unimportant
using clickhouse-local to analyze archived log files
at work we’re hoarding log files. it’s a low-cost, low-tech solution: btrfs, some python script archiving /var/log/*.log, *.1 from hundreds of servers. we have a peace of mind that whatever it is – as long as it’s logging to that folder – we’ll have an archive of it. till now, whenever there was a need ... Read More
debian installer not detecting built-in nvme drive
i’m trying to set up debian 12 on a laptop [ dell latitude 7400 ]. pendrive ready but.. the installer detects only pendrive and no NVMe that holds Windows 11. why? it turns out bios had Raid mode configured for the intel storage controller – as described here. how to reconfigure it without ruining ability ... Read More
mental models and alike
https://fs.blog/tgmm https://perell.com/essay/50-ideas-that-changed-my-life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
restarting from cron users’s service with a random delay
sometimes things are not as stable and not-leaky as they should be.
temporarily speeding up IO performance for KVM VM
i have few VMs running on top of spinning rust. recently i’ve upgraded one of them to not-yet-stable debian bookworm. upgrade would be pretty slow but.. i’ve edited the VM definition and asked KVM to allow host server to cache any IO operations. speedup was great, bullseye->bookworm upgrade finished in less than 5 minutes. for ... Read More
re-parenting a shell command
let’s say you’ve logged in via ssh to some server and started some long running command. minutes or hours later you’ve realized that you did not run it under screen or tmux – so that command will die once your ssh connection is closed. today i’ve learned about reptyr which can help with that – ... Read More
squid-based forward proxy that accepts incoming tls-encrypted connections
we needed to do some interoperability testing, and for that we had to allow http client application to talk with http proxy via secure channel. on debian 11 i had to install package squid-openssl and add this line in /etc/squid/squid.conf: the ssl cert was generated by certbot certonly. that’s how i tested it:
getting unique string stats for large file; where data has small cardinality
sadly, not all of our logs are in clickhouse, meaning chewing them can be time consuming and not-so-fun.
online tools to test your mail infrastructure
once in a while i’m involed in moving mail servers around, to and from the could. those tools are useful each time it’s done: also related – a deep dive into e-mail delivery in 2024.
rsync with more efficient compression, hash algorithm
rsync 3.2.0 and newer supports more compression and hash algorithms. zstd compression is well suited for slower network connections [ tens mbit/s ], lz4 – for faster. xxh3 hash is worth using regardless of the network speed. syntax:
nrpe’s check_http – POSTing a file
i needed to monitor some service available via HTTP, this service is expecting to get a file posted – as if it was submitted via HTML form. so the file’s content is in the POST body, wrapped in Content-Type: multipart/form-data and stored between boundaries. Is it possible to simulate via check_http? yes!
Best Practical’s RT – recovering specific tickets from backups
I needed to recover a particular, old and already shredded, RT ticket from a backup to web interface. I’ve restored the database to a separate server and run those commands to get INSERT statements for two tickets i was interested in – 69187, 100112: To be on the safe side – always recover to a ... Read More
colorized side-by-side diff in console
this one does the trick for me:
WordPress’ Gutenberg editor failing to save anything
i’ve run into an odd situation – wordpress was working just fine yet the new / Gutenberg editor did not save anything. No errors, but also no content saved – the only thing that was left was ‘Auto Draft’ with an empty content. i’ve tracked it down to fact that .htaccess was not actually used ... Read More
public domain image searchers
https://wordpress.org/openverse/?referrer=creativecommons.org https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=image&title=Special:MediaSearch&go=Go&type=image https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=image https://pixabay.com/
bash – finding files which have one of parent folders with a very specific name, and contain specific sub string
and to compress all of the files into single tar archive:
play.pl mobile – 100GB for a month for 5pln
play.pl seems to have never ending promotion where you get 100GB of data traffic for a month when you buy a new starter and activate bonus package. here’s what i do to activate it [ every 30 days ]: buy play-as-you-go sim card e.g. in Zabka convenience store – Play odNowa for 5PLN, register the ... Read More
.net core under linux throws “The remote certificate is invalid because of errors in the certificate chain: NotTimeValid” when communicating with HTTPS server having letsencrypt cert
i’ve stumbled on an issue – simple .net core code using HttpWebRequest failed to communicate with any server that had lets encrypt cert. no matter if the server used new or old certificate chain – i was getting: at the same time curl or wget could communicate with the same site without issues. i’ve tried ... Read More