Archive for December, 2008

I posted about Tom Limoncelli and his Time Management for System Administrators. I have written a simple wrapper to do pre and post processing of a todo file as it is opened and closed to somewhat mirror “the cycle”. If your interested you can find a bit more information on todo-cycle here.

It’s not new news but I havent seen anyone else mention it. Ben Rockwood over at cuddletech had his second SA Pro podcast with Tom Limoncelli, it covers time management. It’s a good listen, I’m still waiting for him to setup a feed for the podcasts. Tom has some good advice, I have picked up a few things and read his Time Management for System Administrators since listening to the podcast. At any rate check out the podcast http://cuddletech.com/sapro/.

Im sure everyone is familiar with smb messages especially as everyone was assulted with them about 10 years ago (stupid soho routers and spammers unite!). Anyway, there are clients for linux like Linpopup. Well recently I didn’t want to use one of those to be able to send messages to my linux workstations so I cobbled together a simple network popup app with python. (more…)

I just wanted to make sure no one forgets that wildcards can be used in your .ssh/config. This can be extremely helpful. For example say you have 100 nodes that have a simple nameing scheme of nodexxxx. You can add the following into your ssh config and pre-poplulate settings.

Host node*
    User staffuser
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/staff_key

That would cause any ssh connection matching node* to use the user staffuser and .ssh/staff_key as the ssh key. By the same token you could do this.

Host *.locallan.domin.com
    User me

This could be useful if you have networks of machines that hook into different authentication systems. Nothing groundbreaking by any means but its useful so dont forget about it.

With small websites sometimes you need to put up a maintenance page while you are making some modifications. Typically you should have some staging enviornment but sometimes infrastructure does not allow for this. If you find your self in this situation you might like this tip. (more…)

I use vim for the vast majority of my editing. It can be a bit cumbersom to hit esc each time you want to perform a command while in insert mode. Using ctrl o will put you in command mode for the next command. Give it a try sometime it may or may not make you more effective with vim.

I have a pretty good memory when it comes to juggling multiple tasks but I am (and have been for some time) trying to break my self of using my brain to store everything. One area a worklog benefits is when you want to look back over time and see what your were working on several months ago (this can be helpful for reviews). At any rate there are many tools to do similar things. At any rate I wrote a simple tool to try and help with this. Feel free to take it modify it or comment on the horrible code. (more…)

Some projects have production code that runs off of a git cloned repository. There may be a case in which you want to notify others when that clone pulls. It is a pretty easy feat with gits post-merge hook. The post-merge hook will run after a merge (think git pull). All you have to do it create a project/.git/hooks/post-merge shell script and chmod +x it. Next time you pull successfully that script will run. Here is an example.

#!/bin/bash
TEMPLOG=$(mktemp)
echo "Sending email notification of update"
git log --reverse --no-merges --stat @{1}.. < $TEMPLOG
sendEmail -u "Production code update notification" -t recipient@domain.com < $TEMPLOG
rm $TEMPLOG

I see Samuel Huckins just had a post about apachetop http://dancingpenguinsoflight.com/2008/12/top-for-apache-activity/ which I have been meaning to mention for a while, but being that there is a fresh post about it I will mention Mytop instead.

Mytop is top for mysql. It can be used for monitoring the threads and overall performance of a MySQL.

Its an easy install in debain with a quick aptitude install mytop.

Here is some example output (sorry my mysql server isnt very busy atm).

I was recently asked how to change screens working directory. It took me a few minutes to realize the benefit of this as I typically have different screen sessions for different purposes. But after thinking about it for a few minutes I have been in situations where what I was doing in a screen session morphed and it would have been nice for new windows to be opened to a different working directory than where I started my session.

A few minutes of grepping around in man -a screen gave the answer.

C-a:chdir /path/to/new/dir