In the Cloud
Today I got my first EC2 instance running. It took a total of about two hours from registering for the service to a point where I had a full CentOS 5 install up and going serving out a static web page. Responsiveness of my server was fast ( even at the cheapest level ) and […]
IOstats
Linux server IO utilitzation: iostat -d -x <wait> <count> Things to note from output: r/s and w/s (reads and writes per second) svctm ( average service time per request) %util (Percentage of CPU time during which IO requests issued to the device. Device saturation occurs as this approaches 100%) combined info from the iostat man […]
quick script to pull load average
Needed to code up something rather quickly today to monitor load average on our servers and send a notification. I should look into getting OpenNMS to do this, but it only took a few tweaks to an existing program to create this. Before hand you need nmap running and creating the servers.txt and SNMP setup […]
damn IE and pdfs
I was having some issues with pdfs mysteriously not downloading from our image server. Like all things that seem to be an extreme pain in the ass, this behavior seemed to also be an IE and Windows tied behavior. After much searching I ran across the server.range-requests setting in lighttpd which seems to have fixed […]
good day
I managed to do three “got my shit to work” victory dances today. Yes, I actually do a physical dance, almost as goofy as most NFL players endzone dances. The first was a minor thing, I got the MyBook mounted to the Logs server via USB and started to move off 500GBs of access logs […]
big numbers
Thursday is sons and daughter day at work so I was thinking I should get some sort of number of the amount of traffic we do in a certain period of time to throw out. I knew we were sitting at around 50 million page views per month for the site, but we get a […]
Pro Curves
This last Tuesday I took some time out to head over to a HP Procurve Seminar that was going on across the street from my office. We’re moving to downtown KC this fall and we’ll be putting in a new network infrastructure and most likely a new Voip system. The Procurve switches are on our […]
good stuff
Looking back over the last year I was thinking about which new application has made the most impact in my day to day work. My first thought was Xen and what it’s done for the servers, but that path had been started down previous to me taking over the reigns as sysadmin. I don’t feel […]
curves
The last six months we’ve been dealing a lot with Rails at work. I wouldn’t say I’m an old school perl guy but it’s what I cut my web teeth on and the language I know best. I have been a perl-ie man for the bulk of the last 10 years. As my current position […]
rotate those rails logs
As we come closer to going live with a high traffic Rails apps it’s time to hammer out log rotation. Thus far I’ve established a standard deployment location of /usr/local/sites/sitename for our apps. Following this advice I think I’ll use standard logrotate to move the logs around. I’ve read that log rotation can be done […]