June 25, 2010

Useful Utility: less

Less is more. That’s the common joke about less- It provides the same functionality as the older utility, more; but oh, how much more than more! Less allows you to easily scan backwards as well as forwards- something more is not too good at (though it is possible). Less also allows you to navigate with arrow keys, page up and page down, home and end. Less provides a quick way to view files as well- Many editors (like vim) need to read an entire file first, and often create a temporary copy (for editing) of the file.

June 18, 2010

Updated to 3.0

Now lets see what breaks…

June 2, 2010

Dear Cyberhomes.com

Some day I hope you’ll join us in the future, where websites don’t fail miserably for having the wrong user-agent string. Here’s the problem- I go to check my home value at cyberhomes only to receive the following message on every single page: Your browser is not supported. We do not support your browser yet… If you are on a Windows machine please use: * Internet Explorer 6 and up

May 14, 2010

Port Conventions

Over the past few years I’ve been doing a lot of work with JBoss and tomcat. One issue we’ve always had is bringing some level of sanity to ports that are in use. My current situation is somewhat abnormal; we have 12 applications, each with two instances, each with 7 ports- that’s a total of 168 ports that we need to keep track of. Now, multiply that by tomcat, apache and nagios’ configurations.

May 12, 2010

Nagios LDAP Contact Creator Script

The Following is an ugly little perl script I’ve whipped up for generating contact entries for Nagios; each file is read via a cfg_dir command in the nagios.cfg. This script is set to run nightly, capturing any new users and updating users and groups automagically. Let me know if you find it useful. <pre lang="perl"> #!/usr/bin/perl # read your ldap repo and generation nagios config files for contacts # and contact_groups use strict; use Net::LDAP; use Data::Dumper; # Set all your custom configs here: my $ldaphostname='ldap.

April 21, 2010

Dandelion Fluff

This sorta puts it in perspective… One of my few remaining coworkers at EPI made the following comment: (11:33:42 AM) Jeff: so many gone (11:34:10 AM) Jeff: jesse matt carrie lisa stacey kurt roger jim naveen brandon lee bink tristan jason jen sean drew radha VJ jackie andy noelle whip reedy jeremy keith ryan pankaj nirupa asad santhi rick limer meads mick (11:34:42 AM) Jesse: you should post that as a facebook status update.

April 13, 2010

I am Disappoint, son

SUBJECT: [#24413540] Suspension Notice CPU Limits Reached (1st Warning) Hello, Due to the amount of CPU and/or memory resources used by your account, we were forced into suspending the account. Please understand that we only suspend an account as a last resort and want to help you track down the cause as quickly as possible. Shared servers (MegaPhase, Prophase, and ANHosting accounts) are only allotted 10% of the server’s resources (CPU and Memory) at any given time.

March 12, 2010

Tomcat Symlink Fun

Here’s how I stumbled across this (names changed to protect the guilty): Suppose you have 4 tomcat instances, A1, A2, B1 and B2. A1 and A2 run application Apple/. B1 and B2 run application Breakfast. Someone decided “Hey, we can save deployment time if we symlink A1 and A2 to the same directory.” Obvious questions aside (why bother setting up two if they’re going to be hosting the same content on the same box?

March 9, 2010

Complex ACLs in Apache Locations

So the problem I’m having is with limiting LDAP users access to WebDAV directories; specifically, how do I keep devs from committing to the release branch. The setup is each of the large Projects (Project1, Project2) has a trunk and release branch; however some pesky devs try to ninja changes into the release branch, circumventing the entire process. That’s bad. The access should go like this (note this is a subset of the mess I’m dealing with):

February 9, 2010

Time warp.

I watch a lot of TV… well, I should qualify that; I do a lot of stuff with the TV on. I pay attention to the shows, but I’ll be doing other things. Since about halfway through November I started losing track of shows- mainly because of the stupid seasonal holiday crap. Here’s the stuff that I’ve watched at one time and lost track of: Dollhouse (Finished) Defying Gravity (Finished) Fringe (Caught up as of Feb 12th) Tosh.