Category Archives: devops

Deploying mod_spnego

Posted on April 22, 2012 by Oliver Gorwits

SPNEGO is a negotiated authentication mechanism for HTTP which can be used to take advantage of Kerberos credentials for web site login (an alternative to simple username/password, or client digital certificates). The reference implementation for Apache, mod_spnego, can be downloaded … Continue reading →

Posted in devops, kerberos, windows | Comments Off

Virtual Machine on Mythbuntu

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Oliver Gorwits

I have a Linux box running the excellent Mythbuntu (Ubuntu-based) distribution, headless (that is, without a monitor). Quite a lot of the time it’s sat around doing nothing (and even during recording or playback the CPU is idle). For some … Continue reading →

Posted in devops, htpc, linux, networking, virtualization | Comments Off

Painless MythTV Channel Configuration

Posted on November 10, 2011 by Oliver Gorwits

MythTV – a brilliant homebrew digital video recorder system. Killer features include being able to play content over the LAN at home, scheduling recordings via the web, and generally poke it to integrate with all kinds of devices (e.g. see … Continue reading →

Posted in devops, htpc, mythtv, perl | Comments Off

Hosting the AutoCRUD Demo

Posted on October 19, 2011 by Oliver Gorwits

In my previous entry here (syndicated from blogs.perl.org), I linked at the end to a demo Catalyst::Plugin::AutoCRUD application running on DotCloud. I’m much happier with this than running something on my own personal server, and here’s the notes on its setup. … Continue reading →

Posted in databases, devops, git, perl | Comments Off

Is it silly that tmux is fun?

Posted on August 15, 2011 by Oliver Gorwits

No, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to get a zing of excitement when you find a new tool that improves your life. Maybe you know what I mean – that feeling of happiness at saving time, remembering more … Continue reading →

Posted in devops, linux, productivity | 1 Comment

Smokeping+lighttpd+TCPPing on Debian/Ubuntu

Posted on August 11, 2011 by Oliver Gorwits

Some notes on getting Smokeping to work on Debian/Ubuntu using the lighttpd web server, and the TCPPing check. Install the lighttpd package first, as then the subsequent smokeping package installation will notice that it doesn’t require the Apache web server. However, … Continue reading →

Posted in devops, monitoring, networking | 1 Comment

The Limoncelli Test

Posted on July 28, 2011 by Oliver Gorwits

Over at the excellent Everything Sysadmin blog is a simple test which can be applied to your Sysadmin team to assess its productivity and quality of service. It’s quite straightforward – just 32 things a good quality team ought to … Continue reading →

Posted in devops, linux, monitoring | Comments Off

Migrate SourceForge CVS repository to git

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Oliver Gorwits

Updated to include promoting and pushing tags. I recently had need to migrate some SourceForge CVS repositories to git. I’ll admit I’m no git expert, so Googled around for advice on the process. What I ended up doing was sufficiently … Continue reading →

Posted in devops, git, linux, netdisco | 7 Comments

A Strategy for Opsview Keywords

Posted on May 20, 2011 by Oliver Gorwits

At my previous employer, and recently at my current one, I’ve been responsible for migration to an Opsview based monitoring system. Opsview is an evolution of Nagios which brings a multitude of benefits. I encourage you to check it out. … Continue reading →

Posted in devops, linux, monitoring | Comments Off

Cfengene3 on Debian Squeeze for local management

Posted on May 10, 2011 by Oliver Gorwits

Dialling the nerd factor up to 11, I’ve decided to store configuration for my VPS server in git and manage it with Cfengine3. Joking aside, this is a sound decision: having the VCS repo makes backups simple and trustworthy, and … Continue reading →

Posted in devops, linux | 2 Comments