Running is therapy

…of Google

Base Camp API


du -cksh * | sort -rn | head -11


I spent some time yesterday messing with drbd. I have to say, it’s quite cool. It ended up not being exactly what I wanted, but if you are considering a linux high availablity cluster, you’d be remiss not to look into this.

The reason it ended up not being just right for me was that I don’t have physical access to the machines I admin, and I am not doing the intial installation. We are leasing the servers. So it looks like I will have to go with a less elegant solution. Not horrible mind you, but block level syncronization would rock.

Just ordered an EZ-PASS from the PA turnpike squad. They have a mandatory field on the application for “How did you hear about us”. I of course lied so as to skew their data. This is awefully cavalier of them.

I have been using tada list for a while. I like the interface. The problem with todo lists is that the user has to actually use them for them to be effective.

Scroogle is a site that proxies google results, and supposedly keeps no records. With the current political climate a little more anonimity might be in order.

So yesterday I learned two things…and today I learned them again :)

1. Perl’s exec, “The “exec” function executes a system command and never returns”…which means if it’s executed in a loop, the loop will run once and never come back. Had I realized that is what that meant (I took that to mean that the thing you were execing wouldn’t be back) I would have used system()…which I did.

2. Eric pointed out in IRC that the cause of my disconnections was caused by a router setting and not ssh. While I wasn’t sure what was causing them, the below config changes did meet my needs. It must send a ping (or releated) every so often to make the router think there is some action between hosts. It was nice not to have to grep for .swp files today after short periods of inactivity.

My new post has me doing a lot more admining than I had been at the last job and I am tackling some neat stuff.

New things learned today:

1: Perl does not like it when you use shell pipes in backticks (ie. `cat foo | grep bar` won’t work.) You have to use ‘exec’… exec “cat foo | grep bar”;

2: sshd does not try to keep connections open by default (meaning, it will drop you if there is no data sent to the server after a certain amount of time). You can change this by editing /etc/ssh/sshd_config, and editing the lines ‘ClientAliveInterval 0′ and ‘ClientAliveCountMax 3′ ( make those whatever you like, I used 30 b/c I locked myself out of a server today testing /etc/hosts.deny ;)

It seems to be working.

Until next time!

I borrowed this book from Lon. It’s good, however already several chapters in, I haven’t really heard anything new that I didn’t get from the perlcast that I posted about a few weeks ago. I was happy to see that I already try to do some of the things he suggests.

Most is the PAA, the perlsonal analog assistant. I always have a notebook near by, anytime some asks me to do something I write it down on a list. This keeps me on track and is probably the single best thing I do. Nothing gets lost, things get done, because I can look at the list and prioritize. Now I am not the most efficient person in the world, but this keeps me from looking bad.

I decided to start using version control on /etc and ~/. I was talking to Sparty and he mentioned that he had been doing this for his ~/ directory. Sounded like a good idea.

A word of caution. Subversion (as well as others I assume), doesn’t preserve permissions. Upon reboot I had to chmod a few things to get back to normal. I did a quick google about preserving permissions but didn’t see anything in the requisite 4 minutes of searching. If you know of a way to do that please post a comment.

Overall though I am pretty pleased with the result. Now I can run etc-update with impunity!