LlamaLabs

1:32 AM Subject: [zenoss] ec2-75-101- … Command timed out on device ec2-75-101… check_http
1:37 AM Subject: [zenoss] CLEAR: ec2-75-101… HTTP OK HTTP/1.1 200 OK – 1241 bytes in 7.617 seconds
This seems to be my life living with EC2 instances…

The Dice Game is hosted in an OpenVZ container on a server in Renton, WA. I should rephrase that. It *was* hosted in an OpenVZ container on a server in Renton, WA.
Last night the server hosting the Dice Game failed. At first there were some filesystem errors. Then the root filesystem was remounted in read-only [...]

“Quercus is Caucho Technology’s fast, open-source, 100% Java implementation of the PHP language” [1].
It has been demonstrated that Quercus outperforms a straight-out-of-the box installation of mod_php.

“Performance: Quercus outperforms a straight mod_php implementation by about 4x (for Mediawiki and Drupal).” [1]
“Resin backed PHP drives 4x performance improvements for Drupal” [2]

I had always wondered how Quercus [...]

I’ve been collecting notes about my experiences with Google Apps Premier (The service where you pay $50 per seat). It includes Google Mail, Calendar, Documents, and Sites.
Yesterday’s outage reminded me of my list and I wanted to get around to posting it.
Hopefully these notes will be useful to someone who is evaluating Google Apps for [...]

Many thanks to Tim for his article Installing git on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. It’s a great starting point for git use on OS X Leopard.
In addition to his configuration and aliases, I have a couple of my own that I have added. Here’s an excerpt from my .profile:

git config –global user.name “Your Name”
git [...]

Here’s another rpm command I can never remember. This lists all installed packages, and sorts the list based on installed size.
rpm -qa –queryformat ‘%{SIZE} %{NAME} %{VENDOR}\n’ | sort -n

The -qa flag specifies that we wish to query all packages. The –queryformat flag specifies how we want each result to be formatted. See below for [...]

Geoffrey Grosenbach, author of the nuby on rails blog, wrote an article titled Useful Shell Shortcuts.
He talked about the Using csh & tcsh book and gave some examples of some shortcuts. I remember using those shortcuts for a while but eventually forgot them all.
What I really found interesting were the CLI tools for interfacing with [...]

For a long time I had been using lsof to track down which process was listening on a particular port, and I know i’m not the only person to find it that way. The -p flag for netstat helps out by showing the pid of the process that owns that listening socket. Here are [...]

Adjust your call to dd to get the size you want.

[root@host ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1024 count=1048576
1048576+0 records in
1048576+0 records out
[root@host ~]# sync
[root@host ~]# mkswap /swapfile
Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 1073737 kB
[root@host ~]# swapon /swapfile
[root@host ~]# echo “/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0″ >> /etc/fstab

It’s often useful to provide some sort of output when a script is waiting for something or running a loop that take a while to complete.  Instead of writing a bunch of output and running the risk of scrolling useful information off the page, I like writing out a single ‘.’ every once in a while, just [...]