{This started as a Disqus reply to Eric’s post. Then I realized blog comments shouldn’t be longer than the original post 🙂 } The app-on-network concept is fascinating: and one I think I’ve thought about previously, too. Hypothetically, all “social networks” should have the same connections: yet there’s dozens upon dozens (I use at least …
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Category:technical
a sample cfengine promise bundle – delete “large” files
body common control { bundlesequence => { “file_remover” }; } bundle agent file_remover { vars: “bigfile” int => “1g”; files: “/home” delete => tidy, file_select => files_too_big, depth_search => recurse(“inf”); reports: “Deleted files over $(bigfile) in size from /home”; } body depth_search recurse(d) { depth => “$(d)”; } body delete tidy { dirlinks => “delete”; …
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soup to nuts mirroring of centos
I run a CentOS mirror. Have for a couple years. But I never stopped to see just how long it takes to start becoming a mirror. In case you wanted to know, I created a quick DO VM and ran the rsync mirror job yesterday. The results? At ~2.5MB/s, it took just over 8 hours to download …
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a public – or white-labelable – rfe service a la uservoice, but easier to use
I’ve seen some services that utilize uservoice to handle requests for features, functionality, etc. And I have seen companies have formal Request For Enhancement / Enhancement Request / etc processes (generally culminating from support cases (hopefully from good ones)). What I don’t see, though, is a way to either limit who can submit requests (uservoice, for example, …
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sending email in python with gmail
A {{Python}} nugget from {{Programming Your Home}} (review) I wanted to share from p97: import smtplib def send_email(subject, message) recipient = ‘your_email_recipient@domain.tld’ gmail_sender = ‘your_gmail_account@gmail.com’ gmail_password = ‘your_gmail_password’ #use tls gmail_smtp = smtplib.SMTP(‘smtp.gmail.com’, 587) gmail_smtp.ehlo() gmail_smtp.starttls() gmail_smtp.ehlo() #login gmail_smtp.login(gmail_send, gmail_password) #message formatting mail_header = ‘To: ‘ + recipient + ‘\n’ + ‘From: ‘ + gmail_sender …
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setting-up etherpad in centos 6
To add to my tutorial collection, here’s how to setup EtherPad on CentOS 6 (x64). As in the IRC tutorial, I used a Digital Ocean VM for this 🙂 What is EtherPad? It’s an open-source collaborative text editor that works like Google Docs – ie, all editors/viewers can see changes from everyone else in realtime. …
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what to automate
I have been in the world of automation for quite a while. Specifically in the realms of server, datacenter, and cloud automation – but I’ve been interested and/or involved in other tasks that tend towards automation (even for a short period of time) for far longer than just my post-college time in the world of …
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programming your home by mike riley
{{Mike Riley}}’s entry in {{The Pragmatic Programmers}} series, {{Programming Your Home}} – automating with {{Arduino}}, {{Android}}, and your computer – was a lot of fun. While I am not really in a position to do many of the mini projects given in the book (wrong type of house plus we rent), reading some of the …
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automatically extract email attachments with common linux tools
I had need to automatically process emails to a specific address to pull attachments out, and this is how I did it: $ yum install mpack $ cat extract-attach.sh #!/bin/bash rm -rf ~/attachtmp mkdir ~/attachtmp mv ~/Maildir/new/* ~/attachtmp cd ~ munpack ~/attachtmp/* rm -rf ~/attachtmp $ crontab -l */5 * * * * ~/extract-attach.sh Why, …
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setting up an unreal irc server on centos 6
Ever want to run an IRC server? I recently set one up at irc.datente.com using a Digital Ocean VM running CentOS 6.5 x64. Here’s what I did, if you want to replicate the process for yourself (full documentation available from Unreal’s website): acquire CentOS 6.5 x64 server (as I mentioned, I used Digital Ocean) `yum …
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group admin in the era of facebook
Along the difficulties of initially building a good group/community, comes the hassles of managing said [virtual] community – especially on the book of the face. I am a coadmin on the Ontario & Western Railways Historical Society Inc Facebook group. My friend Peter is a coadmin of the Linux Mint group. Something both of us have noticed …
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lex>>fwd meeting @ west 6th tonight at 1730 edt
LEX>>FWD is meeting tonight at West Sixth Brewery in Lexington at 5:30p. The topic is scheduled to be “source control and specifically differences between distributed and centralized”. If you’re int he Lexington area this evening, come join us.
a smart[ish] dhcpd
After running into some wacky networking issues at a recent customer engagement, I had a brainstorm about a smart[ish] DHCPd server that could work in conjunction with DNS and static IP assignment to more intelligently fill subnet space. Here’s the scenario we had: Lab network space is fairly-heavily populated with static assigned addresses – in …
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defaulting pxe boots with hpsa 10.0
In follow-up to my last post, which itself was a commentary on an earlier topic, I have the additional steps you need to do the previous procude (which is to edit /opt/opsware/boot/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default): /etc/init.d/opsware-sas stop smartboot Edit file. /etc/init.d/opsware-sas start smartboot
everything with a webui should publish rss
{{RSS}} is far from dead – it’s ubiquitous. What astonishes me, though, is that not all applications that have a WebUI don’t publish feeds via RSS (or {{Atom}} – same difference). OpenNMS and Nagios (via a plugin) will push alerts via RSS – which is fantastic: there’s no reason everyone shouldn’t be able to filter …
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pxe works differently in hpsa 10.x
2 years ago I wrote-up how you can change the default choice for the PXE menu in HP Server Automation. Found out this week that those instructions are not valid if you are running 10.0 (release this past summer). HP changed how they present their PXE menu with 10.x, and I have filed an RFE …
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network install of centos 6
I wanted to try something different when playing with CentOS 6 recently, so I did a network install. Other than one very small detail, the install is identical to installing off a normal ISO. Here’s the difference: use the netinstall.iso (eg http://centos.datente.com/media/6/isos/x86_64/CentOS-6.4-x86_64-netinstall.iso) when it asks for the URL to grab your image from, use something like http://centos.datente.com/media/6/os/x86_64 (make …
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programming again
It’s been years, but I am working on some new (small) programming projects again. First out will be an open-source app that’s a simplified (and slimmed-down) tool akin to Yahoo! Pipes. One of the things I had forgotten was just how hard it is to write code that doesn’t stink. Here’s hoping the first release …
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what should a professional services group’s goal(s) be?
Should it be as a revenue stream? Or can it be far, far more? Every place I have worked since getting into professional services back in early 2008 has viewed the goal of the organization as making money by performing services. Whether or not the customer was happy, something useful was delivered, whether a relationship …
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a break from digitalia
Really enjoyed the break from digitalia this past week. I had one last year about this time, but hadn’t taken a good break before that since 2008. No electronics. No email. No mobile phones. It was nice 🙂 If you tried to contact me in the last week, please be patient. I’ll get back to …
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there’s never enough documentation | there’s too much documentation
Documentation is vital. There’s never enough. And there’s always too much. In general, these are the areas I find documentation to fail: Not Enough Too Much/Many why-tos (instead of how-tos) tutorials on things you need architecture explanation design philosophy “how we got here” “why we are here” future plans / roadmaps deltas from standards recording …
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new documentation should always augment the status quo
In my line of work, I often need to create documentation for clients. Documentation in general is a Good Thing™. But good documentation’s goal should always be to augment and improve upon what already exists – not to supplant, downgrade, or muddle what already exists. A prime example of this has come up with a …
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datacenter bandwidth charges can be crazy
Why are colocation bandwidth rates so crazy expensive? In an era of ubiquitous broadband to the home, why are connections in datacenters still so expensive? I see charges on the per-GB-transferred scale, or flat-rate charges per MB of bandwidth. I have yet to figure out why these rates can vary so wildly even in datacenters …
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on-demand, secure, distributed storage
In follow-up to a friend’s blog post on TrueCrypt, and in conjunction with some previous investigation and interests I have had, I am wondering how difficult it would be to run a tool like MooseFS in conjunction with TrueCrypt to provide a Wuala-like service as a plausibly-deniable data haven a la {{Cryptonomicon}}.
posting from google+ to other services with ifttt
I’ve been using If This Then That (best part? it’s free!) for several months, and wanted to share a simple way to post updates from Google+ (or any RSS feed, but I digress) to your other social media services. Currently I only use Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook – though I am sure this basic process …
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