Lately I’ve been playing around with the VMWare vSphere SDK for Perl, since the new job uses a bunch of VMWare stuff (and I’ve been starting my foray into Perl as a new language, and am amazed by the massive number of modules out there). As much as …

As you may know from former posts, this blog (WordPress-powered) and a few MediaWiki sites that I have use the excellent PHP-based GeSHi syntax highlighter. Today I was writing a post that includes some Icinga (Nagios) configuration snippets. After a quick search, I found a Nagios language file …

I’ve been doing some work on icinga (a Nagios fork) and wanted to implement notification via AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), since I’m almost always signed on when I’m at a computer. Unfortunately, most of the scripts that I could find use Net::AIM::TOC which implements a …

Update November 2013: This post has brought an amazing amount of traffic to my blog, probably because it still seems to be one of the only ENC comparisons out there. Both Dashboard (and Puppet Enterprise Console) and The Foreman have changed quite a bit since I wrote this. Foreman has …

I recently discovered the petit program for log analysis. It’s a simple tool to pull out useful information from syslog logs in a variety of ways. I’ve only used it a few times so far, mainly on logs from problems I’ve already solved but didn’t know …

Yesterday I was asked to help out a bit debugging issues with a site that sits behind a F5 BIG-IP load balancer (LB). It’s a pretty simple site, load balanced between two web servers. The developers were complaining about intermittent page load issues, so I immediately considered a …

Since I always seem to forget this wonderful feature of GNU screen (probably one of the pieces of software I use the most every day)…

• To split the current region horizontally into two equal regions: C-a S
• To switch between those regions: C-a Tab
• To close all regions but the …

Both my last and current jobs use MediaWiki for internal documentation. As always happens, some of this documentation will inevitably get out-of-date, or totally deprecated. As is also the case, many times when we’re looking for docs in the middle of an incident, we don’t have the time …

I just installed Fedora 16 on an older IBM ThinkPad T42 laptop. Unfortunately, the two mouse buttons below the UltraNav touchpad just won’t work at all. Before opening up the case and fiddling around, I decided to try a software solution. Even after fairly exhaustive research, I couldn’t …

Two interesting presentations - which, unfortunately, I only heard the audio for (they came up in my podcast playlist during my commute today).

For the non-techie-geeks out there, All Your Brains Suck - Known Bugs And Exploits In Wetware: OSCON 2011 - O’Reilly Conferences, July 25 - 29, 2011, Portland, OR is an …