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 Better support for multiple processors (Squid can benefit from multi procs when using AUFS) Grace period that can be configured to serve objects from the cache after they’ve expired while fetching the new content from the backend.

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.

January 24, 2010

Python Quote module

Over the past couple of years I’ve been wanting to learn Python more seriously but really haven’t sat down and just done it. I’ve written a couple of various scripts for personal and work use but always felt they weren’t coded in a “pythonic” way. I’m now reading Learning Python (4th edition) from the beginning and making sure I learn things properly from the ground up. When I was writing my code in the past I wasn’t aware of what objects were immutable vs mutable or how generators worked.