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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

For anyone else who sets the Puppet config_version paramater to return the current SVN or Git version of your configuration, here’s a fact that grabs that version (by parsing the cached YAML catalog) and sets it as a fact called “catalog_config_version”. It can then be used for sanity-checking your …

At work, we do a fair amount of DNS updates. Our zone files are stored in subversion, and are named according to the domain (with no .zone extension). It’s a real pain when updating a few (or a few dozen) zones in Emacs, since I have to remember to …

We use Puppet Dashboard at work to view the status of our puppet nodes. While it’s very handy, there’s one feature I really wanted: the ability to show the value of arbitrary puppet facts in the main node table on the home page. Specifically, the facts we use …