Local management tools are critical for most Linux and Unix distributions. For instance, if you delete Python 2.6 from your Ubuntu installation, it becomes more or less unusable. This is because most local management tools are written in Python. I have no problem with this. On the contrary, I think it makes a whole lot of sense to write management tools in a …
While upgrading to Python 2.7 on one of our development servers (FreeBSD 7.2), I ran across a somewhat strange error with Django (or rather mod_wsgi). Since I didn’t find a whole lot useful results when I Googled for it, I decided to do a brief write-up about it. The error I received was as follows: \[Errno 13\] Permission denied: ‘/nonexistent’ As it turns …
My experience with VMware goes way back. I think the first version I ever used was VMware Workstation 4.0 back in ’03. That’s seven years ago. Back then it was really cool as a proof-of-concept, but not very useful as the hardware didn’t have enough power (primarily RAM) to run multiple OS’es simultaneously (or, at least my hardware). A few years ago I …
I watched a really interesting TED-talk last night that I wanted to share with all of you. It’s on the topic of human irrationality and how it is mirrored in monkeys. The verdict is that monkeys make the same irrational decisions as humans make, despite the fact that we know they’re irrational decisions. Here’s the video:
I will rant a bit about how pathetic the U.S. banks are, so if you don’t want to read about that, jump down to ‘End Rant.’ Rant Banks in the US are kind of like the movie industry. They realize that their golden days are over, and will therefor try to squeeze every penny out of you. The two industries are also in denial about the fact that the entire world …
Recently I had to set up an intranet search engine to crawl trough thousands of PDF files. There are a ton of commercial solutions (read: $$$$ ) out there on the market, ranging from Google Search Appliance to IBM’s OmniFind. There are also a few good Open Source engines, such as Apache’s Lucene. The problem is that these are primarily intended for …
This idea hit me this morning. Assuming you have a decent connection at home (not ADSL or Cable that is), Amazon S3 (or Jungle Disk) makes a pretty nice back-bone for a home NAS. It is fairly cheap and you will no longer worry about growing out of your array or failing disks. Yes, I reckon that if you store your data without encryption (even in a private …
To increase the reliability of our backups at WireLoad, we wanted to utilize S3. Obviously we couldn’t just send our backups to S3 without encrypting them, so GnuPG was part of the equation from the beginning. As I started my research, I found a ton guides on how to utilize a variety of backup tools to get your backups delivered to S3. Some of the tools …
Last night we rolled out a new version of Chronicle.IM to the production servers. The product is not quite ready yet, but you can sign up with your email address if you want to be invited to the beta-version. Over the next few weeks we will start letting a few beta-testers in. If everything goes well, we will invite more. So what is Chronicle.IM? The slogan …
Yesterday I posted an article on how to monitor Apache and PostgreSQL with Monit. After setting that up I was amazed how simple and flexible Monit was, so I moved on with two more tasks: monitor Nginx and disk usage. This article assumes that you’ve set up Monit in accordance with the previous article. It also assumes that you’re on Ubuntu 9.10 or 10.04. If …