I just posted my article debugging web applications to my website. If your interested in learning more about curl, chaosreader and HTTP live headers, you might be interested in the article.
Over the past two years, I have grown to enjoy the music from the band Tool. Their music was truly revolutionary when they originally hit the music scene, and they are known for putting on one of the best live shows. A few weeks back I got a chance to see Tool live for the first time. Tool came on stage around 9:20pm, and opened the show with “Jambi.” This is a wicked cool tune, and like each song they played, it sounded absolutely amazing!!!! After Jambi, the band played “Stinkfist.” This tune also sounded incredible live, and it was amazing how the band sat back and let the music speak to the crowd.
Once the band finished up with Stinkfist, they played “46 & 2,” “Schism,” “Pushit,” “Lateralus,” “Lost Keys” and “Vicarious.” Each song was accompanied by a video that was playing on a number of monitors, as well as one of the coolest laser light shows I have ever seen. It’s a bummer the band didn’t play “Sober,” “The Pot” or some of their older hits, but the tunes they did play sounded magnificent! I have seen a LOT of shows in my day, and there aren’t many bands that sound better live than they do on CD. Tool is one such band, and I think this show was the best concert I have ever attended. Hopefully I can see them again in the near future!
I just posted my article debugging SSL communications to my website. If your interested in learning more about openssl and ssldump, you might be interested in the article.
I manage a fair number of Linux hosts, and like to keep tabs on how my systems are performing. One way I accomplish this is with procallator, which is a Perl script that collects performance data that can be graphed by orca. The graphs that orca produces are great awesome for trening server performance over time, and can be extremely valuable when debugging performance problems.
To setup procallator to collect performance data, you first need to retrieve the latest orca CVS snapshot from the orcaware snapshots directory (the procallator script is included with the orca snapshot, and the latest version contains a number of fixes). Once orca is downloaded, you will need to extract the tarball and run configure to modify the variables in the header of the procallator script:
$ tar xfj orca-snapshot-r529.tar.bz2
$ cd orca-snapshot-r529
$ ./configure --prefix=/opt/orca-r529 --with-html-dir=/opt/html
After the configure operation completes, you can install the procallator scripts with the Makefile’s install option:
$ make install
This will place the procallator perl script in $PREFIX/bin. To make
sure the script starts at system boot, you can copy the
$ PREFIX/data_gathers/procallator/S99procallator script to /etc/rc3.d
(or /etc/init.d depending on how you install your init scripts):
$ cp S99procallator /etc/rc3.d
Once these files are in place, you can start procallator by invoking the init script with the start option:
$ </strong>/etc/rc3.d/S99procallator start</strong>
This will start the procallator script as a daemon process, and the script will write performance data to the directory defined in the procallator script’s DEST_DIR variable every 5 minutes (this is tunable). The performance files will contain the name proccol-YYYY-MM-DD-INDEX, and one file will be produced each day. To graph the data in the procallator files, you can use orca and the procallator.cfg file that is in the $PREFIX/data_gathers/procallator directory. I placed a sample set of performance graphs on my website, and you can reference the article monitoring LDAP performance article for details on setting up orca to graph data. I digs me some procallator!
I got a few requests for my monitoring OpenLDAP performance article, so I decided to place it up on my website. If your interested in using ldap-ping.pl and orca to monitor OpenLDAP server performance, you might be interested in the article.