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 As always happens, some of this documentation will inevitably get out-of-date, or totally deprecated.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 …

Well, good news about SOPA. All of my sites participated in the SOPA Strike. While I didn’t fully black everything out (I guess I wasn’t keeping up enough on what others were doing…), I displayed a full-screen popover with a message (I have a version of my homepage …

I’m in the process of moving all of my public-facing services, currently hosted on a single Linode, to a new virtual machine (still with Linode, of course, just a new CentOS 6 VM). Of course, I’ve got a lot (about 60) of DNS records, spread across 8 domains …

Since I moved all of my WAN-facing stuff (mail, web, this blog, svn etc.) to a virtual server with Linode, and just have a desktop at home, it’s no longer practical to use Bacula for backups. Linode manages daily and weekly backups through their backup service, but they …

The Wp-Syntax plugin for WordPress provides syntax highlighting for WordPress blogs via the GeSHi PHP syntax highlighter. Unfortunately, the plugin includes a builtin version of GeSHi (currently 1.0.8.9) in geshi/. As a result, not only are users of the plugin not instructed to use the latest version …

This blog is run on wordpress, and I also do quite a bit in PHP, so I’m familiar with the GeSHi syntax highlighter. It’s PHP-based, and can run both as a Wordpress plugin (WP-Syntax) and as a PHP module. It also works quite well with the …