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. Read on →

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. Read on →

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. Read on →

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? Read on →

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. Read on →

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. Read on →

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. Read on →

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.

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. Read on →

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. Read on →