cmdln.org (a sysadmin blog)

Bind Stats in Centos/RHEL5

Nick Anderson — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 16:21:42 +0000

Just a little tip, if your looking for bind stats and your chrooted rndc stats will give you rndc: 'stats' failed: permission denied All you have to do is touch /var/named/chroot/var/named/named.stats chown named:named /var/named/chroot/var/named/named.stats Now after you run rndc stats your named.stats fill will be populated with information. ©2010 cmdln.org (a sysadmin blog). All Rights [...]

Clear DNS Cache in Linux

Nick Anderson — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 18:42:29 +0000

Had a slightly vexing issue the other day. During a migration the destination host ended up caching some stale DNS entries. I tried a quick restart of nscd to no avail, rebooted the VM, again no joy. Even overriding the host in /etc/hosts wasn’t working. Took a few minutes of digging but what did work [...]

Growing a root file system

Nick Anderson — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 14:45:21 +0000

IMHO one of the great benefits of virtualization is the ability to properly size your guests. Many times 512M memory and an 8G / is plenty. Increasing memory for a virtual machine is typically pretty straight forward, but there are several options when adding disk space. Mounting the space in the file system and doing [...]

CheckDomain Zenpack

Nick Anderson — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 15:52:44 +0000

No one likes to forget to renew a domain. Its not wholly uncommon though. Microsoft forgot to renew passport.com in 1999, and hotmail.co.uk in 2003. Vivendi Universal forgot to renew its MP3.com in 2003, the Washington Post forgot to renew in 2004, and Foursquare forgot to renew their domain in 2010. I stumbled on the [...]

Nginx stub_status Zenpack

Nick Anderson — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 23:41:53 +0000

Nginx is a great little web server. I have posted previously about using it as a reverse proxy. Weather your using it as a reverse proxy or as a normal webserver you will probably eventually want to know what its doing over time so you can adjust resources as necessary. The other day I threw [...]

autofs: Error logging fail

Nick Anderson — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 02:53:29 +0000

Why do applications have such horrible error messages. Non-specific errors are really not any more helpful than not logging at all. I was recently setting up autofs for mounting home directories from an nfs server. The little buggers refused to work right. All I was seeing in the logfile was a notice that an attempt [...]

Monitoring A/B PDU Load with Zenoss

Nick Anderson — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 01:19:18 +0000

Redundant power is a necessity for any highly available system. Most servers have redundant power supplies and the common design pattern is to have each power supply plugged into a power distribution units that are on separate circuits. One challenge with this type of dealing with this type of design is monitoring the power load. [...]

Google hath raped me eyes

Nick Anderson — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 13:15:15 +0000

Today I woke up to another abrupt Google change, the background image. I know some people want so much candy they can’t see the cane. Some of these changes Google has been making lately makes me wonder if the next time I open up vanilla ice cream I will be looking at a tub of [...]

Henry: a co-worker, networker, and friend. You will be missed

Nick Anderson — Fri, 28 May 2010 16:36:23 +0000

Notes on Zenoss ZenPacks

Nick Anderson — Mon, 24 May 2010 20:00:20 +0000

Recently I was building a ZenPack for Zenoss. The ZenPack included an Event Command which executed a custom script. I wanted to store the custom script in the ZenPack and I didn’t want to do anything other than have proper script dependencies in place for it to work. ${here/ZenPackManager/packs/ZenPacks.community.YOURZENPACK/path}/libexec/yourscript.sh ${dev/manageIp} Custom scripts can be placed [...]