First off, I’ve moved this blog from a server in my basement to Linode virtual hosting, in preparation for my move from New Jersey to an apartment in Georgia. This will mark the first time since 2001 (when I was 14) that I didn’t have at least a …

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 …

I guess it’s pretty strange that I just found out about it now, three years later, but there’s an article on TheInquirer.net about Citibank’s website not allowing Linux, that heavily quotes a blog post of mine about the issue. Cool.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Mint.com, it’s a free online personal finance site that allows you to track spending across all of your bank accounts and manage budgets and financial goals. Once upon a time it was a nice little Web 2.0 startup, now …

At work, we have a Netgear ReadyNAS 1100. It’s a 4TB NAS appliance, a cute little 1U half-depth Linux box with 4 SATA disks, a RAID controller, and some firmware to do a whole bunch of fancy stuff (mainly geared towards consumers and very small shops - all configuration is …

• What is a Systems Architect?

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 …

• Inside Facebook’s Not-So-Secret New Data Center - Technology Review

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 …