https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/ Recent content on Steve Wilson Hugo -- gohugo.io en Wed, 29 Jan 2020 12:57:39 +0000 https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/sysadmin/fixing_gitlab_12.0_after_os_updates/ Wed, 29 Jan 2020 12:57:39 +0000 https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/sysadmin/fixing_gitlab_12.0_after_os_updates/ Unfortunately I'm currently stuck with gitlab 12.0.x as I want to use mysql, my server is still 32bit and only has 8G of RAM for all services it's running. I do plan to move gitlab to a docker container on a x86_64 server but at this time I'm stuck with what I have. Now most of the ruby packages for gitlab are installed for the gitlab user, however some are shared system and even then some of the local ones are linked against system libs if they've a native component. https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/sysadmin/mythtv-to-sickragesickbeard/ Sun, 03 Sep 2017 16:12:53 +0000 https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/sysadmin/mythtv-to-sickragesickbeard/ As the better half was recording far too many of her lovely soap operas and filling up space on the provider's DVR I've had to come up with a solution. Having a digital TV tuner card and a Linux computer that's always on I configured MythTV to record various things, this dumps them to disk and I then use some magic scripts to process them for sickrage to then manage. Playback is done via Plex on the smart TV. https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/sysadmin/reducing-raid-5-disks-with-mdadm/ Sun, 12 Mar 2017 12:52:17 +0000 https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/sysadmin/reducing-raid-5-disks-with-mdadm/ I currently have a 4 disk raid 5 array that's just over 50% full so I want to remove one of the drives, there's a lot of information scattered around on google relating to this and some of it is unfortunately outdated. mdadm now has the option to reduce arrays and remove drives, you just need to do it in the right order. First and foremost, unmount the array. Once we've got the array shrunk and it's reshaping we can mount it again, however the reshape will be slower if you're using the array. https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/sysadmin/mumble-murmur-nagios-plugin/ Sun, 08 Dec 2013 21:00:58 +0000 https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/sysadmin/mumble-murmur-nagios-plugin/ As I've just installed a murmur server for mumble I need to monitor it to make sure it stays running. I've been using Nagios for a while and have already done a shell script to monitor MySQL how I wanted. There is already a nagios plugin but it's a shell script which calls a perl script and parses the output. I don't like doing things this way so set out to take the BSD/GPL licensed perl script as the base and turn it into my first perl nagios plugin. https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/sysadmin/grub2-embedding-is-not-possible/ Wed, 16 Oct 2013 18:13:10 +0000 https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/sysadmin/grub2-embedding-is-not-possible/ Well it seems it's finally time to move my gentoo machine away from “grub legacy” and over to grub2. All was going well following the official instructions until after reboot and running the install to replace the MBR. grub2-install /dev/sda At which point it spat out the error below. /usr/sbin/grub2-bios-setup: warning: your core.img is unusually large. It won't fit in the embedding area. /usr/sbin/grub2-bios-setup: error: embedding is not possible, but this is required for RAID and LVM install. https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/posts/howto-access-the-pirate-bay/ Tue, 21 Aug 2012 22:41:29 +0000 https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/posts/howto-access-the-pirate-bay/ For a while now the piratebay has been blocked by various ISPs. Before these blocks were implemented the UK Pirate Party has had a proxy up and running at http://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/ to enable those censored throughout the world to access the site. Why not Join the cause and help the Pirate Party make the world a better place for everyone. https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/sysadmin/rtcw-reflected-ddos/ Sun, 15 Apr 2012 21:01:28 +0000 https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/sysadmin/rtcw-reflected-ddos/ So about mid afternoon I got a nagios alert stating that rtcw was down on one of our servers, this is highly unusual and I thought maybe someone had restarted it. Further investigation however proved otherwise, the server was up and running but had full input an output network buffers. I wondered what was going on so I jumped into the screen session the console runs under and saw loads of “NET_SendPacket ERROR: Resource temporarily unavailable to X. https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/sysadmin/time-based-command-aliases/ Tue, 28 Feb 2012 23:57:31 +0000 https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/sysadmin/time-based-command-aliases/ So this evening I ran “rm *” in the wrong directory, not too bad as my backup was a month old and there's only a few little changes. After ensuring I'm now getting a nightly backup I decided that I should really have an interactive rm command at night when I can make mistakes. The first problem is I need some way for this to run regularly, I discovered that PROMPT_COMMAND is called every time the command prompt is displayed, this however means that the first command run after the late time will set the alias but I think I can live with this. https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/sysadmin/nagios-mysql-connection-count-plugin/ Sat, 14 May 2011 16:45:24 +0000 https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/sysadmin/nagios-mysql-connection-count-plugin/ Lastnight I switched apache from MPM-prefork to MPM-worker, all worked well. It wasn't actually all well, I discovered that some 3rd party php code was using mysql_pconnect which wasn't disconnecting from the server, so a couple of tweaks to my.cnf and all was looking good again. This left me with a problem, was it really OK and will it remain so? Thus I decided that I should monitor the connections via nagios. https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/posts/a-new-year/ Tue, 25 Jan 2011 00:11:19 +0000 https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/posts/a-new-year/ Well here we are a month after Christmas, what's happened? I suppose quite a bit, I'm getting married in April and that's now turned into a full time project, everything's coming together nicely and I wish people would respond a bit quicker as the clock's now ticking. On a different note, I'd a strange problem with a customer of my android fuel use application in which they'd purchased and installed the Ad removal but it wasn't working. https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/posts/htc-now-thats-customer-service/ Mon, 15 Nov 2010 23:58:02 +0000 https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/posts/htc-now-thats-customer-service/ So after I managed to break my HTC magic, I purchased another one from Ebay. After a month it started playing up, it was at this point I realised why it had seemed to be such a bargain. Friday “preveing” I decided to give HTC a call, it turned out they'll cover it under warranty. Great it'll save me additional cost of getting it repaired, I'll just have to pay the shipping to their repair centre. https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/posts/safestyle-uk-never-again/ Mon, 15 Nov 2010 23:49:57 +0000 https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/posts/safestyle-uk-never-again/ The aftermath of entertaining the quest of a door to door souble glazing salesperson https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/sysadmin/return-to-castle-wolfenstein-rtcw-infostring-problem/ Mon, 19 Apr 2010 22:24:18 +0000 https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/sysadmin/return-to-castle-wolfenstein-rtcw-infostring-problem/ OK so I've been helping out for a while with a few wolf (RTCW) servers and the odd Enemy Territory (ET) one. As these servers are monitored and statistics etc. produced regularly I started receiving alert emails that there were problems, not with just one but all of them. Log investigation kept coming up with: Info string length exceeded It seems we'd a script kiddie playing with q3infoboom or similar, there's only one way to deal with these kids and that's to swat them like flies. https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/projects/acer-aspire-one-aa1-bluetooth-addition/ Wed, 05 Aug 2009 22:03:37 +0000 https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/projects/acer-aspire-one-aa1-bluetooth-addition/ Ok so after much research and many thanks to tnkgrl for the great image and blog I decided to give this a try myself. First things first, source a bluetooth dongle. I spent a while looking for a class 2 bluetooth 2.0 with enhanced data rate (EDR) dongle, the reasonably priced ones I could find were mostly not EDR or were class 1. Class 1 would consume too much power in my little AA1 and I'd like the performance from 2. https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/projects/web-based-torque-interface/ Tue, 11 Mar 2003 12:46:14 +0000 https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/projects/web-based-torque-interface/ function onChronoscopeLoaded(chrono) { var data = [kff1001,k4,k11,k5,kc,kd,kf,kff1220,kff1221,kff1222,kff1201,kff1202,kff5201]; pids = document.getElementById('pids'); var pidsinner=''; for (var i=0; i'+ data[i].label +' '; } pids.innerHTML = pidsinner; chronoscope.Chronoscope.setErrorReporting(true); chronoscope.Chronoscope.createTimeseriesChartById("chartid", data, 635, 345, function(view) { var ch = view.getChart(), pl = ch.getPlot(); ch.redraw(); largeview = view; }); } function dostuff() { var inputs = document.getElementsByTagName('input'); var data = []; for(var i=0; i0) ){ data.push(eval(inputs[i].value)); } } } chronoscope.Chronoscope.setErrorReporting(true); chronoscope.Chronoscope.createTimeseriesChartById("chartid", data, 635, 345, function(view) { var ch = view. https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/about/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/about/ With over 20 years of linux system administration and a curious nature I've dabbled in a lot of things over the years. Most of these things need moving into a consolidated area now but here's some things I've messed with/created. torque Android app web logging reverse engineer For a while I was head of IT for Pirate Party UK in my spare time Being one of the first team members of a local ISP's dedicated support team I have both good and bad experience of customer expectations. https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/admin/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/admin/ Links Cacti Smokeping - Home DNS Management Email Monit Graphs Nagios Project Management Shell Splunk dev license Web Stats Google Indexing To Do cacti to docker container on share https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/contact/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.stevewilson.co.uk/contact/ Contact Details: Email steve+website@null.stevewilson.co.uk MSN steve_a_wilson@nullhotmail.com Google Talk steve.a.wilson.74@nullgmail.com ICQ 4037null2896