J’ai posté une question cette nuit sur stack overflow à propos d’un problème bizarre avec grails et les transactions.

I recently had (too much) fun trying to import a few existing chef users (opscode’s platform) to another chef server. There is currently no facility to export your existing users (‘clients’ if you are running your own server, ‘users’ on the opscode platform).

I’m using this trick a lot to check what are the values of attributes in chef nodes without having to navigate through the UI. You can do everything in the UI or whatnot (change attributes, save them …). I usually do that from the top of my chef repository, but you can specify any valid path to a proper knife or chef-client configuration when calling Chef::Config.from_file …

If you have a large collection of files in a certain format and need to convert it to another, it can be quite tricky to do so and retain every tag information and all (i didn’t find any tool that would allow me to do that, even the excellent xACT doesn’t)

Depuis quelques temps, la recette de calibre pour récupérer et convertir mediapart est cassée. On recevait une jolie trace python:

A few weeks ago, my apr’09 13” MacBook started behaving strangely. After a few minutes off the power cord, it would simply shutdown without warning (no display of the low battery warning message … blam ! Black screen of death). The led battery indicators would show the battery to be at 80%, and if you started the laptop again, it would work for 5-10 minutes … then blam !

Chef is a very cool platform management solution. Once it is setup, you have a very clean solution to distribute server configurations across as many servers as you need, very cleanly (Ruby DSL) and quickly. A must on AWS.

One thing that you can’t find easily in Chef’s documentation is how to use the chef API to write scripts that would use the information chef is storing.

Sometimes, you need to run a command (capture, etc …) for a given amount of time. Here’s an example of a script capturing mysql traffic for half an hour :

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    #!/bin/sh
    DATE=`date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S`
    tcpdump -i eth0 port 3306  -s 65535 -x -n -q -tttt > capture-$DATE.out &
    sleep 1800
    kill $!

Trying to setup nagios 3.1 with ndo2db on a 64bits platform, ndo2bd may not work properly and crash over and over.

The symptoms are:

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[1286679019] ndomod: Still unable to connect to data sink.  7575 items lost, 5000 queued items to flush.

I’m currently playing with the all new AWS identity and access management, and wanted to share some groovy magic to play with users and groups …