Category Archives: Sundry sysadmin
Font rendering – no more jealousy
f you like me is an avid Fedora user, I’m sure you’ve thrown glances at colleague’s or friend’s Ubuntu machines and thought that there was something that was slightly different about the way it looked (aside from the obvious Gnome vs Unity differences). Shinier somehow… So had I, but I mainly dismissed it as a case of “the grass is always greener…”. Continue reading
Find out what is using your swap
Have you ever logged in to a server, ran `free`, seen that a bit of swap is used and wondered what’s in there? It’s usually not very indicative of anything, or even overly helpful knowing what’s in there, mostly it’s a curiosity thing.
Either way, starting from kernel 2.6.16, we can find out using smaps found in the proc filesystem. I’ve written a simple bash script which prints out all running processes and their swap usage. Continue reading
Site slow after scaling out? Yeah, possibly!
So, doing the maths, you’re seeing 25*0.2*50= 250ms in just network latency per page load for your SQL queries. This is obviously a lot more than you see over a local UNIX socket. Continue reading
GlusterFS init script and Puppet
I got most of it set up, and got started on writing up the glusterfs Puppet module. Fairly straight forward, a few directories, configuration files and a mount point. Then I came to the Service declaration, and of course we want this to be running at all times, so I went on and wrote… Continue reading
Legitimate emails being dropped by Spamassassin in RHEL5
Over the past few months, an increasing number of customers have complained that their otherwise OK spam filters have started dropping an inordinate amount of legitimate emails. Continue reading