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Posts in Development
Becoming a GDB power user is a truly valuable thing
I've been around Linux and UNIX for quite some time and one thing that has always piqued my interests is debugging broken software. Bryan Cantrill made some excellent points on why postmortem debugging is needed at DOCKERCON and the following video is a must watch: His points on restarting a broken container w/o root causing the source of the failure is SPOT ON! I also love his mad cow analogy. I've had the same mind set since I started managing infrastructure and I find the whole root cause process exciting and fun…
$ read more →Numerous updates to the SSL certificate expiration program
With the help of various contributors, I've integrated some new features and a number of bug fixes to ssl-cert-check over the past couple of months. If you aren't familiar with this tool, it's a bash script that you can use to notify you prior to your certificates expiring. You can read more about the script by surfing over to the ssl-cert-check documentation page.
$ read more →Cleaning up old Ruby gems
I was doing some experiments with a number of Ruby gems, and installed several gem versions as part of my testing. The gem utility has a slew of useful built-in options, one being "cleanup". When gem cleanup runs, it will remove all gems that are older than the the latest gem version. So given a gem that has two versions: We can first run gem cleanup in dry-run mode to see what would be removed: Once we are happy with the results, we can run gem cleanup to actually remove the old gems: Ruby is an amazing language, and the more I read about it the more I like it.
$ read more →Updated version of content-check
After finishing the first version of content-check, I thought about a few additional features I wanted to add. One feature was the ability to include arbitrary HTTP headers in requests, and a second feature was the ability to selectively generate email, syslog entries or logfiles entries per site. After pondering the best way to add these capabilities, I decided to rewrite content-check in Perl. The new version works similarly to the old version, but the structure of the configuration file is different…
$ read more →Measuring website latency with http_ping
A year or so ago, I modified my ldap-ping.pl script to create a script (http-ping.p l) that would measure the time it took to retrieve a specific URI from a web server. While scouring the OpenBSD ports collection for website monitoring tools, I came across http_ping. This is a great tool for measuring the time it takes to retrieve a URI, and is a far superior tool to the one I wrote. Here is an example of http_ping in action: There are all kinds of nifty pieces of software stashed away in the OpenBSD ports collection, and I am on a mission to locate and blog about each and every one of them…
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