asnaedae @ home
random musings from a twisted mind
Smokeping and measuring SOAP requests
Sep 28th
We’ve had an issue with performance of a SOAP interface, and here’s how you go about setting up smokeping to time it:-
extraargs = -H Content-Type:text/xml --data @/srv/scripts/soap_check/soap-test.xml
urlformat = http://server.name.com/url/soap_url
The only annoying problem is that the SOAP payload cannot be included as part of the command line, so any slaves would require the file manually copied into the same location
Mac Pro memory layouts
Aug 9th
Found the following little diagram to show how to balance the memory layout on the mac pro
UTF-8 and MySQL databases
Jul 31st
Nice bugs that no one seems to want to fix:-
mysql> create table test5 (
wibble varchar(500), PRIMARY KEY (wibble)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin;
ERROR 1071 (42000): Specified key was too long; max key length is 767 bytes
mysql> create table test5 (
wibble varchar(500), PRIMARY KEY (wibble)
) ENGINE=myisam DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin;
ERROR 1071 (42000): Specified key was too long; max key length is 1332 bytes
And even with MySQL 6.0.9 (using the Falcon engine which is still brand new)
mysql> create table test5 (
wibble varchar(500), PRIMARY KEY (wibble)
) ENGINE=falcon DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin;
ERROR 1071 (42000): Specified key was too long; max key length is 1100 bytes
more zfs and mac os X
Jul 17th
Finally – fixed annoying missing partition label problem I’ve had. When the box is rebooted (thankfully not a frequent occurrence) it’d not mount the ZFS pool and complain that i’ve not labled the drives (which is sort of true 
. So break mirror, label and reattach.
zpool detach pool1 disk3s2
diskutil partitiondisk /dev/disk3 GPTFormat ZFS %noformat% 100%
zpool attach pool1 disk2s2 disk3s2
# diskutil partitiondisk /dev/disk2 GPTFormat ZFS %noformat% 100%
Started partitioning on disk disk2
Creating partition map
[ + 0%..10%..20%..30%..40%..50%..60%..70%..80%..90%..100% ]
Finished partitioning on disk disk2
/dev/disk2
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.4 Ti disk2
1: EFI 200.0 Mi disk2s1
2: ZFS 1.4 Ti disk2s2
binky:~ root# zpool attach pool1 disk3s2 disk2s2
sign FAIL
Mar 31st
Notice this in Cambridge today – looks like a wee fail to me (there was a few more than the two bikes in the picture along the wall outside the college)
“Please do not lean cycles against this wall”
securing wordpress
Mar 8th
Notes on how to secure wordpress 2.7.1 (this is all pretty well documented, but I ran into a couple of dohs!)
o Remove the default admin user
o Create a user you want to login as
o Login as this new user
o Remove the ‘admin’ user – assign all posts to new user
o Force all admin features via HTTPS, edit wp-config.php
define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true);
o Force logins via SSL, edit wp-config.php
define('FORCE_SSL_LOGIN', true);
Things I ran into was a cut and paste error inserting those annoying smart quotes, but once I did that everything’s golden.