Street Fighter IV Gameplay Video
Wednesday July 16, 2008 10:29 | 
5 Comments
Eddorre.com
Viewing BIND9's Cache
Monday July 14, 2008 21:05 | 0 Comments
I’m posting this mostly for my own benefit so that I don’t forget but I have a feeling that it might help some wayward folks. Ever time my DNS server does some weird negative caching, I want to view the cache but I can never remember the command to do so.
In order dump the cache out to disk, use the command rndc dumpdb (BIND 9) and ndc dumpdb (BIND 8). This will output a file to /var/cache/bind/named_dump.db (On Debian Etch that is).
XMPP and Ruby
Friday July 11, 2008 23:28 | 2 Comments
Although I didn’t make it to Ezra’s RailsConf 2008 presentation on scaling Rails, I was highly interested in the topic and downloaded the slides immediately after they were available.
The big news from his presentation was the reveal of Vertebra which is billed as a Next Generation Cloud Computing/Automation Framework. One slide stood out and immediately got me thinking with the question XMPP is a realtime messaging protocol built fro IM/chat, great for communication between thousands of people, why not machines?
After a dealing with a couple of server failures at work where notification was less than satisfactory, I started mulling around the thought of using Ezra’s idea for a small scale XMPP agent that was used for server monitoring and command processing.
The result is just a small proof of concept that I put together for a recent lunch and learn demonstration. This simple XMPP agent logs into my XMPP server (I’m using Jive Software’s OpenFire) and sets its presence to available. It also immediately sends me a message saying that it’s reporting for duty.
I’ve implemented message handling in a FIFO manner with an array that acts like a queue. If you send the agent a message (using a standard XMPP client like Spark or Adium) it will reply with “Thank you for sending me the message {yourmessagehere}”. If you preface your message with command: then it will attempt to execute that command (provided that it’s in the allowed list of commands). The output of the command is then sent to the sender as an IM message.
Please remember that this is only a proof of concept and it’s not my intent to put this iteration into production.
So without further ado, the code.
