IT Dribble

Via the webconsole, click: Event, then read all the events, while taking note of them and actioning them as required.
Finally click: Clear All Events

<?php
$everything = get_defined_vars();
ksort($everything);
echo '<pre>';
print_r($everything);
echo '</pre>';
?>

Well actually it’s not in the foreground but to a log file, but if you tail / follow the logfile you could pretend it was the foreground :-)

mysqld_safe --log-error=/var/log/mysql.err

And perhaps you have imported a database for forensic investigation and you don’t know the database password, you can just skip the authentication:

mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables --log-error=/var/log/mysql.err

Using Splunk is great! It makes my IT life so much easier but occasionaly there is a use case to only run something once a week. While Splunk will allow this, it won’t allow you to ‘distribute’ running of the script across 7 days. For example you manage over 1000 servers and you require that the script is run by approx 1/7th of the servers each day, how do you do this easily without creating different server classes or whatever…

The solution is my python header script. Basically what is does is assign each server a number between 0 and 99, then splits up each day of the week into multiples of 14, eg Monday is 0-13 (inclusive), then checks if it’s own ‘number’ matches today’s numbers and runs the script if true.

#!/bin/env python
## Needed for weekday selection
import zlib
import datetime
import socket

## Weekday selection 
now = datetime.datetime.now()
today = now.weekday()
weekdayChooser = [0,14,28,42,56,70,84,100]

hostname = socket.gethostname()
hash = str(zlib.crc32(hostname))
# grab it from the back because sometimes negative values are given
dayToRun = int(hash[-2:])

## And finally check if its our day to run and runCode if it is...
if dayToRun in range(weekdayChooser[today],weekdayChooser[today +1]):
    runCode()

https://www.eff.org/ … ssues/net-neutrality