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 …

ISC dhcpd has the ability to always give a specific MAC address the same IP address “lease” using the fixed-address configuration option. This is configured in Vyatta using the static-mapping configuration statement. Unfortunately, since dhcpd doesn’t store fixed-address leases in the dhcpd.leases file, the Vyatta show dhcp leases …

I just installed php-suhosin 0.9.29 from EPEL on a CentOS 5.6 box. I’m running a whole bunch of name-based vhosts in Apache, and have a bunch of web apps, so I opted to run suhosin in simulation mode (don’t actually block anything, but log …

I’ve been having some issues that may be Puppet-related. Unfortunately, Puppet (at least the old 0.25.4 client that I’m running) doesn’t timestamp the debug logs sent to stdout. I know it’s hanging somewhere, but I need concrete numbers to look at. Here’s …

I recently added some Cacti-based graphing to a number of Linux-based servers prior to rolling out a new service. When I was looking over the performance graphs of the initial testing, I noticed that memory usage on our rsyslog server was near 98%. Looking at top(1), I saw …

Jess Robinson’s SQL-Translator CPAN module translates and parses SQL statements. The SQLfairy project has some nice binaries that, among other things, use GraphViz or GD to draw pseudo-ER diagrams from SQL CREATE statements. Drawing a diagram of an SQL schema is as easy as sqlt-diagram --db=MySQL …

I spend a fair amount of my time debugging network and service problems on a few racks of Linux servers. Of course, they’re located in a data center (yes, just downstairs, but still not quite as comfortable as my office), and they’re all command-line only - no sense in …

I spent a good part of the weekend auditing the security of my infrastructure at home, since I haven’t given it much attention lately. One of my first steps was doing a port scan with nmap of my public IPs from a remote host, both to make sure there …