While trying to clone a repository from Github the other day on one of my EC2 servers and I ran into an SSL verification issue. As it turns out, Github renewed their SSL certificate (as people who are responsible about their web presence do when their certificate is about to expire). As a result, I …
By eric
Anyone who has spent any time in a shell and has been cut off while working should know about screen. If not, then I recommend reading up on it (here or here). But I’m not here to tell you about screen as a general tool, I want to show you how to use it for …
By eric
I recently had a very repetitive configuration file that needed creating. There were approximately 50 config blocks of 10 lines each with only the host name changing with each block. So I decided to take a shortcut and do it in Ruby using ERB templates. This is so easy and literally save me hours worth …
By eric
Since one of the core communication methods for my company amongst engineers is 37Signals Campfire and Nagios is one of our main monitoring tools for all of our applications and services, I thought it would be a good idea to combine the two. So with a few simple additions to the Nagios configuration and a …
By eric
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 …
By eric
There 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 …
By eric
I 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 …
By eric
I recently had to setup daemontools on a CentOS system. I had set it up before but it had been a while. So I Google’d around and found very little and what little I did find wasn’t very helpful. So here is a quick and dirty on setting up daemontools. I even included the CentOS …
By eric
If something happens that requires you to recreate /dev/null on your *nix system. Don’t fret, it’s easy. The most recent issue I had was that a Capistrano recipe inadvertently clobbered /dev/null. The file looked like this: 12[root@web1 ~]# ls -l /dev/null -rw-r--r-- 1 capistrano engineering 0 May 26 04:02 /dev/null Thankfully to bring it back …
By eric
