10 Jan 2008

Simplifying Web Framework Deployment on Shared Hosting

On Dreamhost freaking out because they can’t get Rails deployed reliably.

tomayko.com   02:18

16 Apr 2010

Mac OS X SSD tweaks

Great set of tips for eking out disk performance on MacOS X, like disabling last access time tracking. These are just as useful in non-SSD configs.

blogs.nullvision.com   15:34

28 Feb 2010

Running Processes

Dustin Sallings lays out a nice list of simple, non-pid-polling process supervision techniques available on various Unix and Linux environments. Great reference. I’m pretty sure the /etc/inittab respawn directive is one of the most underrated utilities in Linux server environments.

dustin.github.com   14:10

02 Nov 2009

Notes on using NetBSD’s pkgsrc on Mac OS X

I’ve dumped MacPorts for pkgsrc. This quick tutorial helped me get going and this package browser is awesome.

rubenerd.com   20:38

28 Oct 2009

memcache-top

Nice little self-contained perl script that shows a basic memcached top display for a list of servers.

$ curl http://memcache-top.googlecode.com/files/memcache-top-v0.6 >
  ~/bin/memcache-top
$ chmod +x ~/bin/memcache-top
$ memcache-top --sleep 1 --instances memcache1,memcache2,memcache3

That gives you this:

memcached-top

Nifty.

code.google.com   09:17

23 Oct 2009

almosteffortless.com   05:34

10 Sep 2009

Prime-Numbers.org

Prime number browser and generator for all primes smaller than 10,000,000,000 (so called “small” primes). Enter a number and find the prime that follows it — super useful in a variety of server administration and manual cryptography tasks. Also, “there’s totally 455,042,511 prime numbers.” Neat.

prime-numbers.org   04:40

10 Sep 2008

Effortless Thread Dump for Ruby:

Dump the stack trace of all threads in a running ruby process by signaling with -QUIT. Requires patching the ruby interpreter, which sucks because I need it for a process running right now.

ph7spot.com   04:10

26 Aug 2008

tcpdump for Dummies

Alexander Sandler’s get-up-and-running guide to the tcpdump packet sniffer.

alexandersandler.net   18:07

02 Apr 2008

Why aren’t you using ionice yet???

I’m more than a little embarased that I’ve never heard of this utility. I think most modern kernels prioritize IO with normal nice, though…

friedcpu.wordpress.com   01:33

17 Mar 2008

Consistent Hashing

Superbly explained and with extremely useful circly diagrams. Bravo.

spiteful.com   21:47

27 Feb 2008

FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE Announcement

I thought I had a few more months. Dammit. This is going to be a huge time-sink.

freebsd.org   18:02

25 Feb 2008

Csh Programming Considered Harmful

Uggghhh. I just spent 30 minutes hunting some arcane tcsh bug caused by coreutils dircolors. This is my revenge. I don’t even know I had any csh code running on this machine. It turns out that MacOS X’s /usr/bin/which is implemented in csh. Dumb.

faqs.org   05:06

22 Feb 2008

Process title support for Mongrel

Constantly updates the the process title ($0) with something like: “mongrel_rails [10010/2/358]: handling 127.0.0.1: HEAD /feed/calendar/global/91/6de4”. Let’s you monitor backends with ps and top.

purefiction.net   14:16

20 Feb 2008

Chroot in OpenSSH

“… adds a chroot(2) facility to sshd, controlled by a new sshd_config(5) option ‘ChrootDirectory’. This can be used to ‘jail’ users into a limited view of the filesystem, such as their home directory …”

undeadly.org   18:11

11 Feb 2008

Ubuntu's Upstart event-based init daemon

I have a strange fetish for init systems (sysv, rc, launchd, etc). This is the first quick introduction to Ubuntu’s new init system (Upstart) I’ve seen. Nice examples of using the initctl command and writing job files.

linux.com   04:49

05 Feb 2008

htop - top(1) replacement with hierarchical process listing, nicer keyboard interface, and more...

Runs on Linux and FreeBSD (with linproc mounted on /compat/linux/proc). I’ve always wondered why top(1) just kind of stopped being developed 10 years ago.

htop.sourceforge.net   14:53

03 Feb 2008

SwitchPipe - Process Manager and Proxy for Rapid Web App Deployment

Peter Cooper scratches the deployment problem itch.

switchpipe.org   12:48

29 Jan 2008

pv(1) - Pipe Viewer

pv can be inserted into any normal pipeline between two processes to give a visual indication of how quickly data is passing through, how long it has taken, and an estimate of how long it will be until completion.

ivarch.com   06:44

23 Jan 2008

put a proxy in front

“… even if you have a single server, a proxy in front can help performance significantly. Through the simple expedient of buffering, your heavyweight processes don’t waste time serving every request for the entire length of time the client is connected”

joshua.schachter.org   22:09

16 Jan 2008

In Unix, what do some obscurely named commands stand for?

Dennis Ritchie: “There was a facility that would execute a bunch of commands stored in a file; it was called runcom for ‘run commands’, and the file began to be called ‘a runcom’. rc in Unix is a fossil from that usage.”

kb.iu.edu   23:21

12 Jan 2008

Reverse proxy roundup

Bob Ippolito wrote up some pros and cons to reverse proxy implementations in different servers a few months back. I don’t think much of it is out of date at this point but nginx isn’t represented.

bob.pythonmac.org   07:25

What PHP Deployment Gets Right

Ian takes a look at some of the attributes of PHP’s deployment model, why they work so well (for PHP), and why other environments have such a hard time duplicating them.

blog.ianbicking.org   07:17

10 Jan 2008

Shared Hosting is a Ghetto

“The constraints, the instability, and the unpredictability of a shared hosting environment are a big part of the reason why the web hosting business is moving towards virtualization everywhere you look. Big kids need their own sandboxes to play in.”

al3x.net   04:35

Steal This Wi-Fi

Schneier advocates running an open wireless network at home. I’ve been doing this for about a year because I couldn’t get the Wii to work with security enabled. When I thought about it, I came to many of the same conclussions Bruce does in the article.

wired.com   04:03

07 Jan 2008

Nmap for Beginners

I can never remember nmap args for some reason…

blog.fourthirty.org   00:42

07 Nov 2007

Bwana

Manual page URL handler for Safari (e.g., “man:bash”, “man:sort” in URL box). References to other man pages are hyperlinked very nicely and the pages themselves are formatted quite nicely.

bruji.com   16:02

12 Oct 2007

Configuring Apache httpd

Starting with absolutely no configuration file. This is why I’ve prefered lighttpd, because I can put together a separate config in about five minutes. httpd’s sprawling default config has always scared the crap out of me.

links.org   04:54

03 Oct 2007

The rsync(1) Algorithm

Some detail on rsync’s “rolling checksum” algorithm invented by Andrew Tridgell.

en.wikipedia.org   07:33

02 Oct 2007

Good Shell Coding Practices - Handling Command Line Arguments

Very nice look at different methods (good and bad) for handling the command line in sh scripts.

shelldorado.com   00:59

22 Sep 2007

Cronic - A cure for Cron's chronic email problem

“… cron’s pathological behavior has be petrified into the Unix standards. So if it isn’t broken, it isn’t cron.”

habilis.net   04:39

16 May 2007

howtoforge.com   01:10

05 May 2007

Exploring the Mac OS X Firewall [macdevcenter.com]

Awesome look at using advanced features of ipfw(8) on OS X.

macdevcenter.com   17:36

Does Linux "Fail To Think Across Layers?" [slashdot.org]

Slashdot has become a horrible discussion forum for most topics. Disk theory and UNIX sysadmin type stuff is an exception, though. This story on ZFS might have the most informational comments I’ve seen in years.

linux.slashdot.org   12:26