Category Archives: General

Devops Down Under 2010

April 29, 2010 – 1:01 pm

I’ll be at Devops Down Under this weekend. This should be an amazing weekend, filled with talks which aim to help bridge the Developer and Sysadmin divide. I’ll be giving a presentation entitiled Commit early, Deploy often. I’ll be talking about using package management to empower developers to deploy applications locally just as they would [...]

By johnf | Comments (0)

Linux Australia Elections, Last chance to vote!

January 10, 2010 – 2:38 pm

If you haven’t done so, please go and vote in the Linux Australia elections. If you aren’t a member then just join first, membership is free. I’m running for the position of Treasurer, but you don’t need to vote for me since I’m running unopposed. I’m running on a common platform with a group of [...]

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Adding multiple database support to Cucumber

October 8, 2009 – 4:46 pm

The Vqmetrics application needs to connect to two different databases. The first holds the videos, authors and their relevant statistics, while the second database holds the users, monitors and trackers. We do this by specifying two databases in config/database.yml. development: database: vqmetrics_devel < <: *login_dev_local   vqdata_development: &VQDATA_TEST database: vqdata_devel <<: *login_dev_local So by default [...]

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Building a Private PPA on Ubuntu

September 14, 2009 – 4:59 pm

One of the things I love about the Ubuntu project and launchpad is the Personal Package Archive. PPAs make it so simple and easy to backport packages. The only problem with PPAs is that they are public. I had a need to be able to host some private internal packages as well as squid with [...]

By johnf | Also posted in FOSS, Sysadmin | Tagged , , , , | Comments (10)

Mac OS X L2TP VPN to Cisco IOS

December 16, 2008 – 5:45 pm

Just spent a couple of hours trying to get a Mac OS X laptop connected to a Cisco IOS IPSEC/L2TP server. The existing configuration worked fine for windows and linux servers but the Mac just refused to establish a connection. The Cisco logs contained the usual cryptic message. Dec 16 16:53:47.955: IPSEC(validate_proposal_request): proposal part #1, [...]

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Melbourne Cup Dip2

November 4, 2008 – 5:08 pm

To quote Justaan: This is what we call the Melbourne Cup Network Effect It seems it really is the race that stops the nation. This is a graph of Bulletproof’s outbound web traffic for today. That’s a 37% drop in outbound traffic just after 3pm. Make sure you take note of my l33t gimp skills!

By johnf | Also posted in Sysadmin | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Disabling “Subscribe to feed” in firefox

July 6, 2008 – 1:45 pm

At Vquence we do a lot of crawling of various video hosting sites and where possible we like to use APIs or RSS feeds instead of page scraping. A semi-recent features of firefox is that when you click on an RSS link you get a “Subscribe to this feed in your favourite reader” header and [...]

By johnf | Comments (1)