slaptijack

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 …

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 …

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 …

Once again I was working on some Python code for EVE Online. This particular bit of code gathers a list of kills for a particular region and then summarizes that data in a daily report. Everything had been working properly, until one day...

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users …

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 …

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 …

The other night I was working on some Python code that interacts with the zKillboard API. The API call returns kill information via JSON for EVE Online. While making the request, I was getting an error that I was using "non-acceptable encoding." It turns out that the zKillboard guys require …

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 …

It seems this problem has resurfaced again with the new version of Mac OS X. More specifically, this problem seems to affect appending search domains when the hostname contains a dot. In Yosemite (10.10), mDNSResponder has been replaced with discoveryd. Fortunately, all we need to do here is add …

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 …

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 …

On my web server, I keep my web sites in /var/lib/www. Each web site has a dedicated logs directory. Since logrotate is already rotating Apache logs on the server, I'd like to continue using that to rotate these log files as well. Below, is a Puppet snippet that …

I stumbled across this problem when a daily cronjob on one of our Debian servers complained about this. A lot. If you run across this on one of your systems, there is a quick fix.

In our case, it turned out that /usr/bin/mandb could not read /etc/passwd …

Thanks to an error report from one of my backup jobs, I noticed that /Users/slap/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports was filling up with Finder crash reports (files of the type *.crash). These files were being created once a minute. Additionally, icons on my Desktop were blinking once a minute.

Upon …

I decided the other night to begin doing some testing using my headless Mac Mini. I use VirtualBox for all my testing on my Mac OS X systems. Since the Mini is headless, I decided now was as a good a time as any to start using VirtualBox via the …