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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HOWTO Recreate /dev/null
27 May 2009 — ericIf 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:
[root@web1 ~]# ls -l /dev/null
-rw-r--r-- 1 capistrano engineering 0 May 26 04:02 /dev/null
-rw-r--r-- 1 capistrano engineering 0 May 26 04:02 /dev/null
Thankfully to bring it back to its original state, just run the following commands:
[root@web1 ~]# rm /dev/null
rm: remove regular empty file `/dev/null'? yes
[root@web1 ~]# mknod /dev/null c 1 3
[root@web1 ~]# chmod 666 /dev/null
[root@web1 ~]# ls -l /dev/null
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 3 May 26 15:09 /dev/null
rm: remove regular empty file `/dev/null'? yes
[root@web1 ~]# mknod /dev/null c 1 3
[root@web1 ~]# chmod 666 /dev/null
[root@web1 ~]# ls -l /dev/null
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 3 May 26 15:09 /dev/null
Take note of the following things:
- It is not a joke that the mode of /dev/null needs to be 666. It should be user, group, and world read and write.
- The user and group ownership here is root.
- There is no size in the ls like you see in the top one. All you should see are the major (1) and minor (3) device numbers (separated by a comma) prior to the date.
