Tech

Antispin is moving to Hugo!

This may help you recover from corrupt I/O drivers/Management Engine in Windows Server 2012 on Citrix Xen Server which can break after rebooting.

Learn how to set up a new Ghost blog and secure it using SSL with Caddy and LetsEncrypt in minutes!

Preamble A while ago, I signed up for Letsencrypt – a free, short-duration, open-source trusted CA service that runs locally on your machine and is aimed at developers and web geeks who want to secure their web apps without either paying through the nose for SSL certs issued by the likes of VeriSign or DigiCert. As a side note, DigiCert are amazing and if you are an enterprise user who needs an incredibly fast, flexible and reasonably-priced certificate provider, you should definitely look into using them. ...

I’ve been looking for this video for ages. It’s great on many levels: – It showcases some extremely clever procedural algorithms for more natural animation of bipedal models by using muscle routing and optimisation. – It has dinosaurs. – Computer animated box-people falling over.

In case you haven’t heard of Gitlab yet, it’s an open-source alternative to GitHub’s own Github-FI software package. Github-FI is Github’s self-hosted version of their SaaS offering. Basically, you can get your own GitHub inside your network. However, if you don’t have several thousand dollars to blow, you can use GitLab-CE (Community Edition) instead. It offers a large subset of features that GitHub has with many integrations with external services. ...

The more I read Medium, the more I like it. For a change, a site focusing on essays on diverse topics without hyperbolic “You Won’t Believe What Scientists Have Found Inside A Grapefruit!” titles, complete with “Stories You Might Like” sections at the bottom (IFLS, I’m looking at you. You’re great, but stop using third-party traffic referers, please). Medium’s presentation is clean, text-focused (no annoying sidebars with Things I May Like) and the typography is wonderful. ...

After posting a set of postfix and sendmail Grok patterns, I’ve had a request to explain how to implement Grok patterns in Logstash. So, here we go. I’m going to make some assumptions about your installation of Logstash – on a typical Debian install, assuming you installed from the Elasticsearch PPA (hint: you should be doing this), your Logstash configs will be in /etc/logstash/conf.d/ or something of the sort. |/etc/ |-logstash/ |–conf. ...

Zimbra have recently released Zimbra Collaboration Suite 8.5 (JudasPriest). One of the most-hyped features of 8.5 is native support for Exchange Web Services (EWS), meaning Macs and Outlook clients can natively connect to EWS instead of using the Zimbra Connector or IMAP. After laying the groundwork for doing the upgrade – moving data around, system updates, installing the LTS Enablement pack from Canonical on Ubuntu 12.04 to upgrade the kernel among other things, we were ready for the upgrade to 8. ...

Yesterday, internet service providers around the world and the services that used their networks started going offline and experiencing abnormal levels of packet loss and latency. The issue was widespread and affected a great many services. What happened? The internet ran out of routes. Update:  Here is a more thorough explanation of the issues of a couple of days ago: https://www.bgpmon.net/what-caused-todays-internet-hiccup/ The IPv4 public address space (the available publicly-routable IP addresses) has become more and more fragmented as companies have broken down the address blocks they own more and more and sold small chunks of their IPs on. ...

A typical install of logstash-forwarder (lumberjack) is configured to watch a set of files in specific locations and often playing with that file is impossible. However, you might need to load a file into it that it doesn’t typically monitor. In another situation, you may need to load historic logfiles into LSF. This can be problematic as LSF keeps track of its position in a given file and will often recognise the file as one it has already processed and won’t reimport events it considers as “old”. ...

Given the amount of data that we post about ourselves online – on Facebook, on Twitter, Tumblr, blogs, etc, the dataset that effectively describes you as an individual continually grows. With some clever analytics and sufficiently large sample size, trends can be inferred with alarming reliability and predictions about individual behaviour can be made with a frankly scary degree of accuracy. Jennifer Golbeck describes how scientists, governments and companies make use of this data to profile individuals and build a comprehensive picture of you based on seemingly unconnected events, actions and trends. ...

After a conversation with a friend about the best way to go about setting up a NAS for your home, I thought I’d relate some of the things I’ve learned over the few years that I’ve been working with ZFS at home and at work. Specs If you’re going to be building a homebrew NAS box to use as your media/file storage, streaming server and porn dump, you’ll need to think about what sort of kit you need. ...

For the past six months or so, I’ve been running an ELK stack setup in our hosting infrastructure at work to monitor, among other things: HTTP requests coming in Nginx response times System loads Sendmail and Postfix activity Disk IO and related metrics To do this, I’ve had to evolve the infrastructure somewhat. Here’s a brief overview of what happened. v1 Logstash was installed on a single box using its built-in Elasticsearch server to store data. ...

I took apart an old, old 10GB IDE laptop hard disk. Pretty!

Apologies for those affected (like three of you, probably) by the 2-3 hour outage. This was caused by a WordPress upgrade which crashed the PHP process. Obviously I monitor the site closely and fixed it immediately three hours later when I noticed.

I’ve not the time right now to write more in the Logstash series, but as a quick interlude, I’d like to link to my ever-expanding Gist containing some useful Logstash GROK patterns for Postfix and Sendmail. Good, comprehensive sets of these are a bit of a slog to find online, so I cobbled together some from posts on the Internets, GitHub Gists and some tweaks of my own to make them work. ...

In my previous post, I outlined how I manage the collection of logs across our infrastructure at a high level with Logstash and Elasticsearch. I also touched upon viewing and searching through the data with Kibana, a Javascript frontend. In this post, I want to cover an important interim step if using the packages in the ElasticSearch repos is unfeasible or if you are running legacy servers that the repos don’t provide packages for. ...