Yesterday SMS notifications were added to site-uptime.net. You can specify cell phone number and get information on network problems directly to your cell phone. I hope this option will be useful for S-U customers (existing and new).
29/12/2009
23/12/2009
How to correct comment after commit in Subversion
Correcting comments of existing commits is easy if you have enough privileges on subversion repository:
svn propedit -r <revision-number-here> --revprop svn:log "<new log message>" <url>
That’s all. Pretty simple.
http://subversion.tigris.org/faq.html#change-log-msg
20/12/2009
site-uptime.net: failed checks before notification
site-uptime.net, www sited monitoring tool has been just extended with feature to optionally delay notification until problems is confirmed during next (or third) check. It’s useful if you encounter with random short network failures and want to skip notification on such short living problems.
However, such random problems may show efficiency problems with your site (timeouts). You should check carefully what’s hidden behind them (web server error log, if available).
19/12/2009
Aptitude vs apt-get memory usage on Debian
If you are administering small-memory VPS servers it’s very easy to exceed all available memory. Typical memory hogs (apache mpm-prefork, rsyslogd) could be easily replaced by alternatives. It’s not very easy to do with packaging system (you have to be up to date with security updates).
I compared memory usage of two APT interfaces: apt-get and (new, now prefferred) aptitude. Here are the results (top output when command shows list of packages to install):
# apt-get install munin ---------------------------- PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 28800 root 20 0 15940 13m 10m T 0 10.3 0:00.44 apt-get
# aptitude install munin ---------------------------- PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 28822 root 20 0 40936 33m 12m T 0 26.3 0:00.92 aptitude
As you can see aptitude uses almost 3x more memory than apt-get (VSZ and RSZ). If you are low on memory on low-end box it’s noteworthly saving.
Note: tests were done on 32-bit OpenVZ-based VPS.
11/12/2009
Subversion Best Practices
I’ve been using many version control systems in software development projects. I’m aware Subversion is not the best version control system out there, but it’s most popular (at least among enterprise projects I’ve been working on).
I’m describing here Subversion usage best practices that come from my experience with Subversion (or other version control systems) collected on many projects. Some suggestions are related strictly to Subversion, some are general.
(more…)
