Articles by Scott Hebert

  1. Getting Started With Pelican

    Posted on in Software

    I've been using WordPress on this site since 2007. After all this time, I've decided I want to try something new. So, I've decided to go in a completely different direction and start serving static content. There are three things driving my decision to change:

    • The existing site is really …
  2. El Capitan Leads to More DNS Woes

    Posted on in System Administration

    For whatever reason, Apple really likes messing with how I use DNS.

    I've written many, many, many times about having to modify OS X's DNS functionality to append search domains when a hostname includes a dot. Every single time I upgrade, this change is broken.

    Previously, the workaround had been …

  3. Agreeing to the Xcode/iOS license...

    Posted on in Programming

    Sometimes this pops up when you least expect it:

    Agreeing to the Xcode/iOS license requires admin privileges, please re-run as root via sudo.
    

    This morning, I went to refresh one of my git repo's for work, and make spit that out. What the heck happened last night? Anyway, the …

  4. nginx: Blocking Access to /xmlrpc.php

    Posted on in System Administration

    I recently ran into an issue on a Wordpress site running behind an nginx web server. The site was frequently being attacked by a botnet hitting /xmlrpc.php so rapidly, it would eventually force the FastCGI processes behind nginx to consume all available CPU. Naturally, this would cause all legitimate …

  5. Goodbye, discoveryd. Hello again, mDNSResponder.

    Posted on in System Administration

    Great!

    Once again, Apple has made a change in how DNS is handled in Mac OS X. Originally, Yosemite (10.10) had replaced mDNSResponder with discoveryd. This meant that all of those who had made a change to force mDNSResponder to always append search domains to DNS lookups had to …

  6. Career Advice: Becoming a System Administrator

    Posted on in IT Management

    Recently, I got an email that went something like this:

    I have completed a BTech in Electronics and Communication. Now, I am working as a desktop engineer. How can I move my career to the network / server side?

    Career moves are hard for everyone. Personally, I've been thinking about making …

  7. Why Isn't tmpreaper Working?

    Posted on in System Administration

    If you have a directory that you want to keep clean, tmpreaper is a great way to remove files based on how old they are. The other day, I had a directory that looked like this:

    x@x:~/dump$ ls -l
    -rw-r--r-- 1 x x 212268169 Mar 15 01:02 …
  8. WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!

    Posted on in System Administration

    We run several (read: hundreds) of servers that are still running Debian 6 (Squeeze). A few months ago, we started seeing the following errors coming from the daily apt cronjob: "WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!" When running apt-get update the following errors dump out:

    $ apt-get update
    W: GPG …
  9. Mac OS X Not Using Search Domains

    Posted on in System Administration

    Every time I restart my OS X Mountain Lion (10.9) laptop, it stops using the DNS search domains I've added via the Network preferences pane. I have found that restarting mDNSResponder fixes this issue. There are two ways to do this.

    The first is a simple restart by sending …

  10. Mutt: Deleting Messages Older Than 30 Days

    Posted on in Software

    I tend to clear out large chunks of email all at once. The most common thing I do is clear out all mail older than 30 days.

    In mutt do the following:

    1. Shift-D to delete messages matching a pattern. This will return a prompt that says Delete messages matching:.
    2. ~d …

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