Thanks to a post from Steve over at debian-administration.org, I finally got around to setting up monit, the little monitoring app we use at work to keep things sane.  I was getting around to installing it at home, but it became more urgent when Varnish went down last week; without it running there’s nothing to [...]

When you run a webserver behind a reverse proxy or HTTP accelerator like Squid or Varnish, the webserver access logs will display the IP of the proxy (generally 127.0.0.1) instead of the end user’s IP.  This not only breaks any kind of tracking or reporting you want to run against your webserver logs, but it [...]

On the monit mailing list today someone asked how they could monitor a process that didn’t have a pidfile associated with it.  Without thinking I jotted this down, there’s likely a better way, but this should work and may be all I need for some init.d scripts for a couple of apps on ramon (the home server).  In the the beginning of the [...]

Looking over the Debian own harden-doc guide online, (which is a monster of a resource) as well as Debian Help’s security page gave me some excellent new ideas on how to secure Debian and Linux in general.   Also today i found a netstat command with some nice switches to help you figure out what is listening on each port in [...]

UPDATE: thanks to a comment below from Ted, we now have a solution to have this option persist across kernel updates.  In grub, “…at the end of this new menu item add it as an argument to the line:
defoptions=quiet splash irqpoll
I knew there had to be a way, thanks for the post Ted!
There’s a known [...]

So the only thing I don’t love about my new job is the same old thing; you have to run Windows XP on the desktop. Yeah, I’ll give it a bit more time before I really start pushing to run Linux on the desktop, so until then it’s my ongoing struggle to get XP [...]

When you’re running a ton of termial windows or tabs, it helps to have the title of the box name, along with some environment values, easily available to keep you orientated. Here’s a quick script I created to do this automatically when called via your .profile file in your home directory.
#!/bin/bash
HOST_NAME=`hostname -f`
if [ `id -u` [...]

I’ve had a 12″ G3 iBook since ~2002, and I’ve really liked it. Of course me being me, I’ve run Linux on it for almost the whole time, even running a dual boot of OS X and Gentoo Linux back when I used this puppy on the job. The only thing I (and [...]

Recently I had an issue at work; while trying to transfer files between Unix hosts we were unable to hit the known scp port, but we could still hit the ssh port. All of this was occurring from home, late at night on a Saturday where I was the main technical point man to move/install [...]

This may only apply to those of us geeks that use vim to admin servers daily, but today I needed a way to backup, and automate the creation of backup and tmp directories to house those ever annoying ~ and .swp files from showing up in my working directory ($PWD). I didn’t want to [...]