When checking pages with option httpchk against an apache server with virtual hosts setup, you have to remember to put the full domain to what you want to check. This is because if you don’t have the domain, Apache won’t know which virtual host to sent the request to, and you could get pages that are UP showing DOWN, or worse, pages that are DOWN showing UP.

Another thing to remember is using option forwardfor, which passes the domain along with the request, so it will go to the right virtual host.
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Tags: 37signals, apache, haproxy, rails

Posted: September 16th, 2008 under Computers, Ruby on Rails, apache.
Comments: none

I hacked togeather a simple webUI for god this weekend, and it’s now in alpha stages. It will start, stop, Monitor, Unmonitor, and Restart services, and also give logs for the past 5 min. It’s powerd by merb, and is actually my first foray into merb, having used rails for the past 2 years. Read more »

Tags: gem, git, god, merb, Projects, ruby

Posted: July 26th, 2008 under Computers, Projects, Twitter, Uncategorized, git.
Comments: none

Having a local Git repository is great, it lets you keep versioned copies of your work, and doesn’t take up much space. But if you need to share your repository with someone else, such as with a development environment, you quickly find you need a simple way of keeping the repository up to date, and allowing access to other people. Email and thumb drives are soon not enough to keep up with the pace of development. What you need is a server to keep all the information in.

I’m going to show you how we have things setup, and hopefully guide you in your quest to have a remote repository that works for you.

Assumptions:

First off I’m going to assume you have a server setup somewhere, and that you have ssh and root(or sudo) access. This is written for FreeBSD, but the steps should be similar enough on pretty much any Linux or BSD distro.
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Tags: freebsd, git, hosting, repository, scm, server, Subversion

Posted: July 22nd, 2008 under Computers, Projects, Subversion, git.
Comments: none

This week, Amazon’s S3 service experienced about 6 hours of downtime. While this isn’t horrible in the grand scheme of things, they’re at 99.72 for the quarter, it certainly is a hit for the fledgling (2 years-ish) service. The most noticeable effect of the downtime is probably felt in the hundreds of web start ups and other services that are also hit by the outage. One of the biggest of these is SmugMug, and in their blog today, they had this to say. Read more »

Tags: amazon, downtime, outage, s3, smugmug

Posted: July 21st, 2008 under Commentary, Computers.
Comments: none

Because i know you were wondering.

Tags: me, picture, work

Posted: July 18th, 2008 under Computers.
Comments: none

I made a FailWhale desktop background for my own personal use, and I thought I’d throw it up here in case anyone else had a dire need for it.

Right-Click and Save As to Download.

Tags: desktop, failwhale, fun, Twitter

Posted: July 17th, 2008 under Computers, Twitter.
Comments: none

At work, we have a couple of internal applications powered by Ruby on Rails, such as our jobs board, and our customer management system. We use several technologies to make sure that our internal applications have 99.999% uptime. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to go over some of the things that we use to keep our uptime high and ease of development…umm…easy. Read more »

Tags: apache, freebsd, mongrel, rails, ruby, setup

Posted: July 8th, 2008 under Computers, Ruby on Rails.
Comments: 1

Rails 2.1 has certainly added a wealth of features for developers using the framework to take advantage of. There are enough improvements in 2.1 and edge Rails that no developer type should be unhappy… well, not for the next few weeks or so. Some features, such as Time Code based migrations, will make it eaiser to keep teams of developers from stepping on each others toes, while others, such as named scopes will keep complex conditional statements out of the way of view and controller code, making things easier to read and digest when looking at someone’s work.  There are also additional features for scalability and deployment that will make all of our lives eaiser.

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Tags: 2.1, edge, list, rails, ruby

Posted: July 7th, 2008 under Computers, Projects, Ruby on Rails.
Comments: none

Totally got me a hackintosh running.

From: About this Mac

Model Name:    Mac
Model Identifier:    Mac Pro
Processor Name:    Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed:    2.13 GHz
Number Of Processors:    1
Total Number Of Cores:    2
L2 Cache:    2 MB
Memory:    2 GB
Bus Speed:    1.07 GHz
Boot ROM Version:    Hack.int.0sh

Wasn’t too hard to get running either, once I figured out what I was doing. I’m running an Asus P5B motherboard with a 2.13gig Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2gig of Corsair XMS2 DDR2 RAM, and an nVidia GeForce 7900 GS 256m video card. It’s got a 160g samsung and a 120g maxtor IDE drive, one with XP Pro and one with OS X Leopard. I’m able to use VMWare Fusion to boot windows inside os x, just as if it were installed with bootcamp. I’m also able to dual boot using the Windows boot loader.  So far, I haven’t noticed anything weird about the leopard install. It seems to run fine, without any problems.

I used the kalaway 10.5.1 dvd, and skiped the vanilla kernel, loaded sse2 support, nvidia desktop drivers, no sound drivers, no network drivers, and mbr boot. I also partitioned the harddrive with mbr instead of guid. I did have to install 3rd party drivers for the audio to work, but it was pretty straight forward, and the drivers are avaliable from the insainely mac forums.

I use a Macbook Pro at work, and I’m glad to finally have a mac I can use, and can force my wife to use, at home.

Tags: hackintosh, kalaway, leopard, mac, os x

Posted: June 30th, 2008 under Computers, os x.
Comments: 2

I’ve been using FreeNAS for about a year now to host content for my XBMC and other things, such as my iTunes Library and family photos. One thing that’s always bothered me is on Windows, it’s been fast and responsive, but on my MacBook Pro (running tiger) it crawls at about 150-200kbps, even when plugged into the same switch as the NAS.

Today, I was copying over an audio file (AK1200 Live in San Francisco to be exact) and i finally decided enough is enough. Finally found a way to fix it, that was apparently posted in 2005 (i’m a little slow). It’s not the actual blog post, but the comment under it. So, just in case anyone is having the same problem, here is the solution.

This didn’t work for me, but setting the sysctl parameter net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack to 0 did! For me, the results were dramatic: drag-and-drop of a 100MB .wav file from the samba server took 45 minutes before the fix, and < 2 minutes after the fix. Wahoooo!

Found the info here: http://julipedia.blogspot.com/2006/02/samba-performance-under-mac-os-x.html

[in case that link vanishes, here's the short version:
use 'sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0' on command-line to try it (persistent until reboot) and put the line
'net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0' in /etc/sysctl.conf to fix it 'permanently' -- note: I haven't tested the latter yet. I had to create the sysctl.conf file, and haven't rebooted yet]

and a good discussion of *why* it works, starts at the bottom of that same blog entry, then links to the crux of the problem here:
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-net/2003/01/28/0004.html

[It's a TCP bug inherited from the FreeBSD stack - the same bug was fixed in NetBSD back in 1997, and Apple has known about it since before Jaguar release]

Tags: osx, samba, freeNAS, file sharing, home networking

Tags: networking, os x, samba, slow

Posted: May 17th, 2008 under Computers.
Comments: 1