If you’re like me and most humans, the Nagios logfile timestamp (a unix timestamp) isn’t terribly useful when trying to grep through the logs and correlate events:

# head -2 nagios.log
[1350360000] LOG ROTATION: DAILY
[1350360000] LOG VERSION: 2.0

Here’s a nifty Perl one-liner that you …

Recently I was working on a code release on a site running PHP on Apache httpd, and using memcached. Without getting into specifics, we had a number of issues that were both Apache and memcached problems, and little visibility into them as it was running on an older server without …

At work, we use Icinga (a fork of Nagios) for monitoring. We have a few services which are restarted or otherwise poked by event handlers, but the recovery takes a while - so we often get paged for problems which recover in a few minutes. I wrote a small perl script …

I try my absolute best to always install software on my Linux boxes as RPMs, installed through Yum (yes, I use CentOS on servers and Fedora on my desktops/laptops). Not only is this more-or-less required to sanely manage configuration through Puppet, but it also lets me recreate a …

I often find myself logging in to the web UI of F5 BigIp load balancers and tracing down a VIP address to the servers that actually back it. This is an arduous, repetitive task of tracing from the VIP list to the VIP details page to find the default pool …

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 …

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 …

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 …