Using mod_auth_mysql as a single sign-on tool
I recently migrated our Subversion repositories and trac sites from one server to another. This gave me the chance to reorganize our layout and authentication mechanism. I chose to replace our existing...
View ArticleAdding TLS Support to Trac’s WikiNotifyScript
We’ve been using the WikiNotifyScript from trac-hacks.org for quite a while now. It helps us stay appraised of changes to all of our various wiki’s and it’s pretty easy to set up. However, when I had...
View ArticleUpgrading to Subversion 1.4 on a Fedora Core 4 Server
Yesterday Eric asked me to upgrade our Subversion version from 1.2 to 1.4 in order to take advantage of the new XML responses needed by CruiseControl.rb. My first clue that this wasn’t going to be easy...
View ArticleThe quickest way to install Sun’s JDK on a Red Hat machine
For various reasons I inevitably need to install Sun’s JDK on a Red Hat-based machine. If you’ve done this, you know that Java’s related files are managed by the alternatives system. I used to simply...
View ArticleSqlExpress 2005 Install Surprises (Issues)
3 years later and it never ceases to amaze me with how many surprises SQL Express comes with when you try to install it on a windows 2003 server for whatever reason. So today when I was playing the...
View ArticleAWS Ephemeral Storage
You may not know this, but each EC2 instance has available to it lots of “local” storage. For example, the Large instances that I’ve been using have two 420 GiB volumes available to them. HOWEVER, when...
View ArticleMaking Ubuntu 12.04 not crawl in Virtualbox
So I’ve got a new hooptie laptop (a pimped out Sager NP9170). Since I’m pretty much changing everything about my career, I thought I’d stick to one thing staying the same — I’ll stay with a Windows PC...
View ArticleAdventures in Puppetry!
My first attempt at using Puppet to automate a server build was not as easy as I’d hoped. The goal seemed simple enough: Build a RedHat server running Solr 4. What I didn’t know was that this...
View ArticleAWS Autoscaling & Queues
In GPSN we have this task stereotype of spinning up a group of VMs to process task items in an SQS queue. While reading through the autoscaling docs two things jumped out at me: The minimum size of...
View ArticleSolrCloud as a Windows Service
Want to setup a simple solrCloud network on Windows? If you are just running a couple nodes and intend to run the embedded ZooKeeper here’s how to get it done. First, make a list of the ip addresses...
View ArticleSolr Index Speed on EBS
If you’ve got your Solr index on an Amazon EBS volume, save yourself some headache and do this every time you make a new volume: sudo nohup dd if=/dev/xvdi of=/dev/null & (Use your own volume in...
View ArticleRDS is expensive — a cautionary AWS tale
I wanted to share with the world a cautionary story related to my by @softwaredoug that reminded me that while Amazon AWS is amazing, it’s also best used in situations where your needs are extremely...
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