Unfortunately, I often find myself editing files that are mixed PHP and HTML, and ending with a “.php” extension. For most smaller projects/tasks, I use emacs at the command line (nox) and my .emacs settings for php-mode will latch onto the “.php” extension and open it with PHP mode …

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 …

There are a few unfortunate places where I have an Apache httpd server serving multiple vhosts, some behind a F5 BigIp load balancer and some with direct traffic. For sites behind the LB, the remote IP/host will always show up as the LB’s IP/host, not that of …

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 …

A few links that I’ve had in my “mention in a blog post” category for a while:

• Summary of Windows Azure Service Disruption on Feb 29th, 2012 - Windows Azure - Site Home - MSDN Blogs
  • a very detailed and interesting post on what caused the Windows Azure cloud outage on February …

If you keep up with news on the ‘net, you may have heard about photo sharing startup Instagram, which was purchased by Facebook for $1 Billion just 9 days after they released their Android app. Well, not only are they based mostly on open source software (well, yeah, pretty much …

I’ve had a bunch of tabs open in my browser for a while - stuff that I read, thought was wonderful, and wanted to comment on. At risk of letting it pile up forever, here’s a collection of links that I thought were really interesting or insightful…

• MongoDB is …

I just read a wondeful blog post by Adam Fletcher, What Does A Sysadmin Look Like In 10 Years?. This almost totally describes what I see as the future of system administors/engineers/architects, and DevOps. And what I try, or want, to do. It’s the most accurate and …

I recently had to setup Fedora 16 to test something on a SuperMicro 6015T-TV 1U “dual” server. This is a 1U enclosure with two separate servers in it - based on the SuperMicro X7DBT motherboards - each with an AOC-SIMSO+ IPMI and KVM-over-IP management card. Every time I …