to manage and backup critical resources has been lagging behind, and is only just emerging from the dark ages. Although a couple of 250GB hard drives and a DVD burner may be an adequate solution for a home user, a company with large databases, shared file servers, remote home directories and tight data recovery windows needs something more; this book presents the two best options. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/reading-list-20050315/ Wed, 16 Mar 2005 00:28:21 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/reading-list-20050315/ I’ve just finished reading Using SANs and NAS by O’Reilly, in short it’s a great book for picking up the basic principles behind both SANs, NAS and using fibre channel to connect them together. The book doesn’t really delve in to the technical details which means it’s aged pretty well. Taking its place I have Cisco Routers for the Desperate which provides an quick and easy way to get up to speed on the basics of using Cisco routers. https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/debian-installer/ Wed, 16 Mar 2005 00:27:05 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/debian-installer/ I’ve spent a lot of time today installing Debian boxes and testing build documents. After using both the old and new installers (Sarge installer RC2) I’ve come to a bundle of conclusions. The new installer hides a lot of the complexity from most users (use expert mode to get it back). It has a better screen for per-partition options (although it does make you do each one on a separate screen) and it flows a lot better. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/cvsweb-install/ Wed, 16 Mar 2005 00:20:37 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/cvsweb-install/ Version control rocks, it allows you to roll back anything you’re working on to a previous version and remove all the late night weirdness you can’t remember adding. While it’s hard to beat the power of the CVS command line interface or the easy of use of TortoiseCVS there is a third option: CVSWeb. Written and maintained by FreeBSD people, CVSWeb provides an easy to use, web-based, interface to your CVS repositories. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/new-improved-yft/ Tue, 15 Mar 2005 19:50:31 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/new-improved-yft/ I’ve made a couple of posts about the yellow fade technique but now I’ve got a script to one-up it. The people over at Axentric (Adam Michela) have put together a Fade Anything Technique that does pretty much what you expect from its name. The Fade Anything Technique demo is pretty impressive and the code is both readable and clean. For now it’s my winner in this little competition. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/gllug-march-2005-happened/ Sat, 12 Mar 2005 22:09:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/gllug-march-2005-happened/ As I mentioned before I was heavily involved in putting this meeting together. And it seemed to go pretty well! We had three speakers but we had to shuffle the order around a bit, one was a little late and one was having technical problems. With very little time for preparation Pete Ryland stepped up and drew in the crowd. There were actually a couple of people from Ubuntu (and the Debian UK mailing list) which added a fair amount of clue to the audiences questions. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/smart-people-are-worth-gold/ Fri, 11 Mar 2005 00:27:38 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/smart-people-are-worth-gold/ The one thing I’ve learned over the years, although I’m only just starting to realise exactly how much an effect it has on me, is that you should try to surround yourself with smart people. They keep you busy, entertained, challenged, constantly improving and every now and again drop a nugget of pure gold into your lap; completely free of charge. This weeks blinder was from Harry and has given me the arse-kicking I needed. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/i-love-this-city/ Thu, 10 Mar 2005 21:18:55 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/i-love-this-city/ Walking around the back-streets near Oxford Street at night you often see strange things but I saw one this week that gave me a chuckle. The first car pulls up to the traffic lights, it’s a shiny maroon Jaguar XK8 with a white-guy decked out in gold sitting at the wheel. His head is bobbing up and down and you can feel the base of Zed Bias “Neighbourhood”, a garage track that used to be very popular as a between song filler, from across the street. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/agent-virus/ Thu, 10 Mar 2005 20:44:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/agent-virus/ If you ever want to collect a cross-section of the more common Windows email viruses then I’ve got a tip for you. Post a job advert on a couple of the bigger jobsites (Jobserve, Monster etc.) and then wait a day for the agents to start submitting CVs. Reply to them saying no thanks so you get added to their local address books and then watch as every variant of Bagel, Klez and all the other little bits of shite come flooding in to your inbox. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/address-book-phishing/ Thu, 10 Mar 2005 20:37:08 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/address-book-phishing/ Firstly let’s define Phishing, "The act of sending an e-mail to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft.“ While most phishing attacks are done over the web consider how they could be tailored to abuse email and local address books. Lets consider a scenario, a non-technical (and busy) receptionist or assistant (Alice) sends a number of email’s from her pet executive to certain people outside the company. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/radianz-bought/ Thu, 10 Mar 2005 19:53:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/radianz-bought/ You’ve probably seen it all over the news but Radianz has been bought! For those that don’t know of it, the Radianz network is an extranet of financial institutions, it provides a fully redundant infrastructure (if you want to join you are required to have dual lines connecting you; each line has to be from a different approved supplier). It’s used for accessing financial applications where the unpredictable nature of the Internet makes it undesirable but the commodity status of it’s applications and protocols make it the best alternative. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/ruby-annotations-lite/ Wed, 09 Mar 2005 22:29:12 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/ruby-annotations-lite/ There is an interesting post by Aslak Hellesoy over at CodeHaus regarding simple ruby annotations. While I’ve not really paid much attention to annotations in Java (beyond Ted Newards occasional post on the subject) the simplicity of this unofficial ruby implementation is making me want to dig out my Pickaxe second edition and delve in again… Now if I only had a reason to use annotations ;) https://www.unixdaemon.net/gui/yellow-fade-emulator/ Wed, 09 Mar 2005 22:17:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/gui/yellow-fade-emulator/ A while ago I wrote a post on the very excellent Yellow Face Technique (unixdaemon post), a slick bit of browser-based UI that made it easier to track changes on the page. The nice (and patient!) people over at i am jack’s design were kind enough to send me a link answering my challenge for usable code. And it seems to work fine! Go and have a look at the Yellow Fade technique – iamjacksdesign version code and demo; it’s worth five minutes of your time and visitors to your site will thank you… https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/painless-fogbugz-review/ Wed, 09 Mar 2005 00:59:28 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/painless-fogbugz-review/ Writing this review was a little awkward. The book covers a topic I needed to know about while not having a huge amount of interest in learning, however it is an excellent book if you actually need to know about FogBugz so I felt it was worth a review. The book is end user focused and could be thought of as a “Missing Manual” for FogBugz. If you need a book to give an overview of what the product can do and introduce you to the basic and a number of the intermediate features then this is as good as it gets. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/ppmf-book-review/ Tue, 08 Mar 2005 23:48:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/ppmf-book-review/ Author: Mike Gunderloy ISBN: 159059486X Publisher: Apress Despite the name, FogBugz isn’t just used for tracking bugs. The product covers all the essentials such as streamlined bug submission (if it’s not easy people won’t do it), accepting and replying to email submissions and dividing your workload into different projects and releases (with the aid of a nifty autosorter). Over time FogBugz has grown to include discussion groups, tracking of tasks via RSS and email on the technical side, and due dates and escalation reports on the management front. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/risk-adverse/ Tue, 08 Mar 2005 06:23:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/risk-adverse/ This is seriously off-topic considering the sites usual content so if you’re looking for tech then stop right about… here. If you’d like to see me publicly debug myself then carry right on! At some point over the last few years I seem to have made a couple of bad choices. Firstly I’ve become risk adverse; and not just in the good “the production system is sacrosanct” way. In everything from “lets just go to the conference and see how it goes”, through “I’ll download it and have a play without reading a whole book on it first” up to not telling certain people how I really feel and missing the chance I’ve stopped just doing things. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/painless-fogbugz/ Mon, 07 Mar 2005 22:45:35 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/painless-fogbugz/ I’ve been lucky enough to get a review copy of Painless Project Management with FogBugz (I’m not stalking Mike Gunderloy, honest! :)) and I’ve enjoyed reading through the first four chapters. While I’m not sure I’m the ideal target market, the book seems more for end users just picking up the product, so far I’ve found it extremely well written. My initial thoughts are that it’s accessible, covers all the basic functions and could almost be one of the Missing Manual books from O’Reilly. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/fosdem-2005-rocked/ Wed, 02 Mar 2005 23:43:51 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/fosdem-2005-rocked/ Last weekend I ended up being (just about) well enough to to travel over to FOSDEM in Brussels. I’ve done FOSDEM every year and it’s always excellent. The combination of great talks, friendly atmosphere and getting to meet people you don’t see often enough mixed in with some heavy socialising, good meals and late nights makes it my favourite event each year. I was lucky enough to travel over with a rag-tag group of Linux geeks, Perl people, a RedHat employee and a Debian developer… Not exactly a cohesive group but it seemed to work! https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/march-2005-gllug/ Wed, 02 Mar 2005 23:18:41 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/march-2005-gllug/ I’ve been a GLLUG member for a good few years now, I’ve attended meetings, worked on the stall at the London Linux Expos and even given a talk at one of the meetings (I’d like to say sorry for that…) but the March 2005 GLLUG meeting is the first meeting I’ve organised. With the able (and essential) assistance of Bruce “way too deep to have a blog or site for people to link to” Richardson we’ve got a grand total of three speakers and are hosting the meeting at Fotangos offices. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/funny-security-troll/ Wed, 23 Feb 2005 10:17:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/funny-security-troll/ If you are on some of the more useful security lists like full-disclosure then there is a pretty good chance you’ve seen posts from Billy B. Bilano, a very amusing writer who gets people that should know much better to bite. Have a look at the the Tao of doing it right thread or Possible First Crypto Virus Definitely Discovered!. While both of these emails are tragicly funny some of the responses are every bit as good. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/two-face-short-version/ Mon, 21 Feb 2005 18:35:52 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/two-face-short-version/ If you’ve either been waiting on something from me or you’re surprised at the sudden barrage of email’s I’ve sent today (21st Feb) then I have a not very amusing story to tell. I’ve had a mild cold or flu, there are a couple of bugs gong around at the moment so it’s not uncommon. I then spent a day working in a chilled server room. Not my smartest ever plan; and that’s an achievement. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/tpf-funding/ Mon, 21 Feb 2005 18:35:33 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/tpf-funding/ Over at use.perl there is a short call for funding from TPF to help fund the development of Perl6 and Parrot. I’ve long been a Perl 5 fan, it’s flexible, powerful, CPAN rocks and there are a number of smart, helpful people involved. As much as I like the community the killer feature is letting me get things done quickly and easily. When it comes to Perl6 I’ve just not found anything that really interests me. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/take-advice/ Tue, 15 Feb 2005 00:45:29 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/take-advice/ Tonight I was told, "learn to let things go, take a step back and don’t get involved in everything. Not everything has to be fixed by you.“ There is one small problem, in general I’m shite at listening to advice like this. If I see something that’s broken I have to try and fix it. While I’ve gotten damn good at suppressing my urge to do this with live systems (always do a risk analysis first) I’m remarkably bad at applying the same approach to dealing with people; especially at work. https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/slashdot-aftermath/ Tue, 15 Feb 2005 00:21:20 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/slashdot-aftermath/ I was pretty surprised when Slashdot accepted my submission, a Pragmatic Version control Subversion book review. I was even more surprised when it hit th front page and for about twelve minutes my name was one of the first things on slashdot! After this short lapse into geek I logged into my bytemark machine and battened down the hatches. I shut down all unneeded daemons and prepared for the server to go down. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/want-to-work-at/ Tue, 15 Feb 2005 00:19:14 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/want-to-work-at/ I heard about a job a couple of days ago that I’d have taken a pretty big pay cut to get, I won’t mention details as the position isn’t formally open yet, but it got me to thinking. While I’ve been pretty lucky with my employment over the years (Hi Boss!) there are a couple of places that I’d pretty much consider my dream job (and that I’d crawl over most peoples bodies to work), anything in the security, Linux or Open Source departments in IBM for example. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/evil-leet-hat/ Tue, 15 Feb 2005 00:17:38 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/evil-leet-hat/ Over at MegaTokyo they have an Evil Leet T-shirt that I think is excellent on a number of levels. I know it’s sad but so what. I’m not really a T-shirt person (plus I’m not really allowed to wear them in the office) but I do have an OpenBSD baseball cap I’ve very fond of… So why not combine the two? I now want an Evil Leet baseball cap and after looking around the custom cap printing companies it doesn’t look that expensive to do. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/london-ruby-meet-march/ Tue, 15 Feb 2005 00:16:36 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/london-ruby-meet-march/ David Black is in London and the London Ruby people (both of them :)) are planning a meet-up. It’s happening on Monday, February 28, 7:00 PM at the Holiday Inn near Russell Square https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/cheap-offsite-talks/ Sun, 13 Feb 2005 21:40:15 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/cheap-offsite-talks/ There’s an interesting article over at the Tucows Farm on a series of talks titled php|symphony. It’s a live, payed for, talk that allows two way communication with the speaker on some pretty low end machines with very little bandwidth required. So what’s my interest in this PHP stuff? Over the last couple of months I’ve had a couple of conversations with some friends about doing this kind of thing now that VoIP (Skype for communication) is here, virtual machines (UML for interactive sessions) are pretty easy to use and bandwidth is becoming cheaper. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/farscape-repeats/ Sun, 13 Feb 2005 21:33:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/farscape-repeats/ I’ve already ranted about FarScape returning to our screens so I’ll try and keep this a little less enthusiastic! Over on BBC3 (Digital TV) they seem to be showing a FarScape episode pretty much every week night at 00:10 (midnight plus ten) and it’s started from episode one (and it’s still on the first series). If you’ve never seen it before then it’s well worth watching. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/slashdot-subversion/ Thu, 10 Feb 2005 23:15:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/slashdot-subversion/ Hello Slashdot people! I’ve just had a review published on slashdot and I’m sort of expecting this server to have some problems so please bear with me… Also a small disclaimer, I did get a free review copy of the book early (thanks to the very nice Pragmatic Programmers) but this didn’t earn any favouritism. In my defence I point to Building Linux Clusters. Most of my reviews are positive because I simply can’t be bothered to read and review bad books. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/short-stats-feb-2005/ Wed, 09 Feb 2005 23:02:19 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/short-stats-feb-2005/ When I moved from my shared server to the small UML box that this site now calls home I copied a lot of my logs over. I’ve never really done any in-depth viewing of my log files but after finding a new toy to play with (more about that in a separate post) I decided to have a little nose around. It seems that in between October 1st 2004 and December 31st 2004 (a total of 92 days including Christmas Day and New Years Eve) www. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/finding-large-files/ Wed, 09 Feb 2005 22:46:57 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/finding-large-files/ I’ve had a findbig files script up on my miniprojects page for a while now, it’s not exactly a difficult script to write but it deals with a couple of less obvious cases (exclude lists) that most of the similar scripts on line don’t cater for. While the script is something thats easily down-loaded and run, if you have anything beyond a handful of machines you need to actually think about how to incorporate it into your checks and how you should run it to get the most return from the least effort. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/feb-2005-events/ Wed, 09 Feb 2005 22:45:23 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/feb-2005-events/ Every February there are two excellent tech events, the UKUUG LISA/Winter Conference and FOSDEM; my event of the year. Due to prior commitments I’m not going to able to make it to the Winter Con this year which means I’m all the more excited about FOSDEM. I’m heading over on the 25th and returning on the 27th with a bunch of the London Perl/Linux people, so if you’re about come and say “hello”. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/witch-is-dead/ Wed, 09 Feb 2005 21:42:08 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/witch-is-dead/ Carly Fiorina was (oh how I like the sound of that) the CEO of Hewlett Packard, she was the woman that ushered in the Compaq merger (of which most techs mocked and laughed at), sold off their best assets, allegedly undertook some pretty shoddy deals to get it all going and then, while laying off thousands of staff bought herself and her upper echelons cohorts half an air force. And now she’s been asked to step down and get the hell out of the way while the company still has a chance in hell of getting out in the market and actually making some money. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/pragmatic-subversion/ Wed, 09 Feb 2005 18:23:11 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/pragmatic-subversion/ I’ve finished reading Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion and it’s a blinder. Whether you’re new to version control in general or just Subversion itself this book is highly recommended. Clear, concise and crammed full of useful, important and dare I say, pragmatic, advice and information. An excellent book in it’s own right and a worthy addition to the Starter Kit Series. My full Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion book review is also now online both here and over at London. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/pragmatic-version-subversion/ Tue, 08 Feb 2005 15:45:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/pragmatic-version-subversion/ Author: Mike Mason ISBN: 0974514063 Publisher: Pragmatic Programmers Reviewed by: Dean Wilson When it comes to version control systems, CVS has long been the workhorse of the Open Source and Free Software movements, but with the release of Subversion it’s time to put the old nag to rest; and this book tells you what you need to do it. When it comes to software development the Pragmatic Programmers are widely recognised as masters of their trade, but with the release of their award winning Starter Kit Series they’ve begun to gain a reputation for writing, editing and finding book authors that are as talented as they are. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/iats/ Fri, 04 Feb 2005 00:07:15 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/iats/ I’ve recently read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and I found the section on Implicit Association Tests (IAT’s) to be really interesting. The short version is that the tests display a number of words that you have to put into one of two or four categories, depending on how long you take to assign them the test can make some guesses as to your implicit associations. It’s well worth having a play with some online implicit association tests. https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/statoverride/ Thu, 03 Feb 2005 22:57:22 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/statoverride/ While I’ve spent a fair amount of time running around on Linux it’s typically been in a mixed Unix environment (Linux, Solaris and HPUX mostly) so my tool-set was comprised of portable applications and scripts. In my current job I’m working with an almost entirely Debian server environment, the few Redhat machines are living on borrowed time as the bosses want them gone. While this may put a crimp on my cross-platform skills it does give me the chance to delve deeper into the “Debian way”, and to be fair it looks like it’s got a lot of neat tools. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/wanting-vs-having/ Thu, 03 Feb 2005 22:54:25 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/wanting-vs-having/ "Sometimes it’s better to want something that to have it.“ Some of my friends are slightly too observant for my liking and have been mocking some of my phrases of choice. It’s been pointed out to me recently that I use the above as an excuse phrase, think of a shoulder shrug, in order to let myself off things I’m either not sure I can attain or I’m not willing to invest the required time and effort into. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/linkshot-20050201/ Tue, 01 Feb 2005 23:48:56 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/linkshot-20050201/ The day time job is eating up a little bit too much time at the moment so I’m just going to post a couple of links that look interesting and would typically be gifted with my witty rantings :) Ward Cunningham (now an MSoftie) is probably involved in PatternShare, a site that lets you look through a number of patterns from different authors. It’s probably worth keeping an eye on this and seeing how it develops https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/developer-to-designer/ Mon, 31 Jan 2005 23:28:55 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/developer-to-designer/ I was lucky enough to get a free review copy of Mike Gunderloy’s new book, Developer to Designer. While it’s not as good as Coder to Developer (and in fairness very few books are!) for the right audience (Windows developers new to building GUIs) this is an essential reference. I’ve now put a full Developer to Designer book review up under my reviews page. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/delicious-tag-stemmer/ Mon, 31 Jan 2005 23:24:50 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/delicious-tag-stemmer/ Matt Biddulph has put an excellent little tool up on his website, the del.cio.us tag stemmer will display any tags that it thinks are too closely related and probably need to be merged. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/developer-to-designer-book-review/ Mon, 31 Jan 2005 19:48:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/developer-to-designer-book-review/ Author: Mike Gunderloy ISBN:078214361X Publisher: Sybex International Having an easy to use, consistent and intuitive user interface is an incredibly important part of today’s software, but for every experienced UI, usability and human-computer interface professional there are legions of beginning Windows GUI developers (VB developers, Coders working with MS Office etc). Unfortuantly they are often left alone to struggle through the basic do’s and don’ts of building an acceptable and consistent, both with other applications and the OS itself, GUI. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/amazon-dvd-rental/ Sun, 30 Jan 2005 23:32:35 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/amazon-dvd-rental/ Despite my previous bad experiences with Amazon.co.uk when it comes to DVDs, I decided to give their new DVD rental service a go. I signed up, clicked through a couple of very painless screens and added ten films to my list (which I’d like programtic access to if anyones bored :)). Firstly an oddities, they seem to class a 2 disc DVD as two separate items. Now while I could (maybe) see some point in doing this with entire seasons of TV shows that come in six DVD sets I’m not using up two of my six slots (per month) so I can ignore the extras disk. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/tyft/ Sun, 30 Jan 2005 23:18:23 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/tyft/ The very slick people over at Basecamp have a very neat UI trick that highlights any changes to the site for a couple of seconds and then fades out. This allows simple tracking of any changes on page-reload. The full (non-technical) details can be found over at 37, the technique itself is called the Yellow Fade Technique. Now as you can see by looking at this site I’m more of a functional than aesthetic person but I wanted to integrate this functionality in to a couple of sites. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/mysql-worm/ Thu, 27 Jan 2005 23:07:40 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/mysql-worm/ You know you’ve hit the big time when you get your own worm! The MySpool worm is turning badly configured MySQL installations (on Windows) into zombies in a huge bot net. Now I’m not even going to ask why so many people have MySQL installations listening to the network (Debian disables this by default so bonus points to them) but it is depressing. To stop it doing this just add “skip-networking” to the [mysqld] section of the config file. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/delicious-visualisations/ Thu, 27 Jan 2005 22:10:01 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/delicious-visualisations/ Over at the hublog there are two entries that allow you to either graphically browse related del.icio.us tags or browse the network of del.icio.us users as defined by their inbox subscription lists. While neither of these are world changing they are fun to play with, putting in Java and Ruby or OpenBSD and FreeBSD for example shows some interesting interconnects. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/site-changes-email/ Mon, 24 Jan 2005 23:29:36 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/site-changes-email/ It seems that my migration wasn’t as smooth as I’d hoped, my local postfix install was bouncing half my mail addresses… Not quite what I was hoping for! If you’ve sent me anything over the weekend (Jan 21st to 23rd) then please send it again as I probably haven’t received it due to both the changes and my cock-up. On a happier note the O’Reilly Postfix book is pretty good, it’s helped me out today, and I’ll probably end up coming back to it when I actually put the real fix in rather than the hack I’m using now. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/freshmeat-comment-mails/ Mon, 24 Jan 2005 23:25:58 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/freshmeat-comment-mails/ I’m not very good at keeping track of my Freshmeat Projects, I’m also insanely bad at replying to comments but thanks to Stig Brautaset I no longer need to worry about it. Freshmeat has an a pair of options, tucked away under your preference page (which you obviously have to be logged in to see), with the following descriptions “Send comments to my projects by email:” and “Send replies to my comments by email:”. https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/site-upheavals/ Sun, 23 Jan 2005 12:06:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/site-upheavals/ You may have noticed the abscense of my sites and received bounced emails yesterday, this is due to the machine that this site was being hosted on getting cracked via a vulnerability in a PHP application. That machine was a shared box that had a number of people looking after it, but with no central responsibility or formal plans in place. I’m now running on a Bytemark box, which I bought for this purpose about six months ago, and just never got around to finishing, which is going to be my new home. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/project-name-neat-idea/ Thu, 20 Jan 2005 21:57:53 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/project-name-neat-idea/ While reading through Red Handed, a Ruby blog, I stumbled on to an entry about Akira Tanaka’s CVS repository. If you like Ruby then it’s well worth spending ten minutes having a look through his projects, while the code does what it’s supposed to some of his little tools are real niche fillers; and project-name is an ideal example. When run with a single argument project-name goes away and queries a number of different sites, it checks the availability of domain names that consist of the query string and a number of different . https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/threat-warning-one-liner/ Thu, 20 Jan 2005 21:30:21 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/threat-warning-one-liner/ Any attempt at explaining why I wanted to do this will sound odd so for now I’ll just post the one liner… perl -MLWP::Simple -e 'get("http://www.dhs.gov/") =~ /dhs-advisory-(\w+)\.gif/;print "Threat level is $1!\n";' This gets the current threat level for the US and prints it to standard out. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/tadalists-intro/ Thu, 20 Jan 2005 10:21:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/tadalists-intro/ I’ve just discovered Tada Lists (via Jim Weirich’s blog and I’m very impressed, while I’ve seen the Rails video and read the hype it’s only when i use an application like this, written in 579 lines of Ruby code that it becomes clear how powerful Rails is. Tada Lists itself is a very neat site in both the technical and design stakes, it uses XMLHttpRequest (which seems to be very popular at the moment, thanks Google! https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/del-link-checker-initial/ Mon, 17 Jan 2005 23:32:26 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/del-link-checker-initial/ I’ve written a short Perl script that, when run locally with your credentials, will retrieve all your del.icio.us bookmarks and attempt to verify if they still exist or not. The Delicious Link Checker is written in simple Perl and should be quite easy to customise. I’ve added a (now deprecated) Delicious Link Checker home page that contains the notes, the next batch of TODO tasks and other miscellaneous bits of information. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/art-of-boot-strapping-reviews/ Mon, 17 Jan 2005 00:25:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/art-of-boot-strapping-reviews/ I’ve added reviews of The Art of The Start and the The Bootstrappers Bible to my book review page. The Art of The Start is a decent enough look at what you should and shouldn’t know but for me the winner was The Bootstrappers Bible, it covers a lot of the same subjects but its pace was better suited to me and it seemed to be more pragmatic and less preachy. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/boot-strappers-bible-book-review/ Mon, 17 Jan 2005 00:17:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/boot-strappers-bible-book-review/ Authors: Seth Godin ISBN: B00005R2F8 Publisher: Do You Zoom, Inc. The Bootstrappers Bible is a 100 odd page ebook, that was available for free and is now available cheaply from Amazon, that provides a pragmatic and realistic overview on the hows and whys of starting up a business with nothing but limited resources and your own intelligence. This book focuses on the essentials of competing with bigger, better funded players and contains more ideas, practical advice and essential knowledge than most books treble its size. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/art-of-the-start-book-review/ Sun, 16 Jan 2005 23:40:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/art-of-the-start-book-review/ Authors: Guy Kawasaki ISBN: 1591840562 Publisher: Portfolio The Art Of the Start is a short, pithy and to the point look at some of the essential knowledge that any aspiring entrepreneur should have. The eleven concise chapters cover a range of topics including the old favourites, positioning, pitching, and raising capital and the less common bootstrapping, rain-making and even “The art of being a Mensch.” The author’s experience on both sides of the road to starting up a business, as an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist, is very visible in the text and helps convey context with his advice. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/test-driven-development-by-example-book-review/ Sat, 15 Jan 2005 21:03:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/test-driven-development-by-example-book-review/ Author: Kent Beck ISBN: 0321146530 Publisher: Addison Wesley Summary: An interesting book that presents a useful approach, some good idea’s and many pithy quotes but not a classic. Testing is one of the most overlooked phases of the development cycle. From the worst case scenario of not being done to the more common case of all the testing being done at the tail end of a project, when time is most precious and least available, it is more often a rushed afterthought than a real part of the process. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/validate-sites-html-plugin/ Sat, 15 Jan 2005 20:25:16 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/validate-sites-html-plugin/ I’ve added an IE plugin that allows you to validate the mark-up of an entire web-site, starting with the browsers current page, using the WDG HTML Validator tool. The plugin is called Validate Sites HTML and can be found on the IE Plugins page. https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/blog-validates-20050115/ Sat, 15 Jan 2005 19:10:59 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/blog-validates-20050115/ Well at least the main page does for the first time since I added the Google Search on the left hand side. I’ve had a fiddle with the HTML and between removing some styles, turning some in to CSS and re-arranging the tags it now passes validation. The other occasional problem I’ve had is Blosxoms desire to auto-wrap each post in <p> tags. In a casual conversation a very smart chap named Simon Rumble pointed out that you just need to start the post without a <p> and end it without a closing </p> and it works perfectly. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/koders-search-engine/ Sat, 15 Jan 2005 17:30:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/koders-search-engine/ I’ve seen a couple of people mentioning the Koders Source Code Search Engine recently and I decided I should have a little play. The idea is pretty simple, they spider source code from projects across the net and then allow you to search through the gathered code. While I’ve not played with it enough to know if it’s going to be of any interest to me in smaller projects a couple of things did stick out when I tried the site. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/tale-of-two-dvd-sellers/ Sat, 15 Jan 2005 16:19:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/tale-of-two-dvd-sellers/ Like most geeks I did a chunk of my Christmas shopping online and ordered a smattering of DVDs from sites like Amazon UK, my choice for books and Play.com, my choice for DVDs. Amazon had a pretty hefty preorder discount on a box-set (Buffy Collectors Edition) and so I ordered it from Amazon and not Play (who are normally cheaper). And then things started to go wrong. Some of my DVDs didn’t arrive so I checked the customer support pages and sent off queries to each company. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/curse-of-uptime/ Sat, 15 Jan 2005 15:55:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/curse-of-uptime/ A number of Unix/Linux people seem to pride themselves on obtaining the highest uptime they can. While this may seem like a little harmless fun, in a production environment (which are mostly fun-free places), it can hide a number of problems that will later become major issues. At some point the machine will have to come down and face a power off or reboot, and then it’s expected to come back up, and this is where the problems can start. https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/webdeveloper-toolbar-custom-validator/ Sat, 15 Jan 2005 15:39:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/webdeveloper-toolbar-custom-validator/ I’ve been doing some work with RSS feeds recently and I wanted quicker access to the FeedValidator from within FireFox, I already have it in IE thanks to a nifty sidebar written by humble ole me, after a little look around I noticed it’s possible to add a custom validator to FireFox’s Webdeveloper Toolbar The process itself is simple, click Options on the toolbar and then click Options on the menu. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/feed-post-dates/ Sat, 15 Jan 2005 15:26:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/feed-post-dates/ I’ve added a short Perl script called Display Feed Last Modified Date to the miniprojects page. This short (and by no means complete) script looks through a SharpReader OPML file (which can be generated by using ‘Export’ on the file menu) and then tries to obtain and display a Last-Modified date for each feed in the file (this is gathered from the header of the same name) With a single run and five minutes of manual checking of feeds I’ve managed to find and remove 40 dead feeds from my subscription list. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/bloxsom-rss-and-planetpy/ Sat, 15 Jan 2005 14:43:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/bloxsom-rss-and-planetpy/ A quick note for anyone who runs a Blosxom based blog and is being aggregated using the Planet feed merging software. By default, the 0.91 RSS feed created by Blosxom doesn’t have per post dates. This means if you add a new post the Planet software will guess at the modified date for each of your posts and will decide that the current time is as good as any. And all your readers will scream in pain as they are forced to work through duplicate posts to get to the shiny new ones. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/firewall-osdetection-spoofing-stopper/ Sat, 15 Jan 2005 12:51:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/firewall-osdetection-spoofing-stopper/ I recently wrote down a couple of snippets on Limiting Administration by OS, since putting those to er… paper another thought crossed my mind. Some of the worst internal incidents I’ve been involved in were those where the attacker either rebooted into a live Linux CD or had a second hard drive that was mostly left unwired. This made tracking and auditing his actions extremely difficult due to the nature of his attack platform. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/black-horse-and-the-cherry-tree/ Sat, 15 Jan 2005 12:39:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/black-horse-and-the-cherry-tree/ While I’ve been in my quiet phase I’ve been listening to a fair few of my older CDs and I’ve not really bought much in the way of new material but I did make an effort to purchase Eye To The Telescope, the debut album from KT Tunstall, a singer I’ve been very impressed with. While I’ve not listened to the whole album enough to render judgement I wanted to mention how much I like two of the tracks, Miniature Disasters and Black Horse and The Cherry Tree, the song that she sang on her Jools Holland appearance and that reeled me in. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/pointless-review-page/ Sat, 15 Jan 2005 12:31:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/pointless-review-page/ While googling for a book review google sent me to two sites (in the top five hits) that contained ALL the details about the book but missed one vital feature; the actual review After rereading the page to see if my browser had done something strange, hey it can happen on badly designed sites, I noticed a small piece of text located near the bottom of the page and below the scroll line; Status: Not reviewed. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/close-friend-bash-org-style/ Sat, 15 Jan 2005 12:22:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/close-friend-bash-org-style/ DragonflyBlade21: A woman has a close male friend. This means that he is probably interested in her, which is why he hangs around so much. She sees him strictly as a friend. This always starts out with, you’re a great guy, but I don’t like you in that way. This is roughly the equivalent for the guy of going to a job interview and the company saying, You have a great resume, you have all the qualifications we are looking for, but we’re not going to hire you. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/os-limited-connections/ Sat, 15 Jan 2005 11:53:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/os-limited-connections/ This is the third and probably last of my ramblings on the subject of locking down a machines potential attack footprint by mass filtering. While I’ve already mentioned blocking certain ports to entire countries (mostly to stop SPAM) and only allowing access to other ports to geographically local IPs (to stop attacks on critical services like SSH for admins) it is also worth mentioning OS detection. Certain products and operating systems, such as P0F, OpenBSD’s PF etc, can detect what operating system someone is trying to connect with. https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/bash-russian-roulette/ Sat, 15 Jan 2005 11:40:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/bash-russian-roulette/ There are a list of things you don’t want to see in your Unix machines start up scripts but one of the leaders has to be a snippet like this: [ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo "You live. For now." Before we look at what the chunk of code is supposed to actually do it’s worth mentioning that $RANDOM is a built-in shell variable. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/ms-anti-spyware/ Sat, 15 Jan 2005 11:25:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/ms-anti-spyware/ For those of you that haven’t heard the roars yet MS have released a beta of their spyware detection software. Now that they’ve got both this and an AntiVirus product on the market it’s time for people like Symantec to start watching over their shoulders. Now my issue with this isn’t that Microsoft wants to enter (and by extension dominate) this very lucrative market, instead I want to raise, what seems to me anyway, a big conflict of interest. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/changing-moments/ Sun, 09 Jan 2005 23:41:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/changing-moments/ Bottom line is, even if you see ‘em coming, you’re not ready for the big moments. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can’t help that. It’s what you do afterwards that counts. That’s when you find out who you are. – Joss Whedon (via Whistler) Life is an odd thing, some times the rules of your whole universe change underneath you and you have to make some drastic changes just to keep going. https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/rough-year/ Mon, 20 Dec 2004 20:41:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/rough-year/ This year has been a pretty rough one for me, too many good people gone forever with nary a replacement in sight, the proving of “no news is good news” (one more “are you sitting down” phone call and I’m either gonna go boom or crack) and lots of crap rained down from above. In response to life taking a firm hold of my dangly bits I’ve decided to take the next eleven days out and then start afresh from January (I know it’s only a symbolic date) with a clear head, a lot more enthusiasm and a lighter tone. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/proprietary-site-search-engines/ Sat, 18 Dec 2004 21:33:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/proprietary-site-search-engines/ One of the things that irks me about many of the sites I visit is the steaming pile of shite they call searching. Between the missing entries, the irrelevant articles and, this is my killer, only actually using one of the search words provided I cant see why people even bother to put the entry box on the site when you can get far superior results from Google. Now before I get accused of being a hypocrite I’d like to point out that the Unixdaemon. https://www.unixdaemon.net/gui/ieblog-failed/ Sat, 18 Dec 2004 21:23:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/gui/ieblog-failed/ I have a page of Internet Explorer Plugins on Unixdaemon.net, while none of them are complex they do seem to be both useful and quite popular (over 30,000 downloads in the last five months… not too bad :)) and so I have a fair amount of interest in IE despite being a very happy FireFox user. Now Microsoft have decided to make themselves more open and transparent, and part of this includes something called the IE Blog, a site I subscribed to about a day after it started. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/cubicles-and-cabeling/ Sat, 18 Dec 2004 21:06:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/cubicles-and-cabeling/ As a sysadmin a (hopefully) small chunk of my time is taken up laying cables and physically adding machines to the network (a desktop support person, my kingdom for a desktop support person!), while this shouldn’t be too hard most modern offices seem purpose built to drive me insane. Firstly we have the two patch ports and four plugs for six people. This forces you to invest in four / six way extension leads and a switch under each row of desks; as an aside a switch for each person with a laptop or more than one machine is a nice thing to have. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/blunkett-quits-before-sacking/ Sat, 18 Dec 2004 20:54:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/blunkett-quits-before-sacking/ Today we have some good news, David Blunkett has quit after his dirty washing was dragged around in public. Normally I’d keep anything political away from this site but this is noteworthy as he’s the man who’s been pushing ID cards. I’m all for good security, which is one of the reasons I’m against ID cards. They add cost to the system, complexity to the people forced to use them and don’t actually provide any benefits. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/trust-me-or-sack-me/ Thu, 16 Dec 2004 10:45:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/trust-me-or-sack-me/ One of my more infamous quotes at work is “trust me or sack me.” This is the shorter, pithier version of one of my stronger views, you should never hire people you don’t trust or have faith in. When you take on a new employee you are investing a lot of money and effort, both in initial outlay and over a period of time. If you don’t fully believe your hiring choice is the correct one then don’t make it. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/get-caught-msnapping/ Wed, 15 Dec 2004 00:39:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/get-caught-msnapping/ TheRegister has an informative, and pretty short, article on MS NAP, a technology that should help keep networks clear of worm activity by requiring all machines to have up-to-date patching and anti-virus before the network equipment will let them play with others. Now lets gloss over the more obvious question, how do you get a machine on the network for the first time, as it’s simple, the kind of company that actually needs this will have a patch management system in place for new builds (maybe just something like MS SUS) to bootstrap the process. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/not-doom-the-movie/ Wed, 15 Dec 2004 00:12:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/not-doom-the-movie/ I’ve done my time in the first person trenches, from Single player Wolfenstein, all the way to Halflife and its expansion packs along with a diversion into multi-player Jedi Knight 2 (If you played online I probably kicked your arse :)) and the early Doom games hold a warm place in my nostalgia but lets face it, a Doom movie was always going to be bad. The script writer, David Callahan, has made a couple of comments online, the full Doom Screenwriters open letter is available but I quite like the Penny Arcade Doom Movie Strip which summarises the article quite nicely. https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/good-managers/ Mon, 13 Dec 2004 23:12:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/good-managers/ Because if you have a good one you won’t realise how good they are until you get a complete doozy. A while ago i had the luck to work for a very insightful manager, lets call him Mike (his parents did). It took him about an hour to figure me out and from then on he played me masterfully, always the right amount of trust to ensure i was confident about my work but with enough challenge to both make me think about what i was doing and push me into giving more than the pay rate warranted. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/local-logins-only/ Mon, 13 Dec 2004 20:19:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/local-logins-only/ In a previous post about blacklisting IP ranges used by China I stated why I feel it’s a valid approach. I think I should clarify my own actions when it comes to things like this. Any servers that are owned and admined by me alone (Bytemark Virtual machines, friends servers etc) have a number of deny rules in place to drop connections to a number of important ports (SSH, SSL etc) to reduce the attack vectors provided by the servers. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/readonly-gmail/ Mon, 13 Dec 2004 20:07:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/readonly-gmail/ Heres my feature request for Gmail, a service I’m mostly happy with. It’d be nice if you could set up read only access to your inbox, or even designated ‘labels’ that you could limit by either assigning a password or allowing full (read) access to everyone. I pipe quite a few mailing lists into my GMail account and I’d like the ability to give certain people read access to anything labled as security. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/blame-china/ Mon, 13 Dec 2004 20:00:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/blame-china/ Quite soon the Chinese government won’t have to try to censor the net. The western world will just filter off all the traffic coming from China, doing the job much more efficiently. The above quote came from a Slashdot article on China and its Relation With Spam. I don’t normally read the comments on Slashdot articles but I had a hunch some of the posts to this one would be quite extreme; SPAM is one thing that drives most geeks nuts. https://www.unixdaemon.net/gui/vmware-5-beta/ Sun, 12 Dec 2004 12:34:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/gui/vmware-5-beta/ Firstly I need to try and get on to the VMWare beta program instead of only reading about the neat new changes from articles like Flexbetas Inside VMWare Workstation 5.0 Beta. Secondly I’d like to get my hands on this release for two main reasons, firstly the ability to stop and start groups of machines at once would make testing certain sets of machines (webserver and database server used by it for storage) a lot nicer. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/fireengine-whitepaper/ Sun, 05 Dec 2004 16:13:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/fireengine-whitepaper/ Although it actually sounds pretty fast, when you actually start benchmarking it, Gigabit Ethernet isn’t quite as good a solution as you’d think. As more and more commercial deployments move to using SANs and NAS for online storage and backups it’s increasingly easy to saturate existing LANs. One possible solution as people start to look at 10 and 100Gbps networks is FireEngine (PDF), a set of architecture changes and improvements for Solaris 10. https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/targetalert-filehighlighter/ Sun, 05 Dec 2004 16:13:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/targetalert-filehighlighter/ I’m not a big fan of unmarked links pointing to resources that require an external viewer. The worst of these formats, such as PDFs or the Microsoft Office formats, cause the browser to pretty much halt for a couple of seconds while the viewer is loaded and then change the behaviour of the UI (if you are viewing a PDF in FireFox for example, Ctrl-W will not close that tab) in a way that seems designed to annoy people who know how to use the keyboard. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/gcn-python-wtf/ Sun, 05 Dec 2004 16:13:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/gcn-python-wtf/ From an article called Faster Python grabs programmers: The new version of Python includes a new module that allows system administrators to use small Python programs instead of shell scripts, said Michael McLay, a consultant who is the resident Python expert for the nonprofit Center of Open Source and Government. Shell scripts, written to execute routine system administration tasks, have more security vulnerabilities and offer less feedback when errors occur, McLay said. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/google-london-nov2004/ Wed, 01 Dec 2004 16:42:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/google-london-nov2004/ Google recently held a short talk in London (they are recruiting for their ‘new’ Dublin office) that covered a couple of interesting topics such as redundancy using commodity technology (LOTS of cheap machines with the same data), how to create rolling brown outs (rooms packed full of 80 1U servers in every rack seems to do it) and how to horizontally scale everything to meet their needs. The one slide that really caught my attention was mostly flippant but makes an important point about the kind of traffic they are dealing with: https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/php-eggs/ Wed, 01 Dec 2004 16:41:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/php-eggs/ There has recently been a thread about PHP easter eggs on the webappsec security list. In essence if you call ANY PHP page with certain parameters custom pages will be returned. Here’s an example of the PHP Credits Page. It may seem a little petty to complain about such a small thing in a code-base provided for free but there is a more serious aspect to this, the pages returned vary depending on the version of PHP you run so it’s possible to use this to determine which version the server is running; even if you’ve changed the ServerTokens directive to something more restrictive than the default. https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/apt-dupdate/ Wed, 01 Dec 2004 16:36:28 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/apt-dupdate/ I wasn’t going to mention this but I’m on dial-up this week and so dog slow down-loading has become an issue for me and this tool might be useful for people in a similar position. The short version is that the packages/Sources file is quite big, down-loading it each day can actually be quite a big hit in terms of bandwidth, apt-dupdate plans to get around this using bzipped diffs rather than re-sending the whole thing. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/negotiation-basics/ Wed, 01 Dec 2004 16:17:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/negotiation-basics/ This may seem obvious but the number of people that break this simple rule never fails to amaze me. Let’s look at an example, you are meeting with a potential hire and you are discussing salary, as an aside if they are good pay them above the going rate; thats a different post! You make an offer of 30 thousand a year, the other person doesn’t look too impressed. What you should never do (and ignore any uncomfortable silences) is then make another, higher, offer. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/more-system-less-administration/ Wed, 01 Dec 2004 16:06:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/more-system-less-administration/ I started out in IT as a developer working on financial systems using VBA, after a very short period of trying to do flexible string manipulation I stumbled on to Perl, Regular Expressions and the Win32::OLE module; I was hooked. About a year later I had the chance to work at a mostly Perl shop (at the tail end of the dotcom boom) and I was exposed to Unix systems, thats when things got interesting for me. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/sxiping-with-joy/ Mon, 29 Nov 2004 11:58:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/sxiping-with-joy/ I’ve heard the name SXIP (pronounced ‘skip’) mentioned on a couple of different privacy forums (and in the Web2.0 coverage) and decided to have a closer look at what it provides. The short version, I promise!, is that SXIP wants to be a single sign-on provider and help with filling out forms based upon your chosen persona. For the longer version of the who, what and how I’d suggest first listening to the IT Conversations SXIP show and then spending five minutes with the SXIP Demo. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/landmining-compilers/ Sat, 27 Nov 2004 14:09:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/landmining-compilers/ Heres the shell of an idea I’ve been mulling over recently, we all know that compilers on server are bad don’t we? The common wisdom (and this is often disputed by people who use source based systems) is that people shouldn’t be compiling up new versions of software on the production servers. By omitting the compiler suite and required header files you force compilation to occur elsewhere. The second reason, and I’m not so sure about how current this is, is that you deny an attacker an easy way of hiding their tracks. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/linksinfo-shortscript/ Sat, 27 Nov 2004 13:39:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/linksinfo-shortscript/ I’ve added a short Perl script called linksinfo to the miniprojects page. When invoked with an absolute URL it will parse through the HTML and pull out links. The text in each href tag will then be displayed. If you use a ‘-l’ then it will also display the target of the link. Why?: This is the first of a couple of scripts I’m writing to help maintain certain meta-data about a website I’m responsible for. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/grand-dont-come-for-free/ Sat, 27 Nov 2004 11:47:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/grand-dont-come-for-free/ I dislike most modern music (I’m 24 and I’m turning into my grandfather!) but a couple of songs from The Streets last album were good so I decided to give their second a chance; very wise choice. The songs themselves cover a pretty diverse area, from the upbeat backing of “Fit but you know it” to the down trodden lyrics of “Dry Your Eyes” the CD contains a number of little gems. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/preview-google-ads/ Sat, 27 Nov 2004 11:25:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/preview-google-ads/ For one of the projects I’m working on I needed to see which type of ads Google would choose to bestow on certain pages. A co-worker pointed me at Try Before You Sell at the (unofficial) Google Weblog. While this is quite handy (and easy to use in a bookmarklet) I did find it a little cumbersome. So filled with the drive of an early morning and bacon sandwiches I decided to put together a right click extension for IE. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/radius-ora-book-review/ Wed, 24 Nov 2004 22:11:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/radius-ora-book-review/ Author: Jonathan Hassell ISBN: 0596003226 Publisher: O’Reilly & Associates RADIUS (the Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service) isn’t getting any younger or popular, it’s a specialised technology that very few people seem to discuss and even fewer write books about. Unfortunately the ones we do have, such as this, don’t exactly encourage it’s adoption. The book starts with a solid overview of the AAA process/framework, AAA in this context being Authentication, Authorisation and Access Control. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/radius-pick-a-server/ Tue, 23 Nov 2004 22:47:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/radius-pick-a-server/ In my quest to learn how RADIUS works and the correct way of running my own server I picked up both the O’Reilly RADIUS book and GNU RADIUS, A Reference Manual. Neither of which are exactly ground breaking books. Now I’ve almost finished the O’Reilly book I thought it would be a good time to get my hands dirty and have a play, so I looked at XT RADIUS; which hasn’t been updated since very early in 2002. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/avoid-radius-book/ Mon, 22 Nov 2004 23:02:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/avoid-radius-book/ I read a lot of books, some of them are inspiring, entertaining and relevant. Some are dull, overly terse and yet still useful; The O’Reilly Radius book is more akin to bad dental surgery. What really annoys me is that I can’t think of a better way of presenting such as dry topic, the book provides detailed coverage that is just as easy to read and understand (and as fascinating) as the original RFC version. https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/test-uri/ Mon, 22 Nov 2004 22:53:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/test-uri/ If you are not already subscribed then it may well be worth subscribing to the CPAN RSS feed. It’s very easy to let little gems like Test::URI slip through. The downside of course is that I am slowly running out of things I can’t test! https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/gllug-needs-you/ Sun, 21 Nov 2004 14:08:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/gllug-needs-you/ GLLUG, the Greater London Linux User Group, had a user meeting yesterday. It had about twenty people turn up. While this may not seem too bad this is a group that has peaked at 120 people at a single meeting and had a thriving mailing list. After the three main talks the GLLUG admin team, and a few bystanders (including me), had a chat about what we can do in the future to try and reverse the trend of diminishing numbers. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/find-duplicate-filename-script/ Fri, 19 Nov 2004 00:15:37 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/find-duplicate-filename-script/ I’ve added a new script to the Unixdaemon Miniprojects Page. This short chunk of shell and awk, imaginatively named Find Duplicate Filenames, does exactly what you’d expect. It scans the mounted file systems and prints a list of files and the number of times each name (with the path part stripped) was found. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/poland-stumps-patents/ Thu, 18 Nov 2004 23:11:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/poland-stumps-patents/ As many of my incredibly intelligent, talented and loyal readers will already know the European Union and the asshats lobbying for it are trying to get Patents bought in. Apparently the economy and IT industry haven’t had enough problems recently so they’d like to add a new, all-encompassing one. As you may gather I’m not a huge fan of patents and I’d hate to see Europe adopt them, something which has come way too close to happening a number of times; but now we have Poland! https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/reference-gnuism/ Mon, 15 Nov 2004 23:46:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/reference-gnuism/ It never fails to surprise me how I can use a program almost every day and yet still stumble on to previously undiscovered options. Yesterday I discovered the ‘–reference=file’ option while reading the manpage for chmod. When used this option takes the current permissions of the specified file and applies them to the other files specified on the command line. It’s also accepted by chgrp and chown. Note: If you’re going to use this in production please consider the potential race condition. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/bileblog/ Sun, 14 Nov 2004 19:40:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/bileblog/ I love The Bile Blog, it captures the crude yet funny humour that way too many geek / techie hangouts no longer contain. For those of you that have never been lucky enough to stumble upon it the aim is to provide a public mocking for stupid projects, ideas and even people. Every community needs one of these. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/reading-list-end-2004/ Sat, 13 Nov 2004 13:56:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/reading-list-end-2004/ I go through a lot of books, after looking at my reading pile recently I realised something has changed in my reading habits, I don’t get through entire books anymore. I just seem to get through the first half, know enough to muddle through and then get on with that ever I needed the knowledge for. So in an attempt to start clearing the pending pile I’m going to focus on a batch of books at a time. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/code-brews-initial-thoughts/ Fri, 12 Nov 2004 20:42:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/code-brews-initial-thoughts/ Over at Longhorn blogs Bill Evjen has posted an entry about Code Brews, an event where a small group of techs meet up and, by the sound of it, have a cross between a show and tell and a number of short tutorials. I have to say I’m very jealous. Now that I’m working as a full time sysadmin I don’t get to spend any real time writing code so just to keep my hand in I read a number of developers blogs to keep abreast of the emerging ideas. https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/installing-firefox-extensions/ Fri, 12 Nov 2004 20:42:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/installing-firefox-extensions/ One of FireFox’s best features is it’s community of developers and the third party extensions they create. While it’s always been pretty easy to install these, over time, this mechanism has grown to be more secure and less user friendly; a common trade-off. The checks it made (for example you could only install new extensions from certain sites by default) were rational they forced people to either download and install or dig around in the Options screens until they found the correct settings. https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/firefox-upgrade-extensions/ Fri, 12 Nov 2004 20:42:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/firefox-upgrade-extensions/ I’ve just upgraded my main machines web browser to FireFox 1.0 and I was pleasantly surprised by its ability to upgrade some of the third party extensions I use. While I’ve historically bitched about the changes in the extension mechanisms and packages it seems that all the pain was for a good reason. On the first run of the new version I was shown the extensions that wouldn’t work and then prompted to search for upgraded versions. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/phones-considered-evil/ Fri, 12 Nov 2004 00:16:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/phones-considered-evil/ If you don’t believe me then pick ten random numbers from a phone book and try it for yourself! I don’t like phones, despite the fact I now have four in my life, work mobile, personal mobile, home phone and work desk phone, I don’t think they add anything to my life; instead I think they make it worse. My home phone isn’t plugged in, it (and the line) are there for external calls because it’s cheaper to pay for the calls and the line than it would be for making the same calls via a mobile. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/kt-tunstall-false-alarm-ep/ Fri, 12 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/kt-tunstall-false-alarm-ep/ I made some noise on the subject of the great KT Tunstall on Jools Holland appearance a little while ago. After spending some time looking around I’ve finally managed to get my hands on her False Alarm EP. The CD contains four tracks, False Alarm, Heal Over, Miniature Disasters and Throw me a rope. While the first two are respectable songs in their own rights the latter two are an excellent taster of the album to come (in December now, allegedly due to a family of mice in the printing facility…). https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/google-firefox/ Wed, 10 Nov 2004 00:20:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/google-firefox/ If you’ve not yet seen Googles FireFox home page then it’s worth a look. I’m not sure why they’ve decided to do it but as a big FireFox fan I’m just happy to see it get more coverage. It’s a shame that they’ve not replaced the front page for a couple of days to really spread the word. It’s also worth noting that a number of plugins don’t work correctly with the newly released FireFox 1, if you have any that you constantly use it’s well worth installing the new version side-by-side with your current version for testing. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/delicious-visualisation-with-extispicious/ Fri, 05 Nov 2004 00:17:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/delicious-visualisation-with-extispicious/ Frequent readers of this site will know that I really like del.icio.us, it’s become one of my near daily tools and, thanks to the API, it’s become a lead generator for me. While it’s interesting to find people with similar interests to you it can be a lot of very tedious work to get a good overview of someone’s interests and see if they mesh with your own; enter extisp.icio.us. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/tao-of-motivation/ Thu, 04 Nov 2004 23:48:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/tao-of-motivation/ I’m currently doing two short evening courses, ten weeks each, and on the reading list for one of them is The Tao Of Motivation. This isn’t my usual type of book, while my reading list is pretty diverse I would typically only read a book like this for the humour value. The book explores some of the basic principles of motivation including how to deliver praise, (very basic) NLP and visualisation. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/site-search/ Tue, 02 Nov 2004 23:56:59 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/site-search/ Using the very excellent Blosxom Google Site Search plugin I’ve added a Google search box to the left hand column. The search itself will only return results for the blog.unixdaemon.net and www.unixdaemon.net domains (assuming the “Search Unixdaemon.net” option is selected). This is a new addition so there may be a few teething problems for the first few days. https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/debian-apt-torrent/ Tue, 02 Nov 2004 22:01:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/debian-apt-torrent/ Arnaud Kyheng, a very bad man (but in a good way :)) has released an early version of Apt-Torrent. I’m not sure why but this seems like a madcap idea to me. The basic principles behind it, take the load away from the generous hosted main sites and distribute it a little, are sound and valid but it just seems odd to me. Still I feel the need to give it a twirl. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/first-chapters/ Tue, 02 Nov 2004 21:35:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/first-chapters/ How many books for beginners exist for your programming language /technology of choice? I’m assuming that if you are reading this site you are a tech of some description and so have some exposure to coding, if not stay with me ;) How many times, and in slightly different ways, has the same basic introduction to Perl, Python, TCP, Linux or Java been written? Now include the how-tos, on-line articles and tutorials. https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/sysadmin-nature-of-the-beast/ Tue, 02 Nov 2004 21:13:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/sysadmin-nature-of-the-beast/ While I’m in this navel gazing mood (which shouldn’t last very long) I thought I’d say a little bit about the oddness of being a system admin in a corporate environment; it might be the same in academia but I’ve never done that. Firstly you have the contradictions, in most companies, and heavily so in a small team/company, you are supposed to be open and approachable. But you also have to manage your time, their requests and the sanctity of the live environment. https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/teen-spirit/ Tue, 02 Nov 2004 20:53:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/teen-spirit/ "You described them as teenagers." "But I don't think teenagers are the way they are because of their age. It's because they have nothing to lose. They simultaneously have a lot of time on their hands and yet are very impatient to get on with their lives." Quote: Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon This is an odd thing to post about online, especially considering that this is a public blog and that I know at least two of my co-workers read this site on a semi-regular basis, but I need to get this off my chest and see where it leads me; and it’s my site dammit! https://www.unixdaemon.net/gui/software-small-touches/ Mon, 01 Nov 2004 19:18:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/gui/software-small-touches/ What do VMWare Workstation, Windows Media Player and the Windows Volume Control have in common? They each annoy me on a daily basis. I use VMWare on a daily basis, it’s a top notch product that saves me a lot of grief whether I’m writing applications, testing programs for release or playing with services/daemons such as Apache or Postfix and conducting what-ifs but I’ve recently noticed a small glitch that is driving me nuts. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/netbsd-logo/ Mon, 01 Nov 2004 19:03:42 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/netbsd-logo/ The NetBSD project has recently adopted a new logo, the new NetBSD logos are decent enough if a little uninspiring and ‘safe’. I’ve always been a fan of the old NetBSD logo. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/packetstorm-rss-gone/ Mon, 01 Nov 2004 10:24:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/packetstorm-rss-gone/ Way back on the second of September I wrote a blog entry informing everyone that I’d be turning off Unixdaemon Packetstorm Security feeds in favour of people using the Official Feeds. Well the time has come. The HTML on their site has changed again, breaking my script, so now is as good a time as any to stop the feeds. I’ll be putting up a 301 at some point today. Thank you for using the feeds and I hope they proved useful. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/joel-essays-of-the-year/ Thu, 28 Oct 2004 17:08:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/joel-essays-of-the-year/ Joel Spolsky is working on a new book, rather than spread more of his own wisdoms, if you don’t read his site then you should!, he is compiling and editing a list of the best software essays published either online or on dead tree. While it is probably going to be quite a while before the book becomes available you can currently view the list of nominations and, in most cases, read them online. https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/foxylicious/ Thu, 28 Oct 2004 10:57:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/foxylicious/ I’m a big fan of the del.icio.us social bookmarking site but it’s lack of browser integration has always been slightly annoying. Luckily someone else must have thought along similar lines as we now have the excellent Foxylicious This FireFox extension adds a folder to the bookmarks menu that contains your del.icio.us bookmarks making them available without going to a separate website. The only downside is that it seems to be a one way trip, adding a local bookmark to the menu and choosing “update bookmarks” (you can reach this via tools->Foxylicious) doesn’t seem to update the bookmarks on the server. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/startupskills-ebook/ Wed, 27 Oct 2004 19:29:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/startupskills-ebook/ I’ve been a subscriber to the RSS feed over at Startup Skills for quite a while now, the authors insights on creating a start up and online advertising in general and Google Adwords in particular have always made interesting reading; but one day they stopped. Instead of just pontificating about what you could do he’s been busy actually creating and running a company. AdGooroo, “an advertising intelligence service that tracks competitors’ online advertising” and helps you get the most from your own Google Adwords certainly warrants a close eye if you use Google for ads and a perfect starting place to find out what it’s all about if you don’t. https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/adbar-joke/ Wed, 27 Oct 2004 17:32:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/adbar-joke/ I’ve been doing some research on the available FireFox extensions for a very small side project that may or may not appear. During my travels I spent some time investigating the quite excellent Adblock. I bet you can all guess what it does. What was slightly more amusing was the Adbar extension, this adds text ads that no one gets paid for, to FireFox; it is very similar to the unregistered Opera browser. https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/webmail-compose-short/ Tue, 26 Oct 2004 21:07:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/webmail-compose-short/ Over the last couple of days I’ve become quite taken with a FireFox extension called WebmailCompose ( WebmailCompose XPI) This addin for FireFox (although it has an issue installing on 0.9.3) and Mozilla overrides the default behaviour of mailto: links and instead calls your webmail application of choice. By default support is provided for, among others, Gmail (WOO!), Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and you can even add your own service of choice with a little knowledge of URL formats. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/going-postal/ Sun, 24 Oct 2004 20:42:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/going-postal/ I’ve been a Terry Pratchett fan ever since I bought a copy of “The colour of magic”, he was a master of constant jokes, diverse and interesting characters mixed together in a fantasy world which had enough commonalities with our own to add an extra twist to the tale. If one thing stands out from that sentence it should be the word ‘was’, while the quality of the recent stories (Monstrous Regiment, Night Watch) is, if anything, better than the earlier books the newer books including Going Postal are very quiet on the humour front. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/recovering-from-gibberish-terminal/ Sun, 24 Oct 2004 17:36:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/recovering-from-gibberish-terminal/ Occasionly you will pipe or cat a file to the screen or a program will die and the screen will begin to show gibberish when ever you type anything (I don’t mean the usual gibberish that most people type on a command line :)) If you use putty then you will see the word ‘PuTTy’ appear contantly. The quick way around this is to type ‘reset’ and the screen will begin to work as expected again. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/frozen-console-recovery/ Sun, 24 Oct 2004 17:30:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/frozen-console-recovery/ After you’ve been using a Unix (or logging into one via putty) for a while you’ll probably encounter a key combination that locks the term and leaves you unable to do anything. You’ll hunt around the keyboard pressing combinations until you sigh in despair and try Ctrl-C or Ctrl-D to kill the current command or the current shell respectively; and they won’t work. After some more key-bashing you’ll get lucky and the term will bomb out. https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/ubuntu-themes-that-never-will-be/ Sun, 24 Oct 2004 17:25:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/ubuntu-themes-that-never-will-be/ For those of you that don’t know it, and even for those that do, Ubuntu is a Linux distribution that is based upon Debian but with up-to-date desktop packages such as a modern Gnome. The distro itself has received a lot of good press and looks very promising. But that’s dull. No one cares if it’s technically excellent or it meets the needs of a large number of people (I may soon be running this on my Linux laptop so my views on this are pretty transparent :)) What is more interesting is controversy and differing opinions. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/2004-show-summary/ Sun, 24 Oct 2004 16:51:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/2004-show-summary/ This is going to be my last TV post for a while now, I promise! While in general I don’t watch more than four or so hours a week of TV (mostly comedy shows like Have I got News For You and Never Mind the Buzzcocks) the magical combination of an always on ADSL connection, Torrentcasting, a new 250GB harddrive and two monitors (one for work and one for playing TV shows) has rekindled an interest that was almost destroyed by the ending of Angel, FarScape and Wonderfalls. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/execs-get-lost/ Sun, 24 Oct 2004 12:00:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/execs-get-lost/ While I’m on the subject of genre TV (One more post after this one I promise :)) I’ll mention a program that is actually well worth setting your TiVo / Torrent downloader for; Lost. With J.J. Abrams of Alias fame on the creative team this show might actually get past the first dozen episodes (unlike the tragicly killed Wonderfalls) and have a chance to tell its story. The basic idea is very simple, the survivors of a plane crash are forced to live with each other on a remote island, but the execution is excellent. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/farscape-lower-filters/ Sun, 24 Oct 2004 10:44:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/farscape-lower-filters/ I finally had a chance to sit down and watch this over the weekend and while I wasn’t as blown away as I thought I’d be (I had stupidly high expectations) it was still very good TV and tied up a lot of loose ends that the series never got to close. While four hours may have seemed like a long time in which to have one last outing, when you look back at the series and examine the three episode arcs such as “Kiss the princess”, “Liars, guns and money” and “We’re so screwed” they gave any Sci-fi film a run for its money and, for me, were defining achievements for FarScape. https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/kt-tunstall/ Fri, 22 Oct 2004 22:57:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/nottech/kt-tunstall/ For those of you that don’t know it the BBC has a program called Later with Jools Holland. The show is a exhibition of great musicians, from all time greats like Desmond Decker, Aretha Franklin and the late Ray Charles to modern singers like Shola Ama and Beverly Knight each week has at least one act that makes you sit up and take note. And thats just the weekly shows! The New Years Specials are well worth recording for when you get in the next day and have some of the best live performances you could hope for, not just great singers but very unlikely duets and group songs. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/farscape-avoidance/ Tue, 19 Oct 2004 09:27:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/farscape-avoidance/ And people seem to want to talk to me about it. While I’m waiting for it to download, yes I own all the DVDs and I will buy this when it comes out so no I don’t feel guilty, I’ve had to add another rule to my mail filtering. If you so much as mention FarScape in any way shape or form then your mail gets filed away till later. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/calm-swan/ Mon, 18 Oct 2004 22:15:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/calm-swan/ There is a quote I’ve always liked, “It’s like a swan on a lake. On the surface everything is calm but underneath the webbed feet are paddling furiously!” While this is equally true of many things it’s always seems to be most apt when I think about the start-ups I’ve been lucky enough to work at. The sales team and management doing the VC road-shows make the company appear to be a stable, healthy environment where everything is working fine and nothing un-expected arises on a daily basis. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/apache-dates-error2access/ Sat, 16 Oct 2004 17:47:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/apache-dates-error2access/ As part of my daily server housekeeping I keep an eye on the Apache error logs for each of the servers I’m responsible for. If it’s a quiet day I’ll grep through the attempted exploits, attacks and formmail scans for any useful error messages. While attempting to track some 404’s back to the corresponding access-log entries I got bored of converting the error logs date format into the default date format of the access log so I wrote a small bit of shell that I (badly) named ApacheErrorDate. https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/istockphoto-cheap-images/ Sat, 16 Oct 2004 13:40:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/istockphoto-cheap-images/ As anyone who has ever read this site will have noticed, I have no artistic ability; and a love of torturing innocent punctuation :). Even the comet tail / mosaic at the top of almost every page was done for me by an amazingly talented guy called Pete Jones. One of my side projects (which typically move at near glacial speed) could do with a splash of colour and some photos. https://www.unixdaemon.net/gui/google-desktop-is-out/ Thu, 14 Oct 2004 22:23:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/gui/google-desktop-is-out/ Do you want top notch searching on your local machine? Do you want lightening fast results on your (non-commercial; read the EULA!) desktop? Do you want people to stop blogging about the Google Desktop Search? Well the answer to number three is probably going to be yes pretty soon! I’ve not had enough time to form any real opinions yet but it does look pretty cool so go and have a play, it’ll make the abscense of WinFS easier to bear :) https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/viewin-lynx/ Wed, 13 Oct 2004 23:20:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/viewin-lynx/ I’ve actually been receiving a fair bit of mail about my IE plugins recently, a couple of very nice people sent me thank you mails for the BugMeNot plugin (which is amazingly popular!), I had a couple of requests to port some of the ‘View In XXX’ plugins to an IE based browser called Maxthon, which I’ve done, and I had a request to add one for using the online Lynx viewer. https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/spread-firefox-via-gmail/ Wed, 13 Oct 2004 00:12:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/spread-firefox-via-gmail/ Do you have a couple of spare Gmail invites laying around (guvner)? If so you probably already use FireFox as your web-browser of choice, and a good choice at that!, but just think of the poor untold hordes of IE users just waiting to be saved. “What can I do to help?” you may ask, well for a start you can donate a couple of GMail invites to the Spread FireFox GMail Project. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/rojo-rss-honeymoon/ Tue, 12 Oct 2004 23:41:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/rojo-rss-honeymoon/ Like most geeks I’m an information junkie, I have news sites, developer blogs, security alerts and even a couple of system logs piped to me via the bandwidth eating medium of RSS. I started off using FeedReader but soon felt the need for something a little more powerful and swapped to the excellent, if quite memory intensive and slow to start, SharpReader. After six months of happy usage the restriction of only accessing my subscriptions from a single machine began to get to me. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/musthavetimestamps/ Mon, 11 Oct 2004 23:20:49 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/musthavetimestamps/ I know this is old ground but it seems to come up a lot and annoy the arse off me, if you are going to log something then please ensure it has: A date and time... ...that is easy to sort The name of the application that spawned the something you are logging The fully qualified name of the machine it is from If you can’t produce at least those details then what use do you expect the logs to be when someone tries to debug using them. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/searching-torrents/ Sat, 09 Oct 2004 17:54:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/searching-torrents/ And I don’t mean the .torrent file, I’m more focused on the file containing the actual content. For a personal project I’d like to be able to search for information stored in text/DOC format or in compressed archives but short of scripting a down-loader to get each file I find, pulling it apart and searching manually I don’t see any options. As far as I can tell the main search engines stop at the . https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/wsmanagement-snmpkiller/ Sat, 09 Oct 2004 15:45:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/wsmanagement-snmpkiller/ I hate to jump on any bandwagon that starts at Slashdot, although even a broken clock is right twice a day, but I find myself agreeing with a number of the Slashdot comments made about the new WS-Management spec. Firstly, and most importantly, SNMP is still the most widely used management protocol in production. Secondly it has survived the invention of a number of replacements, WBEM and CIM spring to mind as standards chosen to replace a lot of the functionality it provides; oddly enough those specs were also backed by Microsoft and Sun. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/dtrace-perl/ Sat, 09 Oct 2004 15:11:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/dtrace-perl/ While looking through the blogs of both the DTrace engineers at Sun I stumbled upon this little gem (taken from Adam Leventhal’s Weblog): "And speaking of perl, a lot of people asked about DTrace’s visibility into perl. Right now the only non-natively executed language DTrace lets you observe is Java, but now that we realize how much need there is for visibility into perl, we’re going to be working aggressively on making DTrace work well with perl. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/web2-zawodny/ Sat, 09 Oct 2004 15:01:07 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/web2-zawodny/ I’d never heard of the Web 2.0 conference (an O’Reilly event) until Jeremy Zawodny started to blog his attendance but now I wish I’d have gone along (let us ignore the very high attendance cost and the fact I’m in the wrong country :).) His full Web2.0 archive is well worth digging through if you have any interest in where the commercial interest in the web is pointing. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/vender-riggedevals/ Sat, 09 Oct 2004 14:45:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/vender-riggedevals/ Over the last few weeks I’ve been involved with arranging evaluations and purchasing of a number of ‘enterprise’ products. Among the rogues gallery have been IBM (OK but nothing special considering they had near a dozen people in the room), Oracle (Actually very good) and my new favourite, Business Objects (BO), providers of Crystal Reports. The day started off quite nicely, the BO technical gent came in and did an install of the product we were evaluating on our test server with me watching over his shoulder. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/dtrace-ukuug/ Sat, 09 Oct 2004 14:33:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/dtrace-ukuug/ After their 2004 AGM UKUUG arranged for Jon Haslam, a Software Engineer at Sun Microsystems, to give a presentation on DTrace. While I missed the first thirty minutes of slides I did get to see the ninety minutes of practical demonstrations. The official DTrace spiel, “Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) is one of the hot, new technologies in the next revision of Sun’s Operating System, Solaris 10. DTrace provides the ability to generate concise answers to almost arbitrary questions about the behaviour of your systems, from the top of the application through to the bottom of the kernel. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/lessig-ccuk/ Sat, 09 Oct 2004 14:08:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/lessig-ccuk/ I was lucky enough to take a long lunch and amble down to see Larry Lessig’s presentation at UCL on the Creative Commons Licenses last week, firstly it’s worth noting that Mr Lessig is a very slick speaker, he obviously invests a lot of time in his presentations and it shows. The slides were very shiny and incorporated a lot of multimedia, video clips ranged from a mash-up of a Charley Brown cartoon with an Outkast sound-track (the song was Hey Ya) to Blair and Bush singing love-songs; the latter was interesting as the whole video was created from public footage. https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/event-blogging/ Sat, 09 Oct 2004 13:45:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/event-blogging/ It’s been pointed out to me that while I’m willing to endlessly type about such thrilling subjects as “Incomplete Ideas – Knoppix, UML and CDs in books” and Apache Logging directives I’m very lax about covering events, talks and workshops; or as it’s known, things people actually care about :) Two good examples over the last few months have been EuroFoo and the UKUUG Linux Techcon in Leeds. I started out intending to blog at least some of the sessions at each conference but two things stopped me, the talks were too interesting and I felt rude. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/richdad-poordad/ Sat, 09 Oct 2004 13:20:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/richdad-poordad/ I’ve recently re-read Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I was actually looking for a different finance book and this one fell on me so I considered it an omen :) The book is pretty straight forward read which gives you a peek at the perspective of a business man who is trying to educate his son and sons friend in how to treat money. While the book isn’t exactly life changing it is a worthwhile read and contains a number of well explained nuggets, the best example and the one that stayed with me from my first reading about four years ago is the comparison between a “rich” and “poor” mans balance sheet. https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/linuxworld-2004/ Sat, 09 Oct 2004 13:06:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/events/linuxworld-2004/ I’ve been to every Linux World Expo at Olympia in London and each year it gets a little bit more depressing. Earlier events have had such marvels as a giant ice penguin (provided by SGI) that had vodka flowing though its veins and Jon Maddog Hall pointing out how insane it is to refuse entrance to students to a Linux focused event (watching the management squirm was great fun) this year we had… well nothing of any real note. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/ntp-pool/ Wed, 29 Sep 2004 19:49:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/ntp-pool/ A little bit of online technology I’ve been using for the last couple of months is the pool.NTP service provided at (surprisingly) pool.ntp.org. NTP is used to keep your local system clocks synchronised by using some of the bigger, more accurate clocks such as atomic or radio clocks. Traditionally you would add three or four server names/IP addresses to your NTP configuration file and the time would be pulled down and used, the downside to this included the need to ensure the remote servers were still available and the issue of being a burden as the teeming hordes of NTP clients hit the same servers again and again. https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/etc-release/ Wed, 29 Sep 2004 19:30:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/linux/etc-release/ If you are working on a modern Unix machine (no, thats not an oxymoron) then it’s annoying difficult to determine the operating system name and version running. Where you should just be able to type ‘/etc/release’ and get the relevant details you instead need to either guess or brute-force your way through the possibilities. Debian stores this info in ‘/etc/debian_version’, Redhat in ‘/etc/redhat_release’. You know the world is going to end when Solaris makes the most sense and puts this information in ‘/etc/release’. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/generate-wsdl-from-java/ Wed, 22 Sep 2004 18:56:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/generate-wsdl-from-java/ I had a little rant on this subject a while ago about the practises of some companies when it comes to evalling software. After some more digging I found a solution I was happy to recommend for the task; webMethods Glue. I had some trouble using the generated WSDL with a Perl SOAP::Lite server but it was nothing ten minutes fiddling didn’t solve. While I’ve only looked at the java2wsdl converter that single component did exactly what I wanted. https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/running-multiple-versions/ Wed, 22 Sep 2004 18:48:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/firefox/running-multiple-versions/ While testing a small FireFox plugin in both 0.9.3 and PR-1 I noticed a small oddity. Open 0.9.3, leaving this window open try and open an instance of PR-1. When both windows are open click on the Help menu, now select ‘About Mozilla FireFox’. Both windows are version 0.9.3. I’m note sure if this is a bug with FireFox opening new windows with a ‘getobject’ call rather than a ‘create object’ call (that is a serious over simplification! https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/behind-flu-sucks/ Wed, 22 Sep 2004 18:44:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/behind-flu-sucks/ If you are expecting an email, call or anything else from me this week then there is a pretty good chance it ain’t coming. I’ve come down with the flu and I’ve been going to work, doing the minimum hours, coming home and crashing out. What’s that noise? Violins? For me? ;) While I’m typing I’d like to note that my packetstorm feeds actually seem to be getting more users, any other time I’d be ecstatic but come on people move to the official ones so i can shut mine down. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/pragprogreview/ Mon, 20 Sep 2004 20:13:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/pragprogreview/ I finally got around to reading the very good Pragmatic Project Automation, the short summary is that it’s excellent for new Java coders, a good read for new developers of .NET or dynamic languages, a useful but not critical read for people with four/five years experience in delivering software and working in small teams. The review is now up on the London PM Reviews page and also, surprise surprise, on the Liverpool Java User Group. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/pragmatic-program-automation-book-review/ Mon, 20 Sep 2004 09:28:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/pragmatic-program-automation-book-review/ Author: Mike Clark ISBN: 0974514039 Publisher: The Pragmatic Programmers Pragmatic Project Automation is the third in the Pragmatic Programmers starter kit trilogy (so far…) of books. As it is also the first one not written by Dave or Andy the first question is, does it live up to the high standards set? The answer is a very strong yes. While the first two books in the series increased the developers workload (using CVS and writing unit tests) the third installment focuses on pushing the work back to the machine. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/serveraliases/ Sun, 19 Sep 2004 21:23:22 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/serveraliases/ Here is a rarity, something that annoys the hell out of me :). If you have a website then your goal is to get people to view it, or at least it should be if you’re sane. So why the heck do so many site admins require me to type in the ‘www.’ before I can view the site? All it needs is a “ServerAlias domainname” in the Apache config; or what ever you IIS people use instead. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/geekhumour/ Sun, 19 Sep 2004 09:51:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/geekhumour/ I’ve never been a huge IRC person but I do like amusing quotes, if you get a bored five minutes it’s well worth having a sift through both Bash.org and QDB.us. The quality of the humour varies a lot but some of it is good wholesome geek humour. And a lot of it isn’t :) https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/uml-bookcd/ Sun, 19 Sep 2004 00:01:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/uml-bookcd/ If you’re reading this site then there are pretty good odds you own a number of tech books, take a look around your shelves and admire your collection. Now think about the number of those books that include a CD, next try and think of an included CD that was actually useful. Did you think of any? If you did you are a better man than me. One of the reasons CDs are seldom included in tech books is the shelf life of the book vs the software contained within. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/dell-regional-prices/ Sat, 18 Sep 2004 23:02:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/dell-regional-prices/ I’d like to see the European Union spend some more time investigating regional pricing. I’m in the market for a new monitor and I’ve seen a number of people recommend the Dell 2001FP, it’s a nice looking monitor with a good spec. More importantly everyone who has bought one has recommended it. This monitor looks pretty good and I considered buying one. Being a diligent consumer I decided to do some pricing, for comparison lets use the details at Dell 2001FP UK and Dell 2001FP US. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/pickaxe-preorder/ Sat, 18 Sep 2004 21:57:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/pickaxe-preorder/ I do most of my small scripts and minor hacks in Perl, it’s powerful, cross-platform and it has CPAN. While I’ve spent some time investigating other languages such as Python, Groovy and even sed and awk for certain tasks, only one has held my interest; Ruby. It was recently announced that the second edition of the Pragmatic Programmers Programming Ruby (the pickaxe book) is now available for preorder in PDF and dead tree formats. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/miniprojects-2004/ Sun, 12 Sep 2004 23:50:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/miniprojects-2004/ On this page you will find a number of my shorter scripts, applications and bits of code I find helpful and that scratch my own itches. Each one is accompanied by a short explanation of the script, any dependencies, any needed configuration and a link to the code itself. Unless otherwise stated all the code on this page is GPL'd and you are free to do what you want with it. https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/getpageranks/ Wed, 08 Sep 2004 23:50:47 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/getpageranks/ I’ve added a new entry to my miniprojects page, the getpageranks script (written in Perl) allows you to pass in a file containing URL's, one to a line with whitespace and comments allowed. Each entry in the file will then be checked with Google and the PageRank will be displayed. Note: If an invalid URL is given the PageRank will be returned as zero, this makes it very difficult to determine which sites are invalid and which are just unpopular. https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/google-pagerank/ Wed, 08 Sep 2004 22:10:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/perl/google-pagerank/ Unless you run IE on Windows with the Google toolbar installed it’s always been difficult to determine the PageRank of any given URL, while a FireFox/Mozilla extension was created it was, from my experiences, very flaky. It also required manual use. I was pleasantly surprised today to see a module called Google::PageRank hit my local CPAN mirror. I’ve had a quick play and it worked on all my test cases. Tool writers, start your engines! https://www.unixdaemon.net/gui/openoffice-printpdf/ Wed, 08 Sep 2004 20:17:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/gui/openoffice-printpdf/ My current employer uses Adobe software to print PDFs from a number of programs, Visio, Project, Word and Excel are prime examples. In a valiant attempt to avoid giving Adobe more money we decided to have a look elsewhere and see what was available for Windows users. It didn’t take long to notice OpenOffice, it has document compatibility with Word and Excel and integrated PDF printing; it’s just not very good. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/not-a-mac-man/ Sun, 05 Sep 2004 19:43:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/not-a-mac-man/ Firstly I’m going to disclose the fact I have a Mac, it’s an old G3 iBook which has three very important features, it’s got good battery life, weighs very little and has easy to install and use wireless. This is what I call my convention computer and it gets taken to all the tech events I attend; but thats about it. I had a discussion with a couple of GLLUG members this weekend about laptops and the fact soon emerged that I’m not exactly fluent with the Macs GUI. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/little-crazy/ Sat, 04 Sep 2004 13:46:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/little-crazy/ I’ve just finished reading You Need to Be a Little Crazy, a book that puts the life and day to day activities of an entrepreneur under the magnifying glass. The book is a pretty balanced look at the type of people that set up a company under normal circumstances (not a bubble), the down-sides and potential risks are mentioned to deter the casual and uncommitted members of the audience while the author conveys the reasons he enjoys the challenge and tries again and again; even when everything goes wrong. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/packetstorm-feeds/ Thu, 02 Sep 2004 17:07:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/packetstorm-feeds/ For the last year or so I’ve been offering access to a set of RSS feeds for Packetstorm Security, these feeds scrape the latest exploits, files and other similar web-pages. While they were originally for my own benefit they became quite popular and they have a good few hundred people watching them. Unfortunately due to the fact the data is screen scraped from the HTML the feeds have proven to be an annoyance to me whenever the site changed its layout, which wasn’t often enough for me to ditch them but it was often enough to lose me a couple of Friday nights, firstly I’d like to say thanks to all the people that emailed me letting me know they liked them and wanted them fixed and working. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/friendster-chasm/ Wed, 01 Sep 2004 20:09:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/friendster-chasm/ Crossing the chasm is possibly THE book to read on marketing and selling in tech start ups, I’ve done three of them and it gets really disturbing to sit in the office and say “Oh no, we’re entering chapter two."; it really is that insightful. One of the basic premises from the book is that technical adoption follows a pattern, firstly you get innovators and early adopters. These are followed by the pragmatists, the conservatives and eventually the luddites. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/pip-2004/ Sun, 29 Aug 2004 14:22:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/pip-2004/ I recently re-read the very interesting slides from the How To Keep Your Job presentation, if you’ve never seen them and you work in a technology field then I suggest you spend some quality time with them, they might just save your salary in years to come. I spent a good few years working in an investment bank so this approach sits well with my view of the world, the whole investment and portfolio analogy seems very apt. https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/pip-aug2004-aug2005/ Sun, 29 Aug 2004 13:37:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/career/pip-aug2004-aug2005/ The aim is to, at the least, achieve all these goals. The time allocated is from September 1st 2004 to August 31st 2005. Update: I’ve closed my 2004-2005 PiP early and I’m pretty happy with where it is. I’ll put a newer one up soon. Note: This page is actually getting a surprisingly high amount of traffic so I thought I should add some comments and an attribution. The original idea for a Pragmatic Investment Plan comes from Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, the Pragmatic Programmers, to be specific the very interesting slides from the How To Keep Your Job presentation, if you’ve never seen them and you work in a technology field then I suggest you spend some quality time with them, they might just save your salary in years to come. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/rigid-registration/ Sat, 28 Aug 2004 22:46:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/rigid-registration/ Just don’t expect to get new customers when your registration process makes US immegration look open and friendly. I was recently looking for a piece of software to handle WSDL generation from Java source code, I had no current long term need for the software, I just needed to see how well the technology worked these days and have a look at a real world example. Now put your business hat on, I’m not currently a sales prospect but if the product does what I want then there is a pretty good chance I’ll come back to you if I ever need it. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/webdav-badname/ Fri, 27 Aug 2004 21:26:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/webdav-badname/ I’ve spent the last few days looking at document management systems, versioning and work-flow applications, while I’m happy enough putting my own scribbles under CVS (I’ve not yet drunk from the Subversion Koolaid) a number of my less techy co-workers need a solution that fits them better. After some digging around I started to eval WebDAV, it’s used by Apple for shared calendaring, MS Word has WebDAV support and there was an Apache module; very promising. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/sendmail-kamikaze/ Wed, 25 Aug 2004 22:03:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/sendmail-kamikaze/ There are rumblings about Sendmail and it’s future distribution, both it’s involvement in the IETF and Microsoft circus known as Sender-ID and it’s own new license are topics worthy of discussion and attention, a brief collection of useful links can be found at the OpenBSD Journal. I normally don’t get involved in subjects like this until it’s community rallying time (such as European Patents) but I have a vested interest in this one, I’d like to see Sendmail make itself expensive, propriety and (even more) difficult to distribute. https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/farscape-returns/ Wed, 25 Aug 2004 21:45:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/geekstuff/farscape-returns/ My name is Dean, and I’m a Farscape fan. I have just one thing to say: W00T! Why am I making gamer noises of joy? The FARSCAPE Trailer has been released. For those of you that don’t know the back story the best place to start is the Save FARSCAPE site. The short version is that the TV execs meddled in the show and then shut it down. The fans rebelled and, considering that it’s back, I’d say we won. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/load-modperl/ Wed, 25 Aug 2004 21:10:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/load-modperl/ Today I hit an issue with mod_perl that had me going around in circles for about an hour, my mod_perl handler wasn’t being invoked, and I was getting a directory listing instead. With the able assistance of a co-worker the problem was found and solved pretty quickly. If you add the “LoadModule perl_module /usr/lib/apache/1.3/mod_perl.so” line into the config file yourself ensure it’s the last line otherwise something else such as mod_dir or mod_index will execute instead and you’ll go insane trying to work it out. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/itconversations/ Sat, 14 Aug 2004 13:02:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/itconversations/ I manage to attend a decent number of conferences each year (despite my employers lack of interest) but while the UK ones are pretty cheap and amazingly good at securing top notch speakers (UKUUG is brilliant at this) there are a lot of conferences I don’t get to experience beyond the odd blog post and mailing list summary due to geographical location or cost (OSCON wins on both counts!) In a recent post by Jon Udell he pointed to some clips hosted by IT Conversations, after a quick rummage around their site I now have plenty to keep me busy on those long train commutes. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/pp-cvs/ Fri, 30 Jul 2004 15:02:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/pp-cvs/ I’ve been busy lately and I’ve not really had a chance to spend more than half-an-hour on any one thing, I thought I should write a brief update entry to help me keep tabs on what I’ve been playing^Wworking on. Pragmatic Guide to Version Control with CVS book review Added DOAP data to two of my Freshmeat projects. Started playing with bash 3.0, more to come on this. Rattled through six-eight mycroft requests using the excellent tools provided at Mindzilla Read Managing RAID with Linux. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/pp-cvs-book-review/ Thu, 29 Jul 2004 15:54:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/pp-cvs-book-review/ Author: Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt ISBN: 0974514004 Publisher: The Pragmatic Programmers While the presence of a version control system doesn't mean that all is well with a project its absence is often a warning sign of bad practises. Pragmatic Version Control with CVS provides the fundamentals required to ensure your project has a least the basics covered. Firstly let's discuss what this book isn't, comprehensive and for experienced CVS users; unless you want something to hand to your less experienced co-workers. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/sellsing-out/ Sat, 24 Jul 2004 22:31:32 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/sellsing-out/ Adam Kinney has a post about Longhorn and XAML books in production. While I’m an O’Reilly fan, I have way too many of their excellent Unix books, I’ve never been too taken with the Windows selection. It looks like they are gearing up though with two books written by Ian Griffiths and Chris Sells, two bloggers that should be required reading. Nice move Tim! https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/uklug-searches/ Sat, 24 Jul 2004 14:20:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/uklug-searches/ A friend of mine runs the UKLug website, an online search engine for jobs that allows you to ‘subscribe’ to a search query. Every time your feed reader requests the contents the query is re-run and the current results are passed down. “Thats neat. Why is it getting mentioned here?” Well you highly focused individual it’s being mentioned here for two reasons: Firstly it's a good site that deserves some coverage; even if it does look like Google. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/ie-addressbar/ Thu, 22 Jul 2004 16:03:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/ie-addressbar/ Update: As you can probably tell from the “Updated on ‘Thu Jul 22 16:03:01 2004’” I’ve not touched this page for a while. I assume these no longer work so I’ve removed links to the executables and the executables themselves. Love it or hate it IE is one of those things that’s here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future, so why not make it work a little more to our liking? https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/ispell-html/ Tue, 20 Jul 2004 00:07:18 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/ispell-html/ I’m posting this for my own benefit as much as anyone else’s. Ispell has some support for HTML / XML documents, if invoked with ‘-h’ it will not spell-check certain parts of the document as the rules below show: This element name is misspelled: <elemment>element</elemment> This attribute name is incorrect: <tag nme="Dean" /> The value of this attribute is wrong: <tag animal="Elepant" /> Of the three lines above none get kicked out as errors. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/pragprog-do-cvs/ Mon, 19 Jul 2004 23:22:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/pragprog-do-cvs/ I’ve been a fan of the Pragmatic Programmers ever since I stumbled on to their first book, The Pragmatic Programmer. Since then I’ve happily worked my way through the Pickaxe book (Pragmatic Programmers guide to Ruby) and now I’ve started on their own ‘Starter Kit’ series. CVS has never been something I went too deeply in to, the basics of checkout, change, update and commit were fine for my purposes. These days I mostly write small bits of code, short articles and seldom collaborate with other people on projects outside of work. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/orkut-thebigwhybother/ Sun, 18 Jul 2004 16:33:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/orkut-thebigwhybother/ I received an invitation a while ago and I’ve had a play, invited some friends, sent some messages and even created a group to discuss a topic. I spent half an hour looking at the pictures for people I’ve chatted with on lists but never meet in person, that was almost a month ago; then I forgot about the account. I’ve just logged back in and pretty much everything is as I left it, the groups I joined (GLLUG, Lonix, London-PM) have had no posts made and have a subset of the people on the respective mailing lists present. https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/computer-change/ Thu, 15 Jul 2004 22:34:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/computer-change/ I’ve not had a good week as far as computers have gone, my trusty P2-350 with 512MB finally bit the bullet and died, it’s not even reaching the BIOS anymore so I’m looking to dump it. I’m currently using my backup machine, a P3-866 with 128MB running the evaluation version of Windows 2003 (which is quite nice but more to come on that) but its dog slow when I’ve got FireFox, SharpReader, winamp and half a dozen terms open. https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/watch-intro/ Sun, 11 Jul 2004 12:14:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/commandline/watch-intro/ The watch command is one of those little gems that often gets overlooked and has its functionality duplicated by a custom tool; just slower and more complicated. At its most basic watch runs the specified command every two seconds until interrupted, a simple example that shows the current directories content is given below, this will show any changes in either the size or timestamp of the contents. watch ls -ahl https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/sed-whitespace/ Fri, 09 Jul 2004 20:20:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/programming/sed-whitespace/ Leafing through the live source-code should be a pleasant, calming experience, instead it often becomes a game of cringe and seek. While digging through some custom bandwidth monitoring scripts i came across this gem. cat /proc/net/dev | grep eth0 | sed -e 's/:/ /g; s/ / /g; s/ / /g; s/ / /g; s/ / /g; s/ / /g; s/ / /g; s/ / /g; s/ / /g; s/ / /g; s/ / /g; s/ / /g;' https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/grep-options/ Thu, 08 Jul 2004 20:15:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/grep-options/ While rummaging around the grep man page i stumbled on something I’d never noticed before; GREP_OPTIONS. This environmental variable does pretty much what you’d expect, once set it passes the options you specified to each and every invocation of grep that runs with the variable still in scope. While I’m not aware of any real positive usages for this something slightly less wholesome crossed my mind. If you set ‘GREP_OPTIONS=-v’ then every run would return the lines NOT matching your criteria, -v is an absolute switch rather than a toggle one so its not possible to reverse it with another -v. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/mysql-backups/ Wed, 07 Jul 2004 21:35:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/mysql-backups/ Just don’t copy MySQL data files while the tables are in use and expect the backup to work. The conversation was going to be a painful one, sysadmin, the hero of our story felt it in the stream of vindaloo sauce that passed as his blood. “I noticed that our MySQL backups are just raw copies of the data files. I also saw some errors from the tar command about the files being written to while the backup was being run. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/intro-delicious/ Wed, 07 Jul 2004 20:55:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/intro-delicious/ One of the online services/applications that has wiggled its way in to my near daily usage is del.icio.us. The concept, like most good ideas, is pretty simple; you save your bookmarks to a remote server and so does everyone else. What makes del.icio.us special is that everyone else using the service does the same. Each user has their own page of links, each book-marked URL is assigned one or more ‘tags’. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/july-drdobbs/ Sun, 04 Jul 2004 21:06:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/july-drdobbs/ I’ve just finished a cursory read of this months Java focused Dr Dobbs magazine (number 362, July 2004). Not being a Java person i wasn’t expecting to get too much out of it but what surprised me was the sheer number of adverts. This issue has a pull out poster (sponsored by Microsoft) and a total of 50 full pages of adverts. This doesn’t include the half-page or multiple quarter page adverts found on another couple of dozen or so pages. https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/gmail-lil-01/ Sat, 03 Jul 2004 10:02:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/online/gmail-lil-01/ Its the little touches that makes certain products stand out. If you click on the ‘trash’ folder and its empty you see: No conversations in the trash. Who needs to delete when you have 1000 MB of storage?! The first time you see it is amusing (or i need a life). When you think about it the message itself is actually positive reinforcement for the service. It implies careful thought has been given to the storage requirements. https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/servertokens/ Mon, 28 Jun 2004 23:20:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/security/servertokens/ Service banner grabbing is no longer the prominent issue it once was. Todays fire and forget worms probe large IP ranges so quickly that they just try to brute force compromise any servers they encounter and hope to get lucky without checking the product name or version of the target. While these are the most common attacks you will see on your Apache server its also worth noting that they are the easiest ones to defend against. https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/accesskeys-intro/ Sat, 26 Jun 2004 13:52:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/unixdaemon/accesskeys-intro/ The Unixdaemon site is undergoing some design changes as and when i get time. Surprisingly its gone from being a short set of links pointing to a few bits to code to something that actually gets unique visitors every day; and its not just my mum! On the left of the home page I’ve added a small set of navigation links and while working through the CSS i thought I’d try adding access keys. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/xfe-c2d/ Tue, 22 Jun 2004 20:47:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/xfe-c2d/ A couple of my book reviews are now up on London PM’s review section, the two books are Coder to Developer and XForms Essentials. The first, Coder to Developer by Mike Gunderloy, is a great book for less experienced software developers looking to become more professional. The second is an older but still valid book focusing on the XForms spec. Its a little dry and academic but if you need to understand the principles XForms Essentials isn’t the worst option by a fair way. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/coder2developer-book-review/ Tue, 22 Jun 2004 08:43:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/coder2developer-book-review/ Author: Mike Gunderloy ISBN: 078214327X Publisher: Sybex International For those that live in the land of the magic LAMP the name Mike Gunderloy might not ring any bells. For those in the Windows world it’s more familiar, the author of too many books to count, articles in Microsoft Certified Professional magazine (among a fair few others!), his own Larkware site and now Coder To Developer. The book draws upon the author’s years of experience to cover the areas that coders new to the real world of development will find themselves unprepared for, especially if they have come from a hobbyist or purely academic background. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/xfe-book-review/ Tue, 22 Jun 2004 08:43:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/xfe-book-review/ Author: Micah Dubinko ISBN: 0596003692 Publisher: O’Reilly & Associates HTML forms are a necessary evil, outdated and overworked they are prime targets for a long awaited overhaul. From out of the shadows we have the only contender to step up to the challenge and push forward; XForms. XForms Essentials has an enviable pedigree, with Micah Dubinko an editor and author of the XForms specification itself, writing the book the information is almost straight from the horses mouth. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/bugmenot01/ Sun, 20 Jun 2004 14:06:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sites/bugmenot01/ I stumbled across this site yesterday when looking for some FireFox plugins and i have to admit i can see me getting a lot of use out of it. The basic premise is pretty simple: BugMeNot.com was created as a mechanism to quickly bypass the login of web sites that require compulsory registration and/or the collection of personal/demographic information (such as the New York Times). The FireFox BugMeNot plugin provides nice and easy right click access to the site but while I’m at work i have to use IE so i decided to write my own version, imaginatively titled BugMeNot IE https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/server-load-balancing-book-review/ Wed, 02 Jun 2004 17:32:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/server-load-balancing-book-review/ Author: Tony Bourke ISBN: 0596000502 Publisher: O’Reilly & Associates I like concise books, no one wants a 1500 page breeze block which has long winded examples and rambles through the subject matter (cough Wrox cough) but this book sets new standards in small. With eleven chapters and three appendixes in just under 170 pages you get a nagging suspicion that the meat of the topic is going to be left uncovered. https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/testingtesting/ Tue, 01 Jun 2004 23:12:37 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/meta/testingtesting/ Is this thing on? With a little luck you’ll be seeing a spiffy UnixDaemon mosaic across the top of the screen and me blathering on underneath it. I finally decided to stop just reading blogs and start writing my own. I’m not sure how its going to go update-wise but i should be able to stretch to a couple a week. I’m using the quite excellent Blosxom so expect the site to go through a lot of small changes while i get everything just the way i like it. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/isbn-bookmarklet-2004/ Mon, 05 Apr 2004 20:45:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/isbn-bookmarklet-2004/ I buy a lot of books, while a few of them are purchased on the strength of the authors name alone or through idle browsing i stumble upon a growing number of them via webblogs. Unlike the reviews on sites like Amazon with a blogged review i have a basis on which to decide if the authors views are going to mesh with my own. But, like everything else, there’s a downside. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/mozilla-searches/ Sun, 21 Dec 2003 15:42:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/mozilla-searches/ My honeymoon period with Mozilla and Firefox has come to an end. Despite the popup blocking, the actual working security settings and the tabbed browsing I’ve discovered needs that Firefox can no longer meet. When i reached this point with IE i began to work on adding the small snippets of functionality i needed, such as the address bar customisations and the IE plugins but i soon reached the limit of what was easy to add to the browser. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/redhat-linux-firewalls-book-review/ Sun, 19 Oct 2003 18:03:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/redhat-linux-firewalls-book-review/ Author: Bill McCarty ISBN: 0764524631 Publisher: redhat press (Wiley) You are in a maze of Linux Firewall books – all alike. Fortunately one stands out from the others for two reasons, the first is obvious, its an official Redhat press book, you expect Redhat books to be pretty accurate. The second, slightly more subtle one, is the authors name; Bill McCarty. Best known for his excellent articles in the American Linux Magazine and his Learning Redhat and Debian books for O’Reilly the stage is set for a good read. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/miniproject-googlemailer/ Thu, 28 Aug 2003 23:14:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/miniproject-googlemailer/ Webscraping has always been, at best, a flaky way of gathering data and at worst a legal gray area. With premier sites such as Google and Amazon now offering official webservice interfaces to their data, developers can now add both respectability and reliability to their applications and drop the fragile HTML parsing. This change in focus from using these services at the provided front end to wrapping our own services around them takes a while to get your head around but once you ‘get it’ the possibilities become pretty much endless. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/miniproject-sudo-snooper/ Tue, 26 Aug 2003 20:47:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/miniproject-sudo-snooper/ It was a dark and stormy night, in the corner a Postfix server threatened to buckle under the weight of the Sobig.F worm. On a mailing list not quite in a galaxy far far away an argument a discussion about sudo, history files and information disclosure raged. One of the topics that came up was the information you can glean from the process table as people use commands such as Sudo and su instead of running everything as root. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/linux-server-hacks-book-review/ Tue, 12 Aug 2003 18:08:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/linux-server-hacks-book-review/ Author: Rob Flickenger ISBN: 0596004613 Publisher: O’Reilly & Associates The first time i picked this book up to read i never even made it through the first four pages to the preface, the foreword is provided by Eric Raymond and to be completely honest, does no justice to the rest of the book. While ESR focuses on the abstract details of hackers, in pretty much the same way as all his other writing, the meat of the book is pure, hands on solution. https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/auditing-ctrl-alt-delete/ Mon, 23 Jun 2003 16:44:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/auditing-ctrl-alt-delete/ "Its only running a single service, we’re fully patched and it has a local firewall that denies by default.“ "What happens if i do Ctrl-Alt-Delete?“ <h3>Introduction</h3> One of the basic premises of computer security is that it's almost impossible to fully secure any machine to which an attacker has physical access. While we cannot cover all eventualities, we can make some simple changes to catch any use of the more blatant avenues of abuse. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/ie-plugins-list/ Tue, 10 Jun 2003 15:31:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/ie-plugins-list/ Update: As you can probably tell from the “Last updated on ‘Tue Aug 22 00:04:12 2006’” I’ve not touched this page for a while. I assume these no longer work so I’ve removed links to the executables and the executables themselves. I’ve been using IE almost exclusively on Windows since version 4 was released. It beat Netscape hands down and it was actually quite useable. Unfortunately once Netscape was firmly thrashed (Although i did still have to put up with it on Linux. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/dqsd-searches/ Sat, 07 Jun 2003 19:40:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/dqsd-searches/ From the projects sourceforge home: "Dave’s Quick Search Deskbar is an add-on for the Windows Desktop Taskbar that lets you launch searches quickly. With dozens of search engines, a calculator, clock, calendar, and more in one little textbox, it’s monster functionality in a flea-sized GUI" What is DQSD? From the projects sourceforge home: "Dave’s Quick Search Deskbar is an add-on for the Windows Desktop Taskbar that lets you launch searches quickly. https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/miniproject-googlism-bookmarklet/ Thu, 15 May 2003 16:06:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/misctech/miniproject-googlism-bookmarklet/ Googlism is an amusing way of wasting ten minutes of time you’d otherwise spend reading your email. A better explanation from the official Googlism site itself is “Googlism.com will find out what Google thinks of you, your friends or anything!” A bookmarklet is a snippet of code that adds or enhances a web browsers functionality. They live in the same place as your bookmarks and allow easy access to tasks ranging from the trivial (resizing the browser window or turning images off) through to the more complex (running searches with whichever text you have highlighted as the search term or validating the html and links on the current page. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/gold-rush-book-review/ Sat, 23 Nov 2002 14:46:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/gold-rush-book-review/ Authors: Steve McConnell ISBN: 0735608776 Publisher: Microsoft Press One of the things that I used to find puzzling was how Microsoft Press released some of the best books on software engineering and application development while maintaining the level of quality they are famous for. I eventually realised that it was simple, all of the best programmers were writing books instead of code. When your sitting in front of a screen looking at another bluescreen cyou may argue with this being a good thing but if you’ve ever read any of McConnell’s other books such as Code Complete you’ll find the trade off to be acceptable. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/linux-clusters-book-review/ Sat, 23 Nov 2002 14:46:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/linux-clusters-book-review/ Author: David H. M. Spector ISBN: 1565926250 Publisher: O’Reilly Building Linux Clusters was a book that I had high hopes for. Clusters are one of my hobbies and when I discovered that the same publisher that bought Running Linux to me was behind I saw good things ahead. And then I got it. This book was held back for months from its initial release date. I can understand this since pretty much anything in the Linux word is a moving target and around the release date clusters were a prime example so when I got my copy of this book I was looking forward to reading about a subject I have an interest in. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/elements-of-prog-perl-book-review/ Sat, 23 Nov 2002 14:46:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/elements-of-prog-perl-book-review/ Author: Andrew Johnson ISBN: 1884777805 Publisher: Manning If you come from a non-programming background and you want to learn Perl go and buy this book. Now. The rest of the review will wait until you get back. If your coming to Perl from another language and you have basic to intermediate knowledge and experience of programming concepts go and buy this book. If you know Perl well then buy this book and when ever anyone asks you a lot of questions hand it to them and smile as you realise you’ve just done them a favour. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/linux-dns-server-admin-book-review/ Sat, 23 Nov 2002 14:46:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/linux-dns-server-admin-book-review/ Author: Craig Hunt ISBN: 0782127363 Publisher: Sybex DNS is one of the elite few subjects that inspire newbie admins to break out in a cold sweat at the merest mention of its name, along with sendmail it has the stigma of being a critical system allowing no down time making it difficult to learn or tinker with and having documentation that is far over shadowed by an O’Reilly book. When i came to need a good tutorial on DNS i went to the Linux Documentation project and skimmed over the introductions provided there and then prepared to shell out for the newest edition of the rather unfriendly cricket book after being left hungry for more in-depth coverage. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/xml-rpc-book-review/ Sat, 23 Nov 2002 14:46:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/xml-rpc-book-review/ Authors: Simon St Laurent, Ed Dumbill, Joe Johnston & John Posner ISBN: 0596001193 Publisher: O’Reilly Programming Web Services with XML-RPC is a slim concise volume that cuts out a lot of the current XML hype that plagues too many recent books and is all the better for its absence. The first two chapters of the book contain an overview of the XML-RPC standard itself and provide both a good overview of the technology and a flavour of the current implementations. https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/securing-nt-for-internet-book-review/ Sat, 23 Nov 2002 14:46:00 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/books/securing-nt-for-internet-book-review/ Author: Stefan Norberg ISBN: 1565927680 Publisher: O’Reilly I must admit that I was dubious about volunteering to cover this book when I saw it on offered on the list, I was expecting to open it up and see in huge letters, one to a page, Step 1 “Unplug the Ethernet cable.” Step 2 “Remove the power lead.” Step 3 “Feel secure.” But I thought what the hell, I work in a Windows shop so I’ll read it during the work day and get the company to cover my time. https://www.unixdaemon.net/about/ Wed, 01 Nov 2000 14:04:56 +0000 https://www.unixdaemon.net/about/ My name is Dean Wilson. UnixDaemon is my personal site built to make it matter of a few clicks to find the most up-to-date versions of my projects, whether they be code, articles or rants. Over time it has become my external memory, somewhere to put commands and code that I think I’ll need again but won’t remember. Hopefully some of them will be helpful to others. Anything written on here by me reflects the views of no one but myself, and in some cases even those views might not be current.