Category Archives: linux

Internet accessible cats – part 2

Posted on January 3, 2013 by Oliver Gorwits

So far so good for access to the new Cat Cam: from within the house we can view video from the cats’ shed, yet the camera is safely on its own DMZ. In this final post I’ll show how I … Continue reading →

Posted in cats, linux, networking, transcoding, video, virtualization | 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

Hacking # in OS X

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Oliver Gorwits

To get a # sign on an Apple keyboard you use the Option (or Alt) key + 3. This seems terribly klunky to me, and # is of course used quite a bit in programming and sysadmin work. This hack remaps another … Continue reading →

Posted in linux, OS X, perl, productivity | 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

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

Starting irssi in screen at reboot

Posted on March 27, 2011 by Oliver Gorwits

Another short aide-mémoire. My IRC client is irssi, running in a screen session on my linux server in London. I connect to it via SSH, but if the server restarts I want this all set up automatically. Fire up crontab … Continue reading →

Posted in linux | 2 Comments

Fixing character encoding with irssi and screen

Posted on March 27, 2011 by Oliver Gorwits

Yes, this old chestnut. Time and again I forget the steps to get a new (Debian-ish) system working properly such that I can ssh in and reattach to a screen’d irssi session and have character encoding work properly. That is, … Continue reading →

Posted in linux | Comments Off