Ops

I’d been having trouble getting /etc/hosts to consistently resolve a DNS entry on OS X in all the ways that are are important to me.

When we stop building Ruby from source every time, we also stop auto-installing the binary dependencies.

A rather odd mix of side-projects and Ops-related chaos.

Really, that’s it. That’s my useful tip. Everything else is just me telling you a story about it.

Ruby provides some nice features for when you’re building hand-rolled health checking tools. And there are some sshd tricks to be played, too.

I really don’t feel like setting up a full-fledged MTA to just do basic forwarding. Perhaps this is a job for an SMTP relay.

nginx has been pleasantly stable – the only time it has gone down is when I misconfigured it into infinte HTTP 302 redirects, and even then it took several hours of user activity to knock it over.

Because Tomcat keeps dying after about 36 hours. So, I’m gonna enable debugging and JMX remoting so that I can put JConsole to work.

Because the logs don’t clean themselves up. So of course I went looking for cron, and in the process, an OS X lesson was learned.