I wanted an easy way to query our nagios server to see which hosts are being monitored and what checks they have assigned to them for auditing. I also wanted it to be speedy as no one wants to wait 30 seconds for a lookup, so some kind of caching…
At $work we have a client with a hadoop cluster, they wanted a nagios check that would check that all of the regions for a specified table were online/queryable. After some research it seemed like the best way was to use stargate which is the REST api for hbase.…
As an update to the previous post I'm glad to say that our puppet setup is working pretty well! The only issue I've had is that the cron generation script we were using started to break crontab on servers. This seems to be due to it creating blank entries when…
So.. Recently we have had a weird issue at $work with puppet where the puppet runs on quite a lot of servers have appeared to all bunch up and run at the same time. Like this video, but instead of metronomes you have ~1800 servers that were once staggered all…
At $work we use glorious puppet for our configuration management needs. The first version of our puppetmaster was a xen virtual machine with 2 cores, 8GB RAM and 60GB diskspace. This was fine for a while. However soon it started struggling under the load as the amount of servers managed…
My tried and tested toad in the hole recipe. Ingredients. 8 regular sized sausages (I used 6 large ones this time) 225g plain flour 300ml milk 4 large eggs (supermarket sized*) Salt/Pepper Olive oil * I used 3 eggs, but as they are from our chickens they are quite a…
I tried my hand at "proper" crispy roast potatoes at the weekend and they turned out brilliantly, so I will document the recipe I used here. Ingredients. 4 medium roasting potatoes * ~100ml vegetable oil 1 Tbsp plain flour 2 tsp turmeric Salt/Pepper Rosemary * I used 'King Edwards'…
As $work is a hosting provider we have lots of cPanel servers, so naturally they come under bruteforce attempts by bots/hacked sites. At first I wanted to create a script to monitor how many IPs were attempting to bruceforce login pages of sites on our shared servers, but it…
My friend tagged me in a post on facebook, which is a nomination to list the top 10 albums in my life. I actually find this pretty hard to do as I don't really listen to just albums, I much prefer to listen to lots of different tracks by different…
This is pretty much my go-to meal for when I want something yummy that only takes about 30 minutes (prep and cook time). It's pretty healthy and there is no set list of ingredients, just throw in what veggies you feel like. Ingredients. 1 Filet of Basa (frozen). Veggie(s)…