Archive | Linux

26 April 2012 ~ Comments Off

Speeding up Vagrant with parallel provisioning

Vagrant is an amazing tool. It's quite substantially changed my workflows in a variety of areas. It's a particularly interesting tool for building packages or running tests across multiple OS's or distributions from a single set of scripts. A recent example of the usefulness of Vagrant is the new packaging and testing work undertaken in [...]

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27 February 2012 ~ Comments Off

One Liner: Ifstat

Recently I tried ifstat on a freshly updated linux box with a 3.2 kernel, it was reporting nothing (0kb) although the network was heavily used.

A quick one-liner confirmed this and I decided to keep it here for later use:

export IFACE=eth0 ; wh…

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02 February 2012 ~ Comments Off

Sensu and Graphite

It's been pretty exciting to see the number of folks getting involved with Sensu lately, as judging by the increased activity on the #sensu channel on Freenode. One of the most common questions is how to integrate Sensu and Graphite. In this article I'll cover two approaches for pushing metrics from Sensu to Graphite. Remember: [...]

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25 January 2012 ~ Comments Off

Re-use Nagios plugins in Sensu for quick profit

In my previous article I mentioned a key strength of Sensu is the ability to re-use existing Nagios plugins. This is a powerful feature of Sensu. Nagios has been around for at least 1000 years according to most recent archaeological discoveries, which means a vast amount of human effort (and capital) has gone into creating [...]

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20 January 2012 ~ Comments Off

Getting started with the Sensu monitoring framework

(5/15/2012) NOTE: This guide has been superseded by the official ‘Install Guide‘ doc on the Sensu wiki. The new process utilizes the simpler Omnibus-style Sensu packages and covers installation on Debian/Ubuntu platforms as well. Please use this guide instead of the instructions below. I’m excited about Sensu, a new open source monitoring framework, and I’d [...]

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13 December 2011 ~ Comments Off

Which Linux distribution for a MySQL server?

I was pleased to read this link on the excellent MySQL Performance Blog.

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05 October 2011 ~ Comments Off

Staying DRY with Bash indirect references

I should start this post by saying I don’t recommend this method for all situations due to potential security issues, as well as some readability tradeoffs. If that didn’t scare you off, keep reading. I was faced recently with a situation where I needed to update a MySQL clone script written in bash to pull [...]

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22 August 2011 ~ Comments Off

Using Jenkins as a Cron Server

There are a number of problems with cron which cause lots of grief for system administrators with big ones being manageability, cron-spam and auditability. To fix some of these issues I have lately started using Jenkins. Jenkins is an open source Continuous Integration server it has lots of features that make it a great cron [...]

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22 August 2011 ~ Comments Off

Using Jenkins as a Cron Server

There are a number of problems with cron which cause lots of grief for system administrators with big ones being manageability, cron-spam and auditability. To fix some of these issues I have lately started using Jenkins. Jenkins is an open source Continuous Integration server it has lots of features that make it a great cron [...]

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23 June 2011 ~ Comments Off

Command-line cookbook dependency solving with knife exec

Imagine you have a fairly complicated infrastructre with a large number of nodes and roles. Suppose you have a requirement to take one of the nodes and rebuild it in an entirely new network, perhaps even for a completely different organization. …

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