stevekemp

System administration of remote hosts - automation, applying distro-updates, and related things. (I used to be a remote sysadmin for a hosting company for seven years, and have all the expected experi…

I reread Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Amber, and Dune, at least once a year. I guess that I've read each of them at least 20 times each. The only other book that I've read more than ten…

> Guess it's best to setup Master to Master replication.. Master-Master has issues of its own, if you use shoddy applications that assume next-id=max(id)+1. In the worst case situation you can…

> as the whole server been setup for a very important client of me, and for unplanned downtime, we have to pay huge fine. If your availability requirements are such that you get fined for downtime …

Unrelated to gists, but I hacked up http://markdownshare.com/ a while back. It allows quick & easy sharing of markdown text, and you can host your own instance if you wish.…

Back in the day I used to read +fravias webpages, and had hours of fun working through some of the challenges posted.

I have enjoyed using beanstalkd on several projects. It is simple, blazingly fast, and very very reliable.

I just checked Archive.org, to see what the dates were on one of my old toys. I wrote a wrapper for the IE control, using an MDI interface, somewhere between 1999 and 2000. Though it didn't use …

I've done low-level coding in the past, hung around on the osdev wiki, and paid a lot of attention to the topic even though I've no real desire to create an OS. The single biggest piece of a…

I'd be curious what your approach is to handling porn submissions, be they legal or not? (i.e. I don't see anything about reporting illegal images, like most gallery-hosting sites have.) Al…

I worked remotely for seven years, and I found the same thing. That is one of the reasons why I always went out for lunch. I just missed talking to people.

SEEKING WORK - Remote - Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. I'm a system administrator, and I like monitoring, ensuring backups are present,clusters, and performance tweaks. Along with large chunks of auto…

I had a client running PHP from a gluster storage, split across two nodes. Performance was horrific, although some of the sites were improved via Varnish we eventually had to move to local copies of …

"A hosting company" is a vague thing to want to setup, at the low-end you can have a single rack with random boxes in it. But to scale you need to consider running an AS, peering, redundant …

This always bugs me: git status | grep deleted: | awk '{ print $NF }' | xargs foo Instead of using both grep and awk just use awk: git status | awk '/deleted:/ …

Lumail, a scriptable console-based mail-client http://lumail.org/ There is a (small) issue list here: https://github.com/skx/lumail/issues A simple(?) issue…

That at least has been answered, on Raymond Chen's excellent blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/11/16/25822... …

Applying the security update took minutes, even on a large number of hosts, thanks to automation. The harder part was working out how to treat things from there, did we need to assume we'd been h…

Yeah a lot of greylisting is naive and uses "sender", "recipient", and "IP" to discover repeats. If you're going to implement greylisting yourself it makes more sent…

I've got an extensive qpsmtpd setup - the Perl-based precursor to haraka - and I've been meeting to port it over for over a year now. My setup, with some documentation, is here https:/…

I use qpsmtpd as a SMTP proxy, which handles all my anti-spam checks, and does virtual domain lookups. The setup is documented here, and pretty nice https://github.com/skx/ms-lite…

> I'm working on a few such apps myself (todo list, mail client, and a few others), as console applications using ncurses to make something with a responsive, smart, effective and efficient st…

Even with static sites tuning is a must though: http://tweaked.io/

> But what really bothers me is that you got a reply from a no-reply address. I've had interviews where you go from frequent emails and phone-calls, everything looks like it is going wonderful…

Me too. I've yet to find a wearable device I can take to the gym and extract the data from myself. Most of them use online sites and proprietry/undocumented storage formats.

Generally "managed" means you share the login details to your host with somebody, they apply updates, they help work with you to tune your server, and they let you know of upcoming problems.…

Bytemark start from £85 for an hour a month of hands-on work, along with the automation, monitoring & etc: http://www.bytemark.co.uk/managed_hosting/transparent_pricin... …

Bytemark, based in the UK, with their cloud product Bigv ( http://bigv.io/ )

I worked for a company, around 2002, that offered a managed billing platform for small mobile-phone operators. That platform was largely built around microfocus COBOL.

If you look after random mixtures of Linux and similar you'll be OK, but I've juggled OpenBSD , FreeBSD, Solaris, and Linux all at once. Usually Solaris would get GNU tools installed beneath…