Posted on in system_administration
I've been getting the following error from cron.daily in my inbox lately:
/etc/cron.daily/apt:
Cache has broken packages, exiting
That's an annoying email to get everyday. I decided I would apt-get clean and
that would probably fix the problem:
$ sudo apt-get clean
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Reading package …Posted on in System Administration
I use Pingdom's free service to monitor slaptijack.com. Apparently,
late Friday night, oom-killer decided that the server needed more memory and
took out the MySQL server. To make matters worse, I missed the alarm from Pingdom,
and slaptijack.com was down for pretty much all of Saturday. The fact …
Posted on in System Administration
Ever so often, something changes on the network, and you find that your
.ssh/known_hosts file has gotten out of date. Usually this happens after an
upgrade or device change. You'll get the rather ominous warning that
REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!
If you are confident that someone isn't doing …
Posted on in system_administration
While updating the TCP tuning parameters on one of my OS X 10.11 servers, I noticed that my existing OS X TCP Performance Tuning page had gotten out of date. The page was nearly eight years old, so it is no surprise that happened. I updated the page in …
Posted on in System Administration
I have written previously regarding using
Redis for Magento session storage.
You can get the same benefits of using Redis for session storage (reduced disk
I/O, automatic key eviction) for any PHP application by making a quick change to
a couple of settings in your php.ini. I assume …
Posted on in System Administration
Although I do not use Exim myself, I have clients that do. Recently, we noticed that it was taking more than 20 seconds for their SMTP banner to display when initiating checks from the monitoring server. Connecting to the server locally (on any interface IP address) did not suffer the …
Posted on in System Administration
If you have ever used any tool to optimize a web page, you know that compressing
the return traffic to the client is a
big win. In nginx, this is done with
the gzip module. The
easiest thing to do is add gzip on; to the http stanza in your …
Posted on in uncategorized
The new year is finally upon us. Traditionally, I have not been one to make New Year's Resolutions. This year, I decided that rather than a list of resolutions, I would create a list of goals. These are things I would like to achieve over the next year. In other …
Posted on in System Administration
Naturally, I ran into this problem in the middle of the night when the client was asleep and I had no access to the Magento administrative interface. The short story is that after running a re-index of the site, the home page began returning a 404 error status. A bit …
Posted on in Programming
I've got some code that generates loss reports for EVE Online. It uses the
EVE-KILL API and
Python's urllib2 library. Near
the end of October 2015, I noticed that my calls to the API were returning a
403: Forbidden error from the server. I didn't realize it at the time …
Posted on in Programming
Although I was getting this output in relation to one of my Jinja2 templates, it really isn't a Jinja2 problem.
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 69: ordinal not in range(128)
The bit of code here should be doing nothing more than printing a float …
Posted on in Software
One of my frequently used git commands is 'git show <rev>'. As in, "show me
what the heck this guy did here." Unfortunately, Mercurial doesn't have the same
command, but it's easy enough to implement it using an alias in your .hgrc.
The command you would run from the command …
Posted on in System Administration
I ran into this issue while trying to install wine-devel on my Mid 2012 MacBook
Pro running El Capitan and MacPorts 2.3.4. As the install progressed, here is the
error I got:
Error: org.macports.build for port glib2 returned: command execution failed
Please see the log file …Posted on in Programming
I've mentioned before that
empty strings in Python are false.
This leads to a common if not string paradigm. Unfortunately, this can be
problematic. Check out this snippet:
>>> string = ""
>>> if not string:
... print("empty")
...
empty
That pretty much worked out just as we imagined. The empty string returned False
and …
Posted on in Software
The standard log output for both Git and Mercurial is a bit verbose for my liking. I keep my terminal at ~50 lines, which results in only getting about 8 to 10 log entries depending on how verbose the commit was. This isn't a big deal if you are just …
