Enterprise Integration Patterns

This is very cool.

Upside-down-ternet

How to configure a router to turn all graphics upside down. Brilliant!

Serving Django statics

Serving Django statics, from SendHub.

First five minutes

First five minutes troubleshooting a server.

Marelle: sysadmin in Prolog

Marelle allows you to declare packages and dependencies, then derive (and execute) the steps needed to install a given package. Very interesting.

A comparison of process managers

Hey, finally some halfway modern technology for dealing with Linux sysadmin issues - here's a comparative look at some of the newer process managers available.  Very nice!

Docker container engine

Docker is a lightweight alternative to VMs.

Responding to excessive volume

A neat little discussion at StackOverflow (superuser) about how to take an action when the microphone volume goes too high, with some really fascinating responses, including one cobbling it together with Pure Data, an open source visual programming language I'd never heard of.  (It's a dataflow thing.)

Job scheduling components

There's whenjobs and Airbnb's Chronos, because apparently job scheduling with cron is too... 70s or something.

netcat

I had somehow failed ever to hear about netcat.

Expect

Expect is a neat Tcl extension that provides scripting on Unix for command-line programs, especially interactive ones.  This is essentially what I'd like to do (unfortunately from my Windows box) through ssh, although it would be great to be able to do it on Windows as well.

Turns out Windows just basically doesn't permit this, so Windows ports don't work.  Apparently at all, because Windows treats the console special in some way, and when invoking things in a pipe things don't stay interactive.  It's complicated.

But still - the basic idea is quite sound.  For really effective sysadmin work, I'd like to put together two ends: first, an "action worksheet" for complex command-line invocations, and second, just such an interactive back-and-forth.  If it only works through ssh, then so be it - I've got a Cygwin ssh working fine that could probably do the trick.

[Also, note on using expect in noisy connection environments.]

Oh!  Later, I found Net::SSH2::Expect (along with Net::SSH2::SCP and ::SFTP and the fact that Net::SSH2 is itself part of Strawberry, so part of my faith in the CPAN ecosystem was restored this day).  [The Monks have some useful sample code. I think maybe SSH2 could use a tutorial.]

A couple of sysadmin/security posts

Two good ones:

• My First 5 Minutes On A Server; Or, Essential Security for Linux Servers | Bryan Kennedy
• mmb.pcb.ub.es/~carlesfe/unix/tricks.txt

That last one has a lot of stuff I don't see great use for (personally) but I want to kind of get a little database of snippets going for this kind of thing.

The Chaos Monkey

I like this; a post on Amazon's approach to scalability: they have a Chaos Monkey that randomly takes down their component servers to see if the remainder are really running as resiliently and failing as gracefully as they should.

That's brilliant.

Rails devops cheatsheet

Useful collection of command-line incantations.

Exit traps for bash

Better bash scripts using exit traps for cleanup and error handling.

A tcpdump primer

This is neat - tcpdump is a kind of scary tool but essential for networking work.

Fabric

Wow.  Fabric is a Python module/utility that allows you to turn Unix commands on the local or remote system into building blocks.  This is just so cool.

List of Linux monitoring tools

Some of these are pretty basic, but some I'd never heard of.  List here.

IPtables: rate limiting by IP

Another starting point in my quest to grok iptables.

System administration

There's a Python module for system administration. That's neat!