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. Read on →

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. Read on →

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. Read on →

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. Read on →

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. Read on →

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. Read on →

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. Read on →

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. Read on →

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. Read on →

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. Read on →