slaptijack

I've been out of pocket for a while and really have neglected this site. So, as goofy as these things sound, I'm making it a personal goal to contribute more regularly to slaptijack.com in 2022.

I somehow managed to lose my old copy of the markdown I used to …

An Asterisk server has a very involved configuration system. One instance I manage has over 100 configuration files. As these configurations grow, it can be helpful to have a separate server running for testing and debugging problems. If you are planning a major change, it's often helpful to get it …

As always, I've changed pertinent details for reasons.

I was working on an ASR the other day and received the follow error:

RP/0/RSP0/CPU0:ASR9K(config-tacacs-host)# commit
Fri Jul 29 12:55:46.243 PDT

% Failed to commit one or more configuration items during a pseudo-atomic
operation. All …

I had this interesting question the other day. Someone had a file with two columns of data in it. They wanted to assign each column to a different variable and then take action using those two variables. Here's the example I wrote for them:

IFS=$'\n';
for LINE in $(cat …

A bastion host is one of those pieces of infrastructure that is easy to explain and surprisingly easy to get slightly wrong. You have a private server, database node, router, lab machine, or management host that should not be reachable from the open internet. Instead of exposing SSH on every …

I was recently asked to take two lists and interleave them. Although I can not think of a scenario off the top of my head where this might be useful, it doesn't strike me as a completely silly thing to do. StackOverflow's top answer for this problem uses itertools.chain …

Things have changed quite a lot since this post was originally written in 2016. Currently, I would recommend switching over to making asynchronous calls via aiohttp.

One of my scripts that makes an API call has been failing silently lately. It appears that the connection is timing out, but I …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …