The Largest Top 10 Files and Directories in Linux
I look this up constantly so I’m putting it here. du -a / | sort -n -r | head -n 10 Referenced from Cyberciti.
AWS Lambda – CloudWatch event to S3 action
AWS Lambda is a great tool to enhance your messaging and alerting without creating more infrastructure to manage. Use Case I have CloudWatch Log Alarms (originating from CloudTrail events) that I want to act upon by uploading data to S3. Lambda Function Create a Lambda function with these attributes. Code console.log(‘Loading function’); exports.handler = function(event, … [Read more…]
Network vpc-* has some mapped public address(es). Please unmap those public address(es) before detaching the gateway
I ran into the error: Network vpc-* has some mapped public address(es). Please unmap those public address(es) before detaching the gateway while working with AWS CloudFormation templates. This error message is accurate but if you don’t fully understand VPCs, it can be very confusing. After learning what and why this happens, I decided to write it down … [Read more…]
iMac audio on Google Hangout is pwned
I use Google Hangouts all the time. I love the service but sometimes the audio doesn’t play nice on Macs. The solution can be as simple as changing the settings in Google Hangouts and System Preferences -> Sound. Today Hangout audio failed and this didn’t work. Doing a little searching, this command and re-joining the … [Read more…]
Safari Tech Blog
Now that I am at KISSmetrics, I’m no longer blogging on Safari’s Tech Blog. I enjoyed writing these articles and happy that they are still on their blog. Continuous Integration for Chef with Vagrant, Jenkins, and Gitlab Continuing on Continuous Integration When to use Chef wrapper cookbooks (and when not to) Learn Networking with a … [Read more…]
System Engineering thoughts
I was talking to jtzl the other day. He said something post worthy. I see systems engineering as essential to keep as simple and transparent as possible because that allows the app developers to make mistakes If system configuration issues are unpredictable, it slows down app development and makes it unclear where bugs are being … [Read more…]
Prototyping at Work
I have a fun job. I’m a Software Engineer at Safari Books Online. I focus on automating our back-end infrastructure. I also experiment with prototyping hardware architectures. My boss, Clark Hartsock, loves low powered RISC boards for data crunching. We built a 12 Terabyte 10 nodes cluster to compete with our older Atom based stack. … [Read more…]
Reference for installing Gitlab 5.3 on Ubuntu 12.04
I wanted to install Gitlab 5.3 on a fresh Ubuntu 12. The tricky part is you need to have a version of git beyond the local apt version. You also want ruby 1.9.3 and only that version. I used mysql for a database but you could use postgres. These are my notes from doing it. … [Read more…]
Installing Rails 3 on a fresh Ubuntu 12.04
How many times have you wanted to install rails 3 on a system and you ended up in dependency hell? I know I have. Life was simpler with Rails 1 and 2. You could use ruby 1.8.7 and all was good. Now you should use 1.9.3. On ubuntu systems it is confusing to install ruby … [Read more…]
Scp a file with spaces or parentheses in the name
I have googled this so many times I thought I would put it down for myself. I found this great blurb on Tony Arkles blog. Here’s a stupid unix trick: scp is an awesome tool for moving files around between unix-y machines (for instance, my Mac laptop and my Linux HTPC). Often enough, though, I … [Read more…]