September 26, 2010

Python pip on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx

Lately I’ve been reading up on Django a bit in an effort to get back into programming. It seems the preferred way of running Django is inside a virtualenv environment. I try to stick to packages when possible for installing applications and saw that the python-virtualenv package wasn’t too far behind at version 1.4.5, where the latest is at 1.5.1. This appeared at first to suit me just fine until I discovered the version of pip that gets installed along with python-virtualenv is at 0.

August 14, 2010

Configuring Varnish

At $WORK I’m currently working on deploying a pool of Varnish servers to sit in front of some Apache servers running Pressflow. On our current infrastructure we’ve been running Squid for the past few years with very good success , minus a hiccup or two along the way, one involving memory fragmentation (thank you tcmalloc). Varnish has a few nice features that Squid lacks. The ability to PURGE objects using wildcards

June 5, 2010

Thinkpad Trackpoint sensitivity on Ubuntu

A while back I found some notes on configuring the sensitivity of my trackpoint on my Thinkpad T43 and took the time to tweak the values to get it just right. The commands were /bin/echo -n 171 > /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/sensitivity /bin/echo -n 119 > /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/speed In order to keep those values the same on reboot, I placed those commands in /etc/rc.local. I rebooted and… values got reset. After struggling a bit and just giving up on the issue, I ended up just making a shell script that I would execute on boot each time (crappy solution).

May 26, 2010

Check for missing reverse DNS entries on network

A quick way to check your network for IPs missing reverse DNS entries…. nmap -PE -sP 10.0.0.0/24 | awk '{if ($2 ~ /^[[:digit:]]/ ) print $2}'

February 15, 2010

Support for authorized-keys.d/

Why is there no subdir inside .ssh called authorized-keys.d where I can just throw my ssh keys and easily manage them by file name instead of having to edit the authorized-keys(2) file? I need to do some googling on this , a quick search yields this debian bug report on wishing for support for one.