Heartland

James Blast wrote:I d/l something dogey from the internets last Saturday and my machine ground to an halt. My optical drive's fecked so I couldn't use the systems discs that it came with to restore it, my only options was to go for Mavericks, now anytime I try to change anything it asks me for an Admin name and p/w. It doesn't recognise anything I input, so I'm stuck on Pacific Time.

And who said Mac's are more hardy?
I've just downloaded the Maverick X thing.
Sounds nasty dude.

If my optical drive was working it'd be plain sailing, what I need is someone conversant with Unix to use the Terminal and clear all the custard.

must have been one hell of a donkey-gobble.

AirVLC

Now streaming choons from VLC to my new AV amp.

Trying to learn the Fridrich Method to get my times down.

Had a pain getting my iPod working with Amarok after upgrading to Kubuntu 14 (it worked fine with Kubuntu 13).

Discovered that (k)ubuntu 14 doesn't include ffmpeg in the official repositories - it has been replaced by libav.

Unfortunately the version of Amarok in the (k)ubuntu repositories needs ffmpeg to convert files to Apple format (for my iPod) - it can't/won't use libav.

Long story short:
Fixed.

Lucky you, I had to repair a Symantec AV distribution server today.

mh wrote:Lucky you, I had to repair a Symantec AV distribution server today.

That doesn't sound like fun. And that is why I'm a Development Manager and not a SysAdmin!

lazarus corporation wrote:

mh wrote:Lucky you, I had to repair a Symantec AV distribution server today.

That doesn't sound like fun. And that is why I'm a Development Manager and not a SysAdmin!

In fairness I learned a lot while doing it.

I ended up rewriting my own implementation of ddate because they took it out of util-linux

WhyTF would umbongo take ffmpeg out of their repos? That's insanity.

Ubuntu are getting worse and worse. This is one of the reasons I've jumped distro to Arch. Well, that and the cutting-edge rolling-release model.

Although having said that, last night I switched on a laptop that I haven't booted in about a month and ran the software updater; 238 packages to update or reinstall, nearly half a GB to download.

Oh and re: Rubik's cube: forget the Fridrich method, I'm learning the Roux method now.

"umbongo " - have you been persuaded by itnAklipse and joined UKIP, Mark?

(joke, obviously!)

That would surely have been "um-bongo-bongo"?

Sorry, "umbongo" for Ubuntu is a bad habit.

Surely everyone knows anyway that "Ubuntu" is Swahili for "can't configure Debian".

markfiend wrote:Surely everyone knows anyway that "Ubuntu" is Swahili for "can't configure Debian".

I'm taking a "poll tax"-style stand on this: Can't Configure! Won't Configure!

https://uptimerobot.com

free server monitoring

monitor up to 50 servers for free, with 5 min polling intervals

receive alert by email, twitter DM, or SMS (depending on network)

Quiff Boy wrote:https://uptimerobot.com

free server monitoring

monitor up to 50 servers for free, with 5 min polling intervals

receive alert by email, twitter DM, or SMS (depending on network)

I discovered this a few weeks ago and have it running for my main site. Current uptime is 1128 hrs, 55 mins.

Also very useful if your bastard shared hosting provider has set up Apache to sleep after a defined period of inactivity to save their processing power - and therefore take 30 seconds to wake up and deliver the first page when a new visitor finally arrives. Set Uptime Robot to fire an http request at your site every 5-10 minutes and Apache never detects a long-enough inactive period

i've got it set to do keyword checks so it looks for the presence of "general chat" on the HL homepage, and also for the word "eldritch" on the sisters wiki homepage - i figure both should ALWAYS be present, unless the db decides to "go away".

also, i've got a cronjob scheduled on the wiki to reboot it briefly at 4am (i think?) to try and control the apache and mysql memory usage, which i'm not convinced is quite right on the wiki

htop on the wiki server yields this:



but the mem and cpu creep up over time.

Have you tried lowering the KeepAlive timeout (if you have it enabled) to around 5-10 seconds? I've heard that often helps with this problem (but I am not a SysAdmin).

lazarus corporation wrote:Have you tried lowering the KeepAlive timeout (if you have it enabled) to around 5-10 seconds? I've heard that often helps with this problem (but I am not a SysAdmin).

thanks, i'll have a read up on it.

this looks like a good starting place

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4139 ... modern-age

Driving our unix sysadmin crazy with my 1337 MySQl skills:

markfiend wrote:Driving our unix sysadmin crazy with my 1337 MySQl skills:

Code: Select all

SELECT entry.id , val225.value AS url , val226.value AS module_code , val227.value AS subject , val228.value AS date , val229.value AS description , val230.value AS module_1 , val231.value AS module_2 , val232.value AS module_3 , val233.value AS module_4 FROM FoobarDirectories as dir LEFT JOIN FoobarDirectoryEntries as entry ON entry.directoryID = dir.id LEFT JOIN FoobarDirectoryEntryValues AS val225 ON val225.entryID = entry.id AND val225.fieldID = 225 LEFT JOIN FoobarDirectoryEntryValues AS val226 ON val226.entryID = entry.id AND val226.fieldID = 226 LEFT JOIN FoobarDirectoryEntryValues AS val227 ON val227.entryID = entry.id AND val227.fieldID = 227 LEFT JOIN FoobarDirectoryEntryValues AS val228 ON val228.entryID = entry.id AND val228.fieldID = 228 LEFT JOIN FoobarDirectoryEntryValues AS val229 ON val229.entryID = entry.id AND val229.fieldID = 229 LEFT JOIN FoobarDirectoryEntryValues AS val230 ON val230.entryID = entry.id AND val230.fieldID = 230 LEFT JOIN FoobarDirectoryEntryValues AS val231 ON val231.entryID = entry.id AND val231.fieldID = 231 LEFT JOIN FoobarDirectoryEntryValues AS val232 ON val232.entryID = entry.id AND val232.fieldID = 232 LEFT JOIN FoobarDirectoryEntryValues AS val233 ON val233.entryID = entry.id AND val233.fieldID = 233 WHERE dir.id =42;

Wha..?! Wait... what the hell are the database table/column naming conventions in use in this database??

Don't ask. They have a sorry-assed entity-attribute-value anti-pattern going on in the DB

Thought I'd give KDE a go. It's... odd at first glance. Especially when coming from xmonad.

markfiend wrote:Thought I'd give KDE a go. It's... odd at first glance. Especially when coming from xmonad.

I really like KDE - I use it on all my linux boxes.

I can't see me using it at work; xmonad just keeps out of my way and most of the time I'm in emacs or a terminal. OTOH at home I likes me some eye-candy.

One of the advantages of Arch, it doesn't come with any WM or DE preinstalled so you end up rolling your own custom distro. My only problem is that I keep forgetting to uninstall stuff I don't need, and end up with a really crufty system. I still have bits of gnome, xfce, and enlightenment hanging round my home system that I haven't bothered cleaning out yet.