Technology

Script for backing up to Google Nearline storage

November 11, 2015
For Everyone, Linux
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Recently I’ve been working on a mechanism to mirror a dataset from a local filesystem to Google Nearline cloud storage in an encrypted format. The costs are really the compelling factor. While I could buy some hard drives and put them at another location (called the colo-buddy system!) it just made sense to not have to deal with the logistics, maintenance, power, network, etc… Of course being me, it’s a PHP cli script, because well – me. If you’re looking…

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Purging old indexes from elasticsearch with logstash

October 15, 2015
Linux, Technology
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Currently doing some work on logstash and found myself wanting to delete indexes over a certain age. The following PHP script gets the job done. I use php as my primary command line scripting language so use or port as interested. #!/usr/bin/php <?php date_default_timezone_set(“America/Chicago”); $index_name = “logstash-“; $purge_age = 300; $elastic = “http://elastic.domain.com:9200”; $data = file_get_contents(“${elastic}/_cat/indices/${index_name}*”); foreach(split(“\n”, $data) as $line) { $split = preg_split(“/\s+/”, $line); if(count($split) > 1) { $date = preg_replace(“/${index_name}|\./”, “”, $split[2]); $split[] = floor((time() – strtotime($date)) /…

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Water still over the bridge

May 22, 2014
Business, Technology
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Nearly 8 years to the day and here I am talking about net neutrality again. This is a conversation that refuses to end because in the natural order companies want to maximize their profits and find new revenue streams. However when they want to find those streams without introducing new services or making existing services better it is always opposite the values of the consumer. And in this case they want to muscle it in. They’ve never had such a…

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New Digs

May 17, 2014
Business, Technology
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Not all VPS providers are equal. That is to say that you get what you pay for and while I’m paying more than I was, I want to take a minute to make a recommendation for a company that has gone out of their way to help me allocate a new home for many of my web services. In this case I’m talking about Point North Networks / Kickass VPS. You see I have been a customer of burst.net for…

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Filtering output on linux with color

June 3, 2011
Linux, Technology
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Last night I found myself desperate to read the output of tail but looking for specific content. (Basically tailing a log file and needing to have the fields pop out at me.) There’s no easy colorize command in linux so I did some digging, found something similar and modified it. (This is based on Kenny Moen’s blog entry about baretail on unix.) Anyway, the following perl script will allow any content to be highlighted using a simple regex and a…

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Redundancy with IPtables/netfilter – VRRP

April 7, 2011
Networking
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Ever try to setup iptables in a redundant configuration? That’s exactly what I recently set out to accomplish and after a few bumps, figured out a nice clean way to accomplish it. Granted, I don’t yet have a way to do state failover but for my environment that wasn’t a concern. That being said, this was accomplished using iptables and keepalived. I did not use ipvs. I just built two iptables systems and installed keepalived. vrrp is done on the…

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Linux raid hard drive serial numbers and temperatures

December 16, 2010
Linux
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Thought I’d share this little script. Basically what I needed to do was build a way to track what hard drives were connected to my linux raid arrays along with their serial numbers and temperatures. This script requires hdparm and hddtemp which are both readily available on most distros. #!/bin/bash # set LANG for encoding celcius symbol, UTF-8 screws it up LANG=en_US IFS=$’\n’ for file in /dev/md[0-9]*; do VAL=`mdadm -D $file`; for line in $VAL; do if [[ $line =~…

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Should I run Vista?

June 24, 2008
Technology
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As a long running advocate of Linux, I know I’m stepping out of my usual terrain but I think it has to be said by a competent computer user: Yes, you can run Vista. Don’t get me wrong, I still have both desktop and server installations of Linux and love it dearly. I also have a desktop that runs Vista. In fact I took it a step further and run 64-bit Vista and other than Quicken 2008 which gets shut…

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Building a liquid cooled system

April 8, 2008
Technology
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The latest addition to the ManGeek’s computing power is a new PC. The old laptop, while quite capable, was just not satisfactory for geekdom. Anyone who’s seen a ham radio operator today knows what happens when geeks get out of touch with the times. Thus I decided to push the limits on a reasonable budget and build a liquid cooled system. Picture a radiator on your car and you have the same concept for a PC. The radiator mounts on…

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What will a man do for a terabyte?

September 29, 2006
Technology
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Some day a brilliant geneticist will discover a gene present in all masculine people that makes us want to do things bigger than before. That very gene drives us to the verge of insanity for goals that may not ever actually make our lives better. I think it also has something to do with why most redneck deaths begin with the words “Hey man, check this out!” Still, in my quest to satisfy this genetic craving (oh yes, it’s all…

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