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My name is John Daker

Internet memes come, and internet memes go. Some have more traction than others and just become part of the lexicon, while some, seemingly worthy of adoration, don’t. When I first saw this one it was linked to on Twitter by Charlie Day (aka Charlie on the incredible It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) who posted, @TheCharlieDay: http://bit.ly/aCUAAz Also Glenn sent this to me and it rules. The backstory to is that John Daker, in 1990, was on a Peoria, Illinois public access channel singing for a music teachers’ bi-annual recital, and the tape ended up online, and people (naturally) took notice. Now it’s your turn, I present to you the video entitled, My name is John Daker…

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Jul 15, 2010 | Categories: featured, humor, music | View Comments

HOWTO monitor your servers via Twitter

Alert: your server has failed!

The other day I got inspired to write a script that would allow me to monitor my servers via Twitter. The idea of having a column in Tweetdeck set aside to inform me of my servers’ statuses’ sounded cool, plus, it’s quicker than checking email. I know sending tweets from the command-line had been done before, but after seeing briealeida’s post titled Tweeting Cron Jobs I really got inspired. While hers was written in Perl, I didn’t want to go that route since I had a few, self imposed, restrictions I wanted to stick to. One, I only wanted to use standard shell commands, the ones you get by default in Linux, so you would have absolutely no dependencies to install for this to work. Two, I wanted to see how much info I could stuff into a 140 character tweet, and still have it make sense. While I’m still working on adding more info, the current state of the script gives me a quick snapshot of seven specifics metrics on a selected server, which I’m quite happy with. To try it yourself only takes a few minutes. (more…)

Apr 12, 2010 | Categories: geek, howto, linux | Tags: bash, command-line, commandline, monitor, operating system, script, server monitor, sysadmin, system administration, tweet, twitter | View Comments

HOWTO use monit to monitor sites and alert users

Ok, I’ve used the process management software, monit, since at least 2004, and it is simply an indespensible tool in my sysadmin cache. Basically it watches a process, say like Apache, and restarts it if it dies. But wait, that’s not all, it does tons of other things. Want it to watch it and restart it at a certain time? Sure. How about if it uses 50% of system memory in 5 cycles (cycles are checks, 120 seconds by default)? Yep, it’ll take care of that. How about watching a file and stopping a service and/or issuing an alert by email or web if the file’s UID, permission, or whatever has changed? No problem. Disk space is greater than 90% on one partition you want an email to go out to the admin? Easy. Seriously, once you start using monit you’ll be amazed at what you can cover, it’s truly one of the best tools I’ve ever used, and of course it’s GPL’d open source.

So, this week we had an issue where a some of our sites were down, and the monitor that watches them were internal to our network, and relied on some of the same resources; which is lees than ideal. I have a remote server running at one of our partner’s sites, so it’s the perfect canidate to watch our sites from a ‘real world’ view. (more…)

Apr 10, 2010 | Categories: geek, howto, linux | Tags: debian, linux, monit, monitor, sysadmin, system administration, web sites | View Comments

HOWTO sort web-server logs to find top users

The other day I came across a situation where a web-server was getting hammered, and we needed to know who the offend(ers) were. While watching a logfile tail by at high speeds is always fun, we wanted to be able to sort the web-server access log and find top users, to be able to narrow down where the traffic was coming from. While we don’t want to block users that want to access our data, sometimes we need to throttle things back so one requester doesn’t overwhelm all the available bandwidth and make the site unusable for others. So after some playing around and digging on Google, we came up with a nice, succinct one liner to do this, here it is:

cat /path/to/access.log | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail

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Mar 31, 2010 | Categories: geek, howto | Tags: apache, awk, bash, cat, nginx, one line, one liner, script, sort, throttle, top user, uniq, web server, web traffic, webserver | View Comments

Tea partiers: You get mad now?

another solid argument from a 'tea bagger'

Since the health-care debate brought out the worst in the tea party protesters, we’ve seen a shift from fear mongering, to the disgusting behavior of last weekend that included bigoted, racist name calling, spitting on on elected officials and finally vandalism and death threats. If it weren’t clear before, the ‘movement’ has truly showed us what is behind their manufactured anger, and it ain’t health care. Case in point, how can people be mad now, when they weren’t mad when the previous administration that just walked all over the constitution, sent us into a war with a country that never attacked us and raised the debt to record highs? Well as I tried to figure out how to condense my thoughts, who would have thought Rosie O’Donnell would have covered it so well, with a post on her blog titled We had eight years of Bush and Cheney, Now you get mad!? One of her readers was able to succinctly break down the blatant hypocrisy of this whole affair, providing a perfect platform for a tea party rebuttal, but don’t expect that, instead lets expect more gay bashing from those cowards. I’m reprinting the post here (just like the DailyKos did) because it needs more exposure, so please pass it on. After that, follow-up by reading Frank Rich’s Op-Ed titled The Rage Is Not About Health Care for more rational of what is the true driver for this behavior, it gives us a lot to think about.

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Mar 29, 2010 | Categories: commentary, obama, politics, rant | Tags: barack obama, bigots, congress, dailykos, death threats, democrats, fear, fear mongering, name calling, obama, politics, president, protest, racism, republicans, rosie o'donnell, taxes, tea baggers, tea party, vandalism | View Comments

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Welcome

Hi, I'm fak3r and I've been online for over 15 years, blogging for 10. I work with open source software, various hardware and whatever else that I can hack on. I enjoy learning by doing, painting infrequently and listening to more music than the law allows. Feel free to follow me and comment on my thoughts and ideas; we're all in it together kid.