Blogs

cron.daily on SLES

Posted 19 August, 2010 - 17:49 by stintel

Have you ever noticed that if you put cron jobs in /etc/cron.daily on a SLES machine, they seem to run at random times? I noticed it a few times, and I find it to be really annoying. Say, I rebooted a machine yesterday around 14:00, and today at 14:15, the machine starts rebuilding the man db, backing up the rpm db, cleaning /tmp, rotating logs, etc. Huh?! Looks like a bad idea to do such things when the system is currently in use by multiple people. Imagine that you put a database backup in there, and that backup locks your database...

Well, this actually is a feature. If you read /etc/sysconfig/cron, you'll find this piece of text:

# At which time cron.daily should start. Default is 15 minutes after booting
# the system. Example setting would be "14:00".

Enable backspace in vim on SLES

Posted 28 June, 2010 - 10:19 by stintel

In case you're annoyed by the fact that backspace doesn't work by default in vim on SLES, add this to /etc/vimrc or ~/.vimrc:


set backspace=indent,eol,start

Bbox 2 / Sagem Fast 3464 temperature

Posted 6 April, 2010 - 03:18 by stintel

As you could read in one of my previous posts, I have been investigating my Sagem F@st 3464 modem a little, to see if it ran Linux (which it does). With the help of this topic, I was able to login into the modem with telnet. After entering the password and typing the "shell" command, I was presented an ash shell with BusyBox.

Whenever I login into a new Linux system, I have the habit of executing the uptime command. Doing that, I immediately noticed a load average of 1.00. So I checked with top, if anything was keeping the system busy. And yes, there is a process tr98* using about 100% of the CPU all the time.

Internet in Belgium still sucks

Posted 3 April, 2010 - 17:08 by stintel

Recently some of the larger ISPs in Belgium decided to finally open their eyes and increase their ridiculously low traffic limits. They even announced to entirely drop these limits for the more expensive ones. About damn time they did that.

Unfortunately, if you read the small letters, they still mention "$ISP maintains the right to lower the bandwidth for customers who have a higher traffic usage than the average for that particular product". Sounds pretty vague to me. I'd rather have a connection with a 250GB traffic limit, then signing up for something like this, which is totally unclear... Typical ... They really couldn't come up with anything better, after the big publicity stunts they organized? Belgacom, Telenet, you both fail once again.

Gentoo, CUPS, HPLIP and HP Color LaserJet 3600n

Posted 23 March, 2010 - 15:25 by stintel

Somewhere in June 2009, I became self-employed. Since it involves sending invoices, I decided to create a template with OpenOffice. After creating a new invoice, I export it as PDF and email it to the customer. Saves me paper, ink, envelopes, stamps, trips to the post office, fuel, ... You get the picture.

Unfortunately I still have to hand them in to my bookkeeping office on paper, so I still have to print them once. Which is what I've been doing since June 2009. Until I tried printing invoices from Q4 2009, somewhere in December. The printer refused to print anything.

Remote logging to syslog-ng

Posted 15 December, 2009 - 16:53 by stintel

To be able to keep some log history of my OpenWRT based router, I want to send it's output to a remote syslog server.

Fortunately I have another machine that is running 24/7, so I don't have to send it over the WAN link to one of my servers in the datacenter. My HTPC is running Gentoo Linux, and I configured syslog-ng as syslog daemon.

Now, by default, syslog-ng does not listen on the "Well Known" syslog port, so we have to configure it to do so. Start with adding a new source to syslog-ng.conf:

source syslog_udp {
udp(port(514));
};

We also need to configure a destination, a file in this case, where syslog-ng will write logging information received on the syslog port:

destination df_wrt0 {
file("/var/log/remote/wrt0.log");
};

Zimbra, CalDAV, Lightning, iPhone

Posted 9 December, 2009 - 01:45 by stintel

After I got my Zimbra server up and running, and configured some domains and accounts, I started playing with the calendar sharing and syncing. What I want is simple: to access my Zimbra calendar with Lightning, a calender add-on for Mozilla Thunderbird, and with my iPhone.

Zimbra on CentOS 5.4

Posted 8 December, 2009 - 17:17 by stintel

Some time ago I started to experiment with Zimbra a little bit. I already installed it a few times, and I heard many good things about the new release.

Because I ran into several issues with Debian and Ubuntu in the past, I decided to try Zimbra on CentOS. So I installed a clean CentOS 5.4 VM to test Zimbra on. I downloaded ZCS 6.0.3 for RHEL5, and then the fun started ...

Drupal migration, part two

Posted 26 November, 2009 - 10:25 by stintel

After migrating my blog to Drupal, the old Wordpress style URL's were broken, as explained here. At that time, I was trying to fix them with mod_rewrite, but didn't succeed.

Fortunately I have been fiddling around with Drupal a lot lately, and I found a rather easy way to fix my old WP-style URLs: Pathauto. It was just a matter of configuring the default pattern for blog entries: blog/[yyyy]/[mm]/[dd]/[title-raw], deleting all existing URL aliases for nodes, and bulk generate them with the new settings. Sweet.

So I resubmitted my sitemap to Google, and requested removal for the "default Drupal-style" URLs.

Website performance issues

Posted 15 November, 2009 - 05:00 by stintel

If you recently visited my website (let's say in the last two or three days), you might have noticed some performance issues. It seems I didn't pay that much attention to the MySQL binary logging configuration, when I enabled this feature so that I could do point-in-time recovery in case something goes wrong.

In /etc/mysql/my.cnf, I had these options related to binlogging:

[mysqld]
log_bin = /var/log/mysql/mysql-bin.log
expire_logs_days = 10
max_binlog_size = 100M