LVM snapshot performance
The Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM) supports creating snapshots of logical volumes (LV) using the device mapper. Device mapper implements snapshots using a copy on write system, so whenever you...
View Articleipq.co: create dns records instantly
ipq.co is a new service I put together to lower the barrier for dns management. It’s the tinyurl of the dns world – provide an IP address and you get a random dns record for it (or you can choose your...
View ArticleThe cost of free
Helienne Lindvall writes in the Guardian: Cory Doctorow [will] cost you $25,000 (£15,800) to get him to speak at your conference… But what does Doctorow speak about? Well, ironically, he’s a proponent...
View ArticleBreaking my blog embargo
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...
View ArticleIndexing syslog messages with solr
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...
View ArticlePuppet dependencies and run stages
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...
View ArticleRedirecting outgoing mail with Postfix
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...
View ArticleCeph at London Devops, 25th July 2011
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...
View ArticleInside Google Plus
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:...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Killing and butchering a chicken
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 by us. This...
View ArticleDocumentation that tells a story
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Full text indexing of syslog messages with Riak
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...
View ArticleRate limiting with Apache and mod-security
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Heaton Royds School
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Domes on Mars – Pathfinder Mission
The recent NASA “Curiosity” mission that just landed reminded me of something I did the last time a robot was exploring up there. It was July 1997, and I was 18 years old and relatively new to the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Beautiful command-line interface design talk
I spoke about writing beautiful command-line interfaces at Scottish Ruby Conference back in June and they’ve published the video, which is freely available for viewing now. The slides are available...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Visualising the Ruby Global VM Lock
I’m working on Ruby bindings for Ceph’s RADOS client library – it’s the first native C Ruby extension I’ve written so I’m learning lots of new things. I’m keen to ensure my extension releases Ruby’s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Clik here to view.
Quadcopter build, first steps
After weeks of research, and then days of cultivating a Farnell shopping basket, I finally handed over some cash for the first parts for my quadcopter. Lots of nuts and bolts, cable ties, spacers and...
View Article
