The Drobo is supposed to be one of those solutions that essentially pops out of the box and with very little effort, just works. I ordered my Drobo FS through an Amazon retailer. What I wasn’t expecting was an experience…
By eric
I have been trying to figure out how, while using OptionParser to be able to check for files being input on the command line and if they don’t exist, check other input streams (like Bash). This initially wasn’t very easy since input streams are blocking. So with a little help from friends (thanks roberto), I …
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
In case you haven’t heard about the new Massachusetts state law regarding consumer or client information in databases, you can read about it here, at Information Week, or just Google for “Massachusetts data security law”. And if you haven’t read about, then I strongly suggest you do. This is one of those instances where I …
By eric
I don’t know what the right answer is, so any insight would be appreciated. From Googling around, I came across this thread on StackOverflow which talks about Validating exits and aborts in Rspec. I have a few issues with this, namely that I am using shoulda and I don’t want to validate the exit, I …
By eric
One of the best ways to learn something new is to find a project in that realm and do it. I wanted to learn Ruby on Rails, so I wrote a web site. I wanted to learn Python, so I did a project in it for work. Now I want to get better at Ruby, …
By eric
I work with email and Postfix. On every mailing machine I have Postfix setup on, I have at least 2 instances, sometimes more (in fact, sometimes its as many as 6 instances). I was recently setting up a new set of mailers and decided to give Postfix multi-instance seutp a try. It was excellent. There …
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 use Capistrano to deploy my webapps and have been for a while. I also deploy right from my laptop quite frequently. So I was a little taken aback when I could deploy in one place and not in another. It turned out that Capistrano was having issues with deploying to multiple servers. In fact, …
By eric
