Archive for the 'Admin' Category
Tips for handling big SQL dumps
Recently I had to work with SQL dumps to recover a database server and to update a MySQL installation. Because complete SQL dumps are too big to handle them with diff and vi (with enough memory vim actually works on large files, but it is really slow) I needed more traditional tools to compare them and to extract only the parts I needed.
On Invaluable Resources
Names and numbers are important but invaluable resources in IT (e.g. URIs, IPs, e-mail adresses). Their consideration nicely distinguishes techies (for lack of a better word; everyone with certain technological experience and proficiency) from non-techies (e.g. management :->).
Non-techies see these resources as abundant and dirt-cheap because they do not cost any money. – Whereas techies regard them are scarce and expensive because no amount of money can completely revert a bad allocation.
simple log event histograms
Just to preserve it, here’s a useful shell command line to print a histogram of frequent log events:
grep -h 'expr' files | cut -d ' ' -f 1,2 | uniq -c | awk '{step=5; bar = ""; for(i = $1; i>=1; i = i-step) bar = bar "#"; printf $2, $3, bar; }'
PHP syslog patch
Given a multiuser webserver with PHP and error logging to syslog. Problem: how do you correlate error messages with users? This patch lets PHP call openlog() with a configurable program name. Read the rest of this entry »
Solaris syslog and message IDs
I finally checked how the Solaris kernel assigns message IDs to its log messages.
Mailing List Statistics
Recently a friend showed me the tool MailListStat to generate mailing list statistics and I thought it would be much easier to implement this in Perl or Python instead of C.
So I tried and the result is Py-MailListStat 1.0 (I am not very creative with names). Maybe someone finds it useful…
Apache 2.2.13
I already love the new Apache httpd version 2.2.13 because its mod_ssl finally supports the TLS extension for Server Name Indication. In other words: it allows for every name based VirtualHost to use its own HTTPS certificate.
