The solution: apachetop. I tend to start it as follows: apachetop -H 5000 -d 2 and when it has started, I press ‘d’ once, which will make it show me the source ip addresses. Nice!

PS. Another solution: tail -10000 access.log | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 10

Tags: apache, apachetop, hits, ip, traffic, work

This is the first post in a series of mine, while I’m reinventing our puppet modules. Puppet is the tool we use to maintain most machines in our care. We make it a point to share our modules as much as possible, so others might benefit from them.

Today I was working on our kbp_firewall module, which sets some variables that other modules can use via qualified variables. We differentiate between “protected”, “public” and “management” network interfaces on each host. These are always separate (virtual) interfaces, to make our life a little easier. I wanted to make both the interface and the IP address for these easily available, but I wanted most of it to happen automagically after puppet has determined which interface is connected to which network. I wanted to use the facter fact $ipaddress_(interface name), which is created for each interface, like for example $ipaddress_eth0.

Currently, there’s no way to use something like $ipaddress_${interface}, although I’ve been told on the #puppet IRC channel that this will be implemented in the next major version. So I had to create a more hackish solution. Inline_template to the rescue!

What I currently do:
$protected_ip = inline_template("<%= ipaddress_${protected_if} %>")

This will probably work in future versions too, so I feel confortable implementing it like this. Once we’ve fully switched to the next major release, I can slowly work through the code to make it all a bit better readable.

Hope this helps someone!

Tags: inline_template, puppet, tips, tricks, variables

Tags: firework, funny

Tags: car, kangoo, occassion, renault

One of my personal missions within Kumina is to decrease the amount of noise. We work fairly event-driven, responding to everything that gets reported. Although I believe our customers like this very much, it can be a bit of a bother in the case where someone is not on helpdesk duty. One of my pet peeves was the fact that Nagios sent SMS alerts to everyone, instead of the person who was on duty at the time.

Since we have multiple Nagios instances, it would be a bit of a hassle to change the config everywhere all the time, so we stuck with the current way. At least you can be sure that someone received the message. But since we get some false positives too, at time, it does add to the bill.

So I decided to create Kumishifts. This little Python script takes a Google Calendar (or any ical you point it at) and distills who’s on duty. It generated a Nagios contacts file based on that information (and then some). We can now actually work with escalations to make sure that if the first person responsible doesn’t respond fast enough (bad person!), a second one will get the message after a little while, too.

We’re not yet deploying the script everywhere, but will soon, after it’s properly tested. I’d appreciated any feedback on the app!

Tags: application, calendar, google calender, helpdesk, ical, nagios, python, shifts

• Install ffmpegX, follow their steps.
• Copy all the songs you want on one CD to a single directory.
• Run the following command:
  find . -name "*.m4a" -exec /Applications/ffmpegX.app/Contents/Resources/ffmpeg -i {} -acodec mp3 -ac 2 -ab 128 "{}.mp3" \;
• Wait until done.

Tags: convert, ffmpeg, m4a, mp3, music

During my lunch today (I’m working from home) I decided to mow the front lawn. Aagje noticed me getting my jacket and she misinterpreted it as “we’re going for a walk!”. So she got all excited and I told her to go lie down on her spot.

Mowing the lawn took me less than half an hour and afterwards I went back to work. About 5 minutes ago I heard her whine. When I looked around she was still on her mat, just like I told her. She apparently was very thirsty, because as soon as I told her she was allowed to get up, she ran to her water and started drinking for a minute straight.

I mowed the lawn two hours ago.

Tags: aagje, dog, obedience, training

Got this link via LibraryThing’s Blog, which points out another great example of what Clay Shirky is spelling out in the talk above. I’ve become a lifetime member of LibraryThing yesterday. Started to catalogue all my books. See the link on the right.

Tags: clay shirky, internet, librarything, love, ted-like

The key is using gnupg 2.0.12 (with the Ubuntu patches) and installing libccid, which seems not to be pulled in by default. After that, it’ll work as expected. We’ve been using a SCM SCR335 to attach it to the computer, but any other supported smartcard reader should work.

We spent a whole day on this, trying to get it to work. I don’t get why kernelconcepts already sells these exclusively if the support in GnuPG is still so fresh. Bit of a shame.

Error we got were things like:
scdaemon[85270]: updating slot 0 status: 0x0000->0x0000 (0->1)
scdaemon[85270]: sending signal 31 to client 85269
and:
gpg: key operation not possible: Unknown IPC command

Hope this helps someone!

Tags: gnupg, gpg2, openpgp, openpgpv2, smartcard, ubuntu, unknown IPC command