Quick Python script to backup Disqus comments for a forum

So hypothetically, you have a GPG public/private keypair (from a backup or old computer), but you don’t remember the passphrase. Here’s a relatively simple way to find it from a number of possible options. This requires that you have a computer secure enough to store the possible …

Here’s a tiny little snippet that I have in my .bashrc which really comes in handy when trying to figure out what I did on a system when. One of the first things I do when (eek) building out or working on a one-off machine (or setting up a …

Every once in a while I need to add a bunch of redirects in Apache. Here’s a handy, dead simple Python script which takes a list of URLs on STDIN, and for each one prints out either the response code, or, if the response is a redirect, the response …

I posted back in January about RPM Spec Files for nodejs 0.9.5 and v8 on CentOS 6. In that post I also said that I was unable to get recent NodeJS to build on CentOS 5 because of a long chain of dependencies including node-gyp, v8, http-parser, glibc …

Between RHEL/CentOS 5 and 6 the default RPM compression format was changed to xz. As such, trying to build a recent Fedora or Cent6 SRPM on Cent5 will error out with a message like error: unpacking of archive failed on file foo;51a4c2a5: cpio: MD5 sum mismatch because tar …

This post is part of a series of older draft posts from a few months ago that I’m just getting around to publishing. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a build system that meets my requirements (see the last paragraph).

At work, we have a handful - currently a really …

I’ve been configuring Apache httpd for over a decade, from a single personal web server to web farms running thousands of vhosts. In most of the “real” environments I’ve worked in, we’ve had some variation of production, stage/test/QA and development hosts; and usually some method …

The latest version of nodejs that I could find as an RPM for CentOS was 0.6.16, from http://patches.fedorapeople.org/oldnode/stable/. That’s the one that puppetlabs currently uses in their puppetlabs-nodejs module. There is, however, a nodejs 0.9.5 RPM in the Fedora Rawhide …

Note 2014-12-16: I’m leaving this here for historical reasons, and since some older OS versions still need properly-written init scripts. Since starting to use Arch Linux on my laptop, I’ve become a convert to the systemd world. I know this is a hot topic and has sparked a …