Category: sysadmin

I like munin.  It’s an old school pluggable server monitoring framework that suffices well for my current purposes.  This week I installed it on a new ubuntu box and it wasnt as straight forward as I’d hoped so here are some notes

These instructions will get you up and running but you wont get the rather useful dynamic zoom behaviour on the graphs and you’ll have added an unnecessary level of indirection when you changed the web directory from /var/cache/munin/www /var/www/munin.  To get the dynamic zoom you need the fcgid (fast cgi daemon) apache2 mod which in turn needs the libapache2-mod-fcgid package.   Also you’ll need the libcgi-fast-perl package.  With these installed you just need to make a couple of small adjustments to the provided apache config and you’ll be good to go.  I’ve created an ansible playbook to do this for you if that’s your thing.

I’ve been working with Netbeans in the last couple of days, and this post is an aide-memoir for one of the more onerous tasks I came across.  I wanted to re-use netbeans icons, but they were difficult to locate.   As usual stackoverflow had some useful information and what worked for me was Continue reading “Locating images within jars with Bash” →

Occasionally I put an admin hat on.  These are a couple of useful scripts for your development / demo servers.

• A script for backing up all your MySQL databases to file
• Updating dates in a demo database refresh restore

Continue reading “Potentially useful mysql bash scripts” →

I configured my docked Ubuntu laptop with an external screen to have an extended desktop using Xinerama. It works (almost) nicely. I have a wide desktop that I can drag screens around on now, but unfortunately the pointer isnt rendering properly on the external screen – instead of a clean pointer I have a 2cmx2cm square on the external monitor.  Even with a clumsy mouse pointer, this is an improvement on my previous dual monitor setup which used aticonfig’s bigdesktop setting. I found that bigdesktop configured two separate desktops which meant that I was unable to run firefox/thunderbird on both desktops, or drag windows from one screen to another.

These two references were useful:

• ubuntu forums
• paralipsis