As time goes on, and I find myself dealing with more and more large companies, it’s pretty obvious that there’s a recurring pattern. Many large companies are awful to work with. Dell are pretty bad. On one recent occasion, we had the need at work to call Dell Support for a mysterious problem with our shiny new blade servers. The biggest problem when dealing with Dell in particular is their scripted support technicians on 1st line....

Smokeping is one of my favourite diagnostic tools for tracking down sporadic network issues. You install it, configure it with a list of hosts, and it pings them regularly, and keeps track of the round-trip times, latency, packetloss, and so on. The web frontend is a Perl CGI script, and as a result, it’s a bit of a bugger to make it work on Nginx. I wasn’t gonna install Apache just for this one thing…...

Does this look suspicious to you? 85.25.184.184 - - [13/Mar/2012:00:41:09 +0000] "POST /3293b4da67abffca2460244619d9a8bca3f4c401.php HTTP/1.1" 200 1096 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; MSIE 9.0; WIndows NT 9.0; en-US))" 85.25.184.184 - - [13/Mar/2012:00:42:57 +0000] "POST /3293b4da67abffca2460244619d9a8bca3f4c401.php HTTP/1.1" 200 359 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; MSIE 9.0; WIndows NT 9.0; en-US))" 85.25.184.184 - - [13/Mar/2012:00:42:57 +0000] "POST /3293b4da67abffca2460244619d9a8bca3f4c401.php HTTP/1.1" 200 450 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; MSIE 9.0; WIndows NT 9.0; en-US))" 85.25.184.184 - - [13/Mar/2012:01:14:12 +0000] "POST /3293b4da67abffca2460244619d9a8bca3f4c401....

This is a continuation to my earlier blogpost about hacking initrd.gz. After it’s installed with the modified installer kernel, and finished building, the installed kernel doesn’t have the e1000e driver. This is because the netboot installer pulls in a kernel and it’s wherewithall from apt. It also gets a new initrd. As a result, I’ve decided to build an e1000e-dkms module, and we’ll specify the preseed installer to install that, along with linux-headers-generic, linux-headers-2....

This morning, I did something unquestionably naughty, and totally got away with it. A little background. We just had some brand new workstations delivered.. They turned up yesterday afternoon. They’re high performance 3d workstations with an Intel DX79TO mainboard. This mainboard has the intel 87529 Gigabit Ethernet controller. I wouldn’t normally pay so much attention to the controllers and so on that are actually on a board, but in future, I will....

Well, that’s certainly another strange problem. We have a tendency to build our own DMG images for certain bits of software we roll out here. Sometimes we’ll incorporate our own patches, other times it’s just to make the application structure more FHS compliant, and stop it “shitting all over the filesystem”, as we so charmingly term it. In the past, we’ve used InstallEase to build a DMG and PKG installer for OSX....

Puppet really is great. Don’t ever get me wrong there. It’s saved me masses of time and money over the last few years, and allowed me to do my job quickly and efficiently. That said, it really does have issues with scalability. After about 20-30 clients using WEBBrick, everything kinda falls over a bit. We had this problem at Baseblack. We’ve now got ~60 workstations and rendernodes all using Puppet for configuration management and software deployment....

Originally a comment here In the above article, Bhumi gives a method for storing files in the database, using MySQL and PHP. My personal distaste for PHP aside, I don’t think I could ever find a reason to store files in the database, rather than on the filesystem. I’m also primarily talking about RDBMS type databases, not NoSQL, which tend to have a mechanism for storing files a little bit more sanely than “old-fashioned” databases....

Firstly, welcome back. It’s now 2012, and there’s lots more to write about. Recently, Oracle withdrew the ability for Linux distributions to repackage Java and distribute their own packages. This has been widely regarded as a bad idea. I tend to agree. So, let’s re-roll an old sun-java6 deb file, with a new content to contain the latest 6u30 java release. You will need: A set of build packages (I’ve got a set for lucid, so if this goes away, I’ll find some way to host them....

Hah. So it’s New Year’s Eve. Twitter is down, and has been for about 3-4 hours. That’s because the NYE celebrations have already started. Somewhere on the other side of the world. I include Twitter on my personal website. The one you’re reading. There’s a template tag that displays my five latest tweets. About 2-3 hours ago, I got some error reports about XML parse errors on that template tag. I use api....