adrift on a cosmic ocean

For a long time I've shunned stereotypes such as the hacker sitting in a dark basement listening to repetitive music with headphones on while they code into the early hours of the morning. My early hours of the morning are usually spent rocking the baby back to sleep and then trying to get back to sleep myself, and I don't live in a basement. Nor do I particularly enjoy listening to techno, trance…

I have a Zotac ZBox which I use an my HTPC, and generally it works pretty well. One thing that is slightly troublesome is the HDMI audio, which seems to rely on having the ALSA backports modules package installed in order for it to work. Remembering this is key, though, since when the package is installed it does not automatically get updated when you upgrade the kernel package.

Most packaging…

My proposal is up on the DevOpsDays website, please comment and vote on it!

I've been working recently on building up a more reliable, predictable Puppet infrastructure. I'm not a developer at heart, but I've been trying very hard to apply software development principles to what I do, since generally configuration management and software deployment is becoming more and more just another software problem. One of the end goals of the system I am building is to have a pretty…

I had a fairly frustrating time today trying to explain to someone that indeed the order of actions matters very much when trying to recover failed replication on a MySQL server. We had a good dump from the master taken with --single-transaction --master-data=2 (yes, all InnoDB tables here), and had imported it successfully. However, at the critical moment of reading the binary log name and…

I've been hacking on a small Ruby on Rails project to summarise and then prettily display pmacct traffic data. It's not an original idea by any stretch and in fact is directly inspired by a system we had at my last job. For obvious reasons I have to at least reimplement the idea myself, and while the original was written in Python using PostgreSQL, mine will be using Ruby and MySQL.

One small pain point I've already encountered is the lack of IP address functions in MySQL. PostgreSQL at least as far back as 7.4 has supported IP address functions and in the case when you need to be comparing addresses and summarising based on local subnets they are sorely…

Last year in Berlin we had a fairly terrible Winter, with temperatures going down to -30C which we were completely unprepared for. Ange was pregnant and neither of us had really adequate clothing although we both got sturdy boots and some thermals to stop from freezing altogether. This year we vowed to be more prepared, and one of the most popular brands that we see on the streets is Jack Wolfskin…

I consider myself a failed programmer, having never really excelled at it during University and only really having come to terms with some of the concepts several years later. I've always liked programming but at some point years ago I decided I didn't want to be a programmer/developer so that was that. Since cementing myself in the realm of Systems Administration I've come to miss the programming…

I searched everywhere for an example of this but couldn't find one, so I stumbled through and got it working myself and am documenting it here in case it ever shows up on Google and helps someone. The premise is: you have some crazy variables that you want to turn into resources of some kind, but there's no way to do it using the declarative methods within Puppet. Most notably lacking is usually…

One of my favourite pastimes (sad as it is) is finding new and cool things that the Linux kernel can do. Short of reading through the actual source code, a relatively sane way to find your way around the kernel is by reading the documentation provided by the Linux Cross Reference. Seriously, bookmark it now.

Ever since my baptism of fire with our Sun OpenStorage cluster shortly after joining Nokia…