One of my favorite things about Debian is its awesome package management system. Apt is one of the reasons I have used Debian for servers for so many years and eased my initial transition to Ubuntu (which as most people know was initially a Debian fork). Apt is a great tool as long as you aren’t building packages from source (and not making debs out of them). I have packaged a whole bunch of debs, but sometimes it just isn’t necessary. So if you haven’t used equivs, then you need to check it out.
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Erics Tech Blog Thoughts, musings, and other idealistic (sometimes useful) systems and development hoopla.
Creating Dummy Packages On Debian
4 May 2010 — ericMonitoring Services with Nagios::Plugin
7 Apr 2010 — ericThere are a lot of people who say, “if it isn’t monitored, then it isn’t a service.” The problem is that I don’t think enough people outside of the systems world believe that or even understand why its said. I think the primary offenders here are developers. It isn’t because they don’t know better, but typically developers just want to get the application up and running and then move on to developing the next thing. I also think there is some fault on the side of the administrators and the managers not insisting that part of the completed version of a project includes monitoring. But I don’t want to harp on this as much as I would like to show just how easy it is to compensate here by taking advantage of Nagios::Plugin.
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Cluster SSH with cSSHx
29 Mar 2010 — ericI am in the middle of building out a group of about 25 machines in a data center for my company. I hadn’t really dove into it on a micro level until a few days ago. I was moving around on individual machines that others were working on. When I had gotten to one of the “untouched” machines, I found that vim wasn’t installed. There was about 15 machines that were “untouched” and therefore were missing vim (along with other stuff). And seriously who wants to install a bunch of the same software on every machine after they’ve already been kickstarted?
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Git Branch Name in Your Bash Prompt
11 Dec 2009 — ericI work with a few repositories at any given time. And during that time, I typically have multiple branches created for each repository. I figured that it would make my life easier if I knew which branch and/or repository I was working in. Luckily, very little hackery is required here since the git distribution already comes with such a tool. (Note: If you didn’t build Git from source, then you may not have this file.)
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