Louisa, Lily the dog and I went for a walk in the woods near my parents home in Heaton, Bradford and we came across the now closed down Heaton Royds school. It seems to have closed down around March 2009 … Continue reading
Rate limiting by request in Apache isn’t easy, but I finally figured out a satisfactory way of doing it using the mod-security Apache module. We’re using it at Brightbox to prevent buggy scripts rinsing our metadata service. In particular, we … Continue reading
I’ve just released a little tool I wrote called riak-syslog which takes your syslog messages and puts them into a Riak cluster and then lets you search them using Riak’s full text search. Rather than re-implement the wheel, riak-syslog expects that a … Continue reading
Understandably tired after a long day of sleeping.
When reading technical documentation I too often come across examples like this: let’s assume you have a client called foo and a server called bar or command examples like: mysqldump -h server1 | mysql -h server2 When I write documentation, … Continue reading
At the weekend I killed a chicken, and Louisa and I plucked it and then Louisa butchered it. It was one of a few chicks that turned out to be male, so his fate was to be killed and eaten … Continue reading
Steven Levy interviewed Google’s Bradley Horowitz about Google+: Wired: Some users are chafing at Google’s insistence that they provide real names. Explain the policy against pseudonyms. Horowitz: Google believes in three modes of usage—anonymous, pseudonymous, and identified, and we have a … Continue reading
I’ll be down London way on Monday 25th July giving a talk about Ceph at the London Devops meetup. Come along and learn about petabyte scale distributed filesystems, or just come along and drink beer with us!
We have a various staging deployments of our systems at Brightbox and need to test that the emails they send are correct. We have a bunch of test accounts registered with various email addresses and we wanted them all to … Continue reading
I’m using Puppet to manage some apt repositories on Ubuntu and have had a dependency problem. I want to write the source configs before running apt-get update and I want to run that before installing any packages. Otherwise, a manifests … Continue reading
I’ve been thinking about centralized indexing and searching of logs for a while and the other day I came across a project called Graylog2 that does just that. It provides a service to receive messages over the network (in a couple … Continue reading
I often find myself in the situation where I’ve not blogged for a long time which makes it difficult to write a new one, as if the long delay means the next blog has to be weighty and impressive. I’ve … Continue reading
