Archive for November, 2008

I typically use /etc/cron.d to store all of my system crontabs. I recently ran into an issue that I had either not run into before, or fixed and paid no attention to. Files stored in /etc/cron.d/ or any /etc/cron.* directory need to adhear to the run-parts Debian cron script namespace which consists is

(^[a-z0-9][a-z0-9-]*$)

for the regex impared this does not include the dot character. If you have a file in /etc/cron.d/ that has a dot in it it will not be evaluated by cron. I have seen mention of underscore not being valid but in my testing underscore was not an issue, only dots.

As you by now well know I try to mostly live at the console (well multiple x consoles). Mutt is my mail client of choice. I’ve tried Thunderbird, Kmail, Evolution, Sylpheed, and pine. For whatever reason I feel most comfortable with mutt. I also use IMAP for both my personal and work accounts. Mutt was originally designed to deal with local mail and while it does a very good job with IMAP I don’t like how it handles multiple accounts.
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Rarely do I get emails that are worthy of even reading let alone sharing with others. This one however, is pretty funny, and seems to be fairly accurate.
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Recently I had to move a website that gets a fair amount of traffic. I prepared for this by lowering the TTL on the domains associated several weeks in advance to 600 seconds. Originally my plan was to toss up a maintenance page on the old server, change the DNS, and figured that within a few hours max the vast majority of DNS servers would have the update being that TTL had been set at 600 seconds for several weeks and prior to that it was set at 48 hours. This was all planned for the middle of the night on a weekend (very slow traffic time). I was in for a rude awakening the next morning.
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