Category Archives: Tech

Dynamic hosts file using Chef

Posted on July 18, 2010 by garret

There are a number of ways to setup your infrastructure so that you can refer to machines by hostname. I currently prefer the “dynamically generated hosts file” approach because it’s simple to understand and setting up a DNS server is … Continue reading →

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Redis plugin for collectd

Posted on June 27, 2010 by garret

Last weekend I wrote a small collectd plugin for monitoring Redis and put it on GitHub: http://github.com/powdahound/redis-collectd-plugin. If you haven’t heard of Redis before, it’s a key-value store similar to memcached with support for more complex data types like lists, … Continue reading →

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Tricky Apache configuration bug

Posted on November 10, 2009 by garret

When using Apache’s DirectoryIndex directive make sure you don’t separate the values with commas. If you do, Apache will be looking for filenames ending in commas! # Incorrect DirectoryIndex index.html, index.php, index.cgi   # Correct DirectoryIndex index.html index.php index.cgi Tweet

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Colorize log output with ack

Posted on October 10, 2009 by garret

Adding color to log files makes them a lot easier to understand, especially when tailing them. That’s why tools like MultiTail were created, and some logging tools can output in color. Last night I realized color could be added to … Continue reading →

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mkscript – test script creator

Posted on September 17, 2009 by garret

I usually do something wrong when I create test scripts (typo in shebang, not executable, missing open PHP tag, etc) so I wrote a small tool called mkscript that can create them for me. Basically, instead of doing: $ echo … Continue reading →

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