By default, Ruby on Rails writes to the same development log, located at log/development.log indefinitely. This can lead to a large log file. Fortunately, it’s possible to rotate this log file without having to depend on any external applications, like syslog....
Ethernet interfaces normally use an MTU of 1500 bytes. I recently needed to increase the MTU use by the NICs on a point-to-point link to 9000 bytes in order to improve DRBD performance. This is sometimes referred to as enabling jumbo frames. In the past I’ve...
Introduction I recently configured a CentOS 7 server to run BIND as a DNS caching server. This post documents the process. Although I used CentOS 7, these instructions should be equally applicable to CentOS 5 through 7, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 through 7. If you...
The GroundWork Monitor is a simple way to deploy Nagios monitoring to networks. It does a great job of monitoring Linux servers, and anything that speaks SNMP. I recently needed to make some updates to a GroundWork Community Edition VM, and found myself in a situation...
I performed BIOS updates on a stack of Soekris net4511s and net4521s today. Here’s a quick-and-dirty howto for anyone who wants to do the same thing from a Linux host running minicom. Note that these instructions should work on any net45xx series Soekris board,...
Here’s how to install and start up an UltraVNC server from within an RDP session. This has been tested with UltraVNC 1.0.8 and a remote desktop session into a Windows XP Professional SP3 installation, but should work in other Windows / UltraVNC combinations as...
The centerpiece of my lab is white box ESXi host. It’s been running ESXi 3.5 without issue for about a year now. A lot of my clients also run ESXi, with a few potential 3.5 to 4.0 updates coming down the pipe, so I decided it was time to update the lab to ESXi...
I migrated my web hosting servers from cPanel to Directadmin earlier this year. The transition was smooth for the most part, but one problem was that users with blank crontabs with cPanel had corrupted crontabs post-migration. They could ssh in, and issue crontab -e,...
If you attempt to create a new MediaWiki account with its user name set to the same as the email address, you’ll be greeted by a cryptic “You have not specified a valid user name” error message. The reason for this is that MediaWiki forbids the @...
About half of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl) stack websites that I develop or sysadmin for use the Joomla CMS. I like Joomla because it has a number of excellent extensions, including Mosets Tree – my favorite web directory software. A problem...
