Tips and Tweaks
Occasionally I have to clear all the logs on a Windows system, if it’s reasonably new then the following command run in PowerShell as an administrator (Right-Click then ‘Run As Administrator) should do just that.
wevtutil el | Foreach-Object {wevtutil cl "$_"}
I was updating the monitoring setup at work the other day and suddenly got hit by a few State: UNKNOWN – **ePN /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_rbl: plugin did not call exit() messages.
When the plugin was executed outside of Icinga it worked fine, online searches revealed nothing of use, I spent ages trying to adjust the config file and check command for the plugin but with no success.
Eventually I was able to track it down to the embedded Perl interpreter used by Icinga. The solution was fairly simple I just had to add nagios: -epn as a comment within the first 10 lines of the script. This told Nagios to use an external Perl interpreter when running this plugin.
This solution should apply to anything based on Nagios by the way: Icinga, Shinken, Centreon-Engine, Opsview, etc.
It’s been a while since I last updated and the truth is I just don’t have time to write proper blog posts. Keeping that in mind, but still wishing to keep this up-to-date. I’ve decided to post quick tips and snippets that I find useful. Here’s the first:
I’ve been doing some database work recently and I wanted to unify the character set and collation for all databases and tables. Changing the database collation was easy to do in bulk. The tables less so and I was not manually changing 13,014 tables, eventually I came up with this:
mysql --batch --skip-column-names --user=username --password=password --execute="select CONCAT('alter table ',TABLE_SCHEMA,'.',TABLE_NAME,' convert to character set utf8 collate utf8_general_ci;') from information_schema.TABLES WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA != 'information_schema' AND TABLE_SCHEMA != 'mysql' AND TABLE_SCHEMA != 'performance_schema';" | mysql --user=username --password=password
That should generate a bunch of statements that look like this:
alter table database_name.table_name convert to character set utf8 collate utf8_general_ci;
For every table in every database except the information_schema, mysql and performance_schema databases. I just pipe these right back in to MySQL but you can output them to a text file and run that later if you prefer. This snippet should also to be useful for any mass/multiple/bulk table edits or changes.
Recently I had a web developer who was coding on a Linux server, he was used to working on Windows servers and was having problems dealing with the case sensitivity of the EXT3 filesystem. I looked into it and in addition to using the Apache mod_speling module, also decided to go a step further. As root or using sudo do the following:
dd if=/dev/zero of=fat32.disk bs=1K count=1M
mkfs.vfat fat32.disk
mount /media/fat32.disk /var/www/fat32 -t vfat -o loop,owner,group,umask=000
/media/fat32.disk /var/www/fat32 vfat loop,owner,group,umask=000 0 0
I wouldn’t use this for production systems, in that situation I’d recommend a dedicated FAT32 or NTFS partition. If you do have to run this on a production system it should be fine for 99% of setups, it just feels like a quick hack to me.
I have been moving back and forth between Emacs and Vim for about two years trying to pick one, I think Vim has finally won. I’ve been putting together a .vimrc and plugin set since then. I may write more on why I went with Vim and on my setup later, but I had a problem recently and I thought I’d post the fix I used:
I had just installed the SnipMate plugin which mimics the snippet functionality of TextMate, and every time I restarted I got an error stating:
cpoptions=ces$ line in my .vimrc. This line makes the cw command and similar commands put a $ at the end instead of just deleting text and replacing it. I could see no reason for me to need this and just removed the line. That setting then defaulted back to cpoptions=aABceFs and the error was gone.