I am setting up monitoring for my PostgreSQL database server, and ran across a cool way to get around specifying the username/password via the command-line every time the checks are run: pg_service.conf. Unfortunately, there is very little documentation on the config file. As best as I can figure out, if you are connecting to a remote host, your definitions should look as follows:
[service.name.here]
dbname=db.name.here
user=user.name.here
host=host.name.here
password=password.here
On a Gentoo Linux server with PostgreSQL 8.4 installed, this file will need to be placed at /etc/postgresql-8.4/pg_service.conf. Then, to reference it, simply export the PGSERVICE environment variable with the value of the name of the service in brackets.
*nix, Systems Administration
postgresql, Systems Administration
If you were a luck systems administrator who followed the instructions for a Tomcat container installation using the EAR-WAR install when setting up Atlassian JIRA, then you may have been privileged to see the following error message in your log files:
2009-12-06 22:56:25,762 main WARN [core.entity.transaction.JNDIFactory] [ConnectionFactory.getConnection]
Failed to find DataSource named java:comp/env/jdbc/JiraDS in JNDI server with name default.
Trying normal database. javax.naming.NameNotFoundException: Name jdbc is not bound in this Context
If you’d like the solution on how to get rid of this error, please read on.
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*nix
atlassian, jira, Systems Administration, tomcat
I recently upgraded my student worker workstations up to Snow Leopard (Mac OS X.6) to take advantage of the better integration with Active Directory and Exchange. The primary reason: getting network home drives working correctly. We have a set schedule for them, but they may come in early or late depending on their school schedule. This introduces problems if someone is on a workstation that another typically uses. If all of their data were on a network server, there would be no cause for concern because they could use any workstation and still have access to all of their data. This blog represents my trials and failures with getting mobility synchronization to work properly.
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Systems Administration
apple, mac os, Networking, snow leopard, synchronization, Systems Administration
After several updates of various systems software packages on my Gentoo Linux servers, I began to notice a problem where I was being denied sudo access. The solution was amazingly simple, once I actually Googled to figure out what was going on.
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*nix
gentoo, linux, Systems Administration
I seem to be surrounded by problems these days. Zend has announced that Zend Studio 7 is now in Beta, so I figured I’d go give it a try since I was having so many problems with Eclipse being sluggish and overall a piece of junk. Yes, I know Zend Studio 7 is based on Eclipse, but I can’t help but think that the slowness is a part of the PDT plugin I use for PHP development.
I’m running Gentoo Linux AMD64 on a dual-screen monitor utilizing Xinerama. I ran into a problem when trying to start the installer for Zend Studio.
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*nix
gentoo, linux, Systems Administration
I typically only install Mozilla Firefox plugins that I find really useful and help improve my browsing experience. Because I’m a hardcore Linux geek, I also love applications such as vim, which is a text-based, high-performance editor. When I head about Vimperator, I immediately grabbed it and started using it. The plugin was amazing in that it really helped me move away from that dreaded mouse and back to my keyboard, improving my overall efficiency.
Well, Vimperator recently released an upgrade to 2.0. This upgrade really overhauled the performance and indicates that the developers are serious about making sure this plugin is useful for its audience. It did, however, break compatability with one of my other plugins, Tab Mix Plus.
Tab Mixx Plus is a great tool in that it can help manage your tab bar and do cool things such as make all tabs a fixed width and spill tabs over to other rows (so that if you have 40+ tabs open like me, you can still stay somewhat organized). Additionally, if you open new tabs from a link inside an existing tab, the color of the tabs will change so you can see which are related. However, upon reading about Vimperator 2.0 and Tab Mixx Plus, I found that the Vimperator team doesn’t prefer Tab Mixx Plus because of the way it interfaces with Firefox.
Their alternative is Tab Kit. In addition to being more standards compliant in terms of how it interfaces with the tabs in Firefox, it also has more features than Tab Mixx Plus and also is more efficient. This is another plugin that I’ve found helps improve Firefox performance, since I was hell bent on reducing the amount of memory Firefox consumed on my 4GB system.
Hope this helps.
Systems Administration
firefox, memory, Systems Administration
When Mozilla Firefox was still in Beta stages (e.g. pre-1.0), I fell in love with it. The browser was light-weight, standards-compliant, and much more secure than Internet Explorer. Ultimately, the thing that won me over was the fact that the browser had multiple tabs to allow me to browse multiple web sites without having to open a dozen different windows, yet still consumed very little memory.
Flash forward to today and we find that Firefox 3 is a bloated monster, especially on anyone’s computer that has more than 2GB of RAM. Why? Well, everything points to the caching that Firefox does behind the scene’s to make it have accellerated performance. However, after a certain point, this performance drops not just the browser, but the entire system. The caching algorithms by default use a percentage of total memory. Thus, the more memory you have, the greater initial percentage taken up by the caching system. So, on a system with 4GB of RAM (such as mine), I easily see Firefox consuming > 1GB of RAM - even with only 12 or so tabs open and things like Flash blocked.
I believe I have found a Firefox plugin that has managed to bring that memory bloating under control. The plugin is called RAMBack. So far on my Linux system, Firefox has gone from consuming ~25% of memory (~1GB) to just 4-6% (roughly between 175MB and 225MB). I’m going to try this plugin out on different platforms and see how it compares, and I encourage anyone else to do the same if they want to see immediate performance.
Systems Administration
firefox, gentoo, memory, Systems Administration
So, one of the things I’ve been working on is getting a nice Virtual Mail system setup for Cerberus’ Enterprise Hosting Solution. One of the things I’ve come to be really annoyed with is the lack of being able to apply procmail filtering to my mailbox (getting ~100+ e-mails from systems logs every day really makes my phone’s battery drain trying to download them all). After scrounging around, I managed to find a nice solution for my virtual mail hosting.
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*nix
gentoo, linux, mail, maildrop, postfix, Systems Administration
Because of the need to have Active Directory operating over SSL, Active Directory Certificate Services were setup in our environment.
For those unfamiliar with Active Directory Certificate Services, it is essentially a Public Key Infrastructure for a Windows Environment that cleanly ties into IIS, LDAP, and anything else that needs to request certificates and have a parent certificate authority seamlessly sign requests (real purpose is shortened for brevity).
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Windows
java, ssl, Systems Administration, Windows
I found an article today that any Gentoo (and likely any Linux user) should look at if they want fonts to look better than either Windows or Mac OS X. Check it out.
*nix, Systems Administration
gentoo, linux, Systems Administration
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