2015

You are currently browsing the yearly archive for 2015.

If you are like me, you are notified of both email and syslog errors from your Linux hosts. If you aren’t, you don’t know what’s wrong with your computers. But if you are, you sometimes have to deal with noise, like this totally useless message:

From: Anacron 
To: root@host.example.com
Subject: Anacron job 'cron.daily' on host

/etc/cron.daily/logrotate:
gzip: stdin: file size changed while zipping

This is caused by a logrotate definition using “compress” without “delaycompress”. The error message is especially unhelpful because it doesn’t contain the filename causing the problem, due to the way logrotate invokes gzip as a pipeline.

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Merry Christmas!

It’s that time again! $happy $holidays, everyone! We have a special card just for you:

http://www.tolaris.com/xmas/xmas2015.php

After years of fun with the “madlib”-style card, we tried something very different this year!

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In late 2005, my wife and I were living in Sulimaniya, Iraq. As I was preparing for bed one night, I decided to play a prank on her. Shaving the beard from my goatee to leave only a filthy little mustache, I slid next to her in bed.

molestache1

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Advanced Ping with Cacti

I use an advanced ping template with Cacti to monitor ICMP latency. Advanced Ping is based on a template originally found on the Cacti forums, but modified to look more like Smoke Ping. My thanks go to my colleague at Talia, Enno, for making it look beautiful as well as functional.

Advanced_Ping

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