I’ve been doing a lot of RPM packaging lately, and on different (and very old) distros and versions. Sometimes I lose track of all of the macros used in specfiles (_bindir _sbindir dist _localstatedir, etc). There’s no terribly easy way to dump a list of all of the …

The bulk of this post was written way back in April 2012. If you’re just coming here, and looking to setup oVirt, you should probably skip down to the postscript for an update, and ignore most of the content here (as it’s applicable to an older oVirt version …

I’ve recently started casual work on a side-project to collect, store, and analyze apache logs from a bunch of servers - for the initial implementation, I’m looking to handle about 15M access_log lines per day (that works out to 173 lines/second assuming an even distribution, which there certainly …

At $WORK we lost a disk in the RAID1 of one of our external nameservers, and it rekindled an occasional discussion of migration from ISC BIND to PowerDNS. PowerDNS has separate authoritative and recursive servers, and doesn’t seem to natively support views or split-horizon the way BIND does, but …

In an earlier post, Piwik Web Analytics, and some unfortunate stats about my blog, I mentioned that the Feedburner stats for this blog show a relatively high subscribe/unsubscribe rate for this blog. I think a large part of that is my tendency to blog in spurts, and even worse …

Here is a small selection of sysadmin links that I recently found, and wanted to share:

• Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture - Code as Craft
  • some really good ideas about a culture that recognizes and seeks to remedy human errors, rather than punishing and generating fear.
• The first pillar: We …

I’ve been working on a personal project with Logstash lately, and it relies relatively heavily on grok filters for matching text and extracting matched parts. Today, I’ve been parsing syslog from Puppet to extract various metrics and timings, which will then be passed on from Logstash to Etsy …

Back in March when I selected a new template for this blog, I posted that I was looking into open source self-hosted web analytics tools to replace Google Analytics. There were a few reasons for this; most importantly, it started from a discussion with some privacy-conscious coworkers, who said that …

I have a few more custom facts that I’ve added to my puppet-facter-facts github repository:

• syslog_bin, syslog_type, and syslog_version
  • tell the absolute path to the running syslog binary, its short name (basename), and its version as a string. Currently only know about /sbin/syslogd and /sbin/rsyslogd.
• has_netbackup
  • tests …

I’m unfortunatey stuck, at least for the time being, using flat-file manifests to configure my puppet nodes. Without an ENC, it’s pretty difficult to get a good ovewview of what classes are used on each node, and what nodes use a given class. I know I could write …