A New Beginning

Dog Barks for six years

shawnbower — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:17:00 +0000

Tiny Dog Has Been Barking Nonstop For 6 Years

The iPhone has arrived.

shawnbower — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:06:00 +0000

http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/1128.html

Log rotate final solution

shawnbower — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 03:07:00 +0000

#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; #Number of days to retain Output Directories my $numDays = 7; #Number of days to reatain archived tars my $numLongDays = 30; #get the current date time and break up my ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday, $yday,$isdst)=localtime(time);


#create date stamp

$year = $year + 1900;

my $dateStamp = "$mon-$mday-$year";
#find out who is running this process

my $who = `whoami`;

chomp $who;
#Get the list of directories

my @baseDirs = `find /usr/peoplesoft/$who/appserv/prcs/* \\( ! -name dir -prune \\) -type d -print`;
#for each dir arcvhive and delete folder from log_ouput

foreach my $baseDir (@baseDirs) {

chomp $baseDir;

#set the path to the directory that has the logs and the archive directory

my $logDir = "$baseDir/log_output";

my $logArchiveDir ="$baseDir/log_output_archive";

unless(-d $logArchiveDir){

mkdir $logArchiveDir or die "Couldn't create dir: [$logArchiveDir] ($!)";;

}

#archive then delete out put folders system("/usr/bin/tar cvf - `/usr/bin/find $logDir/* -mtime +$numDays` | gzip > $logArchiveDir/log_output_$dateStamp.tar.gz"); system("/usr/bin/find $logDir/* -mtime +$numDays -exec rm -rf {} \\;"); system("/usr/bin/find $logArchiveDir/* -mtime +$numLongDays -exec rm -rf {} \\;"); }

Why its important to rotate logs.

shawnbower — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 01:13:00 +0000

Any of you who have been in the sysadmin business for more then a few days know how critical it is to rotate log files. When logs get to big your system will stop working. For example each file system has a maximum file size (http://www.novell.com/documentation/suse91/suselinux-adminguide/html/apas04.html#tab:maxsize) which if reached will cause problems. In the old days linux had a 2 gig ceiling and when your apache access log reached it apache would crash and not come back up. Some times worse.

Today I ran into a new one, in Solaris there is a limit to the number of sub directories that can be created. The magic number is none other than 32,767. We had a process that was storing log files for in there own sub directories. It had been doing this for multiple years and finally it had the lmit. We got this rather unhelp error, mkdir: Failed to make directory “test3″; Too many links.

The solution was rather simple. Tar up and archive the folders and then delete the originals. I set up a quick script to do this monthly and hopefully we will be all set. Going forward I would like to get a more robust solution in place like the standard logrotate. Dare to dream.

Siesta

shawnbower — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:57:00 +0000

Good on article on how to nap: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/naps/.

Arent they just precious

shawnbower — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:37:00 +0000

Uncle Shawn

shawnbower — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 02:50:00 +0000

I just found out that I’m going to be an Uncle, how cool is that? It is totally awesome and scary all at the same time, I cant imagine how my brother feels! It really gets you thinking about life and the whole cycle of things. I’m way excited for this little sea monkey! I cant wait to teach him/her how to calculate pot odds and bluff on the river. I’m already thinking about taking them to scouts and camping and the other nine million other things that will be fun to do.

Congratulations Chad and Mal!!!!!

Firefox 3

shawnbower — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 02:36:00 +0000

I’m very impressed with the latest release of Firefox. I have for a long time switched between safari and Firefox mostly because I love the way safari looks. The native look and feel of safari is fantastic! Not to mention safari is a pretty darn speedy. Firefox has come a long way, the original version looked awful and was very clunky. I would have given up on it if it wasn’t for the amazing plugins. Version 3 is just as functional as ever and finally feels like it belongs on the mac. The history looks great and is search able too.

Way to go Mozilla!

Interviewing

shawnbower — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 01:52:00 +0000

Interviewing is hard work. Its hard to be the interviewee and its hard to be the interviewer. Fortunately I haven’t had to be on the interviewer side of the table in quite some time. I’m a fan of Joel Spolsky who writes a fantastic tech blog, his suggestion is that you should look for people who are smart and get things done. That is it. Simple. When I’m on a interview committee that is my Mantra. The problem I have seen lately is that others on the committee have very defined set of things they are looking for that blurs their judgment of the canidate at hand. I believe that at the end of the day you can teach someone to use a tool or set of tools but you can not teach them to think in a different way. Personality traits are hard if not impossible to change and further more we should not want to change a person to fit our job and environment.

Today we did a phone screen for two candidates. Both were technical savvy however one had a lot more programming experience then the other. The one with programming experience certainly could do the technical aspect of the job however the canidate had a hard time communicate at a level that would engage a functional user. This to me is a red flag. We are not going to be able to change this candidates communication style, they have operated this why for years. Trying to shape away years of learned behavior is almost impossible. The other canidate was an effective communicate that understood process and methodology. This canidate was not a strong programmer. In my opinion we can teach programming and we can teach the tool. The good news is we are starting with a clean slate!

My goal when looking at some one to hire is to find someone smart that gets things done. This is the corner stone! After we narrow down the candidates I’m looking for some one that fits the job, the organization and has the innate skills that can’t be trained.

Scripting SCP

shawnbower — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 19:23:00 +0000

I love scp, its easily one of the most used unix commands in my tool bag. That said it is a real pain inf the butt to try and script scp. I was in the midst of writing a little script that would create ssh key pairs and distribute them to a number of servers. On paper this seemed to be almost trivial and that my friends is the problem wit paper. In order to make scp more secure the developers had it communicate using PAM instead stdin, sterr and stdout. Bummer, This meant there was no easy way to supply scp with the users password. So there is no command line option to supply the password and I can’t write to it over stidn, I was a little stuck. After searching that Internet, and I mean really scouring, I found a command called expect. Using this I wrote a quick and dirty shell script to do the scp part:
#!/usr/bin/env expect -f set password [lindex $argv 0 ] set file [lindex $argv 1 ] set command [lindex $argv 2 ]

# trick to pass in command-line args to spawn eval spawn scp -r $file $command

expect "password: $" send "$password\n"

# wait for regular shell prompt before quitting # probably a better way using 'wait' expect "$ $"

With this the whole scripting experience became trivial again, rock on!