Strange Downtime Issues

Friday 01/23/2009  –  Category: Uncategorized

Flickr Original users and everyone else–my server hiccuped sometime yesterday afternoon which caused most of the running apps to die, resulting ‘503 service unavailable’ errors. I’ve looked at my logs and charts over the past day and I can’t tell what exactly happened yet…my merb processes totally disappeared and php-cgi instances stopped responding. [...]

Setting up Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibix) on a Dell PowerEdge 2400 in a RAID1 configuration

Saturday 01/17/2009  –  Category: Uncategorized

Thanks to this guide and this post, I was able to setup Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibix) on a Dell Poweredge 2400 in a RAID1 configuration.
I ran into more than a few hurdles along the way:

The first iso I burned was corrupted…I suspect it was because I had paused/resumed the download a few times. Grr.
On my [...]

Monitor your server with Zabbix (pretty graphs included)

Saturday 01/17/2009  –  Category: Uncategorized

(…or, how MRTG is too much trouble to setup)

My server was having spiking load averages this past week and I had no idea was going on; my top output didn’t have any processes that stood out and I didn’t have any cron jobs running either.  A friend suggested I use a monitoring tool like MRTG [...]

Remotely access your Mac with Screen Sharing (and other fun stuff!)

Saturday 01/17/2009  –  Category: Uncategorized

I’ve recently transitioned to using a  separate machine work but wanted to be able to access my home lappy in case I needed anything.  Here’s how I got stuff working:
Set up Screen Sharing (from the helpful guide at Lifehacker)

Make sure Screen Sharing and Remote Login are enabled in your Sharing preferences pane
Configure your router to [...]

Combining AND and OR for complex expressions (SQL)

Thursday 01/8/2009  –  Category: Uncategorized

This is a pretty basic concept, but for some reason I forgot the power of parentheses:
To select people with first name equal to “Jason” and last name equal to “Tom” or “Ting”:
SELECT * FROM people WHERE
first_name=’Jason’
AND (last_name=’Tom’ OR last_name=’Ting’)