IT Dribble

First things first: Update to the latest Snapchat.
Then in the main Snapchat window where you view sent and delivered messages, select a name and swipe / drag the name to the right. This takes you to the ‘chat’ window.

From here you can chat per normal using the return button on your keyboard to send the message - not the the yellow button.
Clicking the yellow button allows you to send a pic or video within the chat session (kind of like normal snapchat).
The key feature is once both users are ‘active’ within the chat session, the yellow button becomes blue.

Now hold the blue button and it will now send them your video stream, they just need to hold their blue button down also, and now you have video calling!!

Make sure your volume is up (and so is theirs) and chat away.

You can also move your held down thumb to the top half of the screen and the camera will change to the rear camera. Move your thumb back down to the bottom half of the screen and your back to the front facing camera!

These posts were pretty popular when I used to do them so I’ll try keep them updated:

Download the full Adobe Acrobat Reader installer EXE here:

ftp://ftp.adobe.com/ … beRdr11006_en_US.exe

No bloatware either!

Recently had a client with an unused Sharepoint instance and very little free disk space left.

A review of the file system show that xxxxxxxx was 51GB!! … The server had 17GB free disk space. I knew it was a SQL log that hadn’t been truncated. But with little free disk space left and the fact that it was unused sharepoint - I was happy to discard the logs without backing them up.

I used the following commands to do so:

BACKUP LOG [database] WITH NO_LOG;
GO

ALTER DATABASE [database] SET RECOVERY SIMPLE;
GO 

use [database];
GO

DBCC SHRINKFILE([database_log],2);
GO

ALTER DATABASE [database] SET RECOVERY FULL;
GO

Success 67GB Free!!!

So many times I need to measure the amount of IOPS on a Linux disk/storage system. While there are many tools for the jobs they just don’t seem to give you a ‘number’. For example Splunk indexers require 1200+ IOPS according to hardware recommendation guides but how do you find out if your any where close to that number? Use ‘bonnie++’, ‘iozone’ or perhaps ‘fio’? Well use any of those tools will create the type of read / write sequence you would like to replicate - but where the damn magic number???

Easiest two ways are:
Method #1:
run iozone -a (or bonnie++) in one screen then in another session / terminal use nmon, pressing D (capital D) to get disk stats and get the number from the Xfers column. This is your magic number (or IOPS reading)

┌nmon─14i─────────────────────Hostname=reddragon─────Refresh= 2secs ───19:51.57─
│ Disk I/O ──/proc/diskstats────mostly in KB/s─────Warning:contains duplicates─
│DiskName Busy    Read    Write       Xfers   Size  Peak%  Peak-RW    InFlight
│sda       99%    699.9     14.0KB/s  178.0   4.0KB  493%    3658.8KB/s   1   
│sda1       0%      0.0      0.0KB/s    0.0   0.0KB    0%       0.0KB/s   0   
│sda2      99%    699.9     14.0KB/s  178.0   4.0KB  493%    3658.8KB/s   1   
│dm-0       0%      0.0      0.0KB/s    0.0   0.0KB    0%       0.0KB/s   0   
│dm-1      99%    699.9     14.0KB/s  178.5   4.0KB  494%    3658.8KB/s   1   
│dm-2       0%      0.0      0.0KB/s    0.0   0.0KB   76%    2553.5KB/s   0   
│Totals Read-MB/s=2.1      Writes-MB/s=0.0      Transfers/sec=534.4 

In the above example I’m getting about 178 IOPS for my disk ’sda’

Method #2:
run fio with the correct workload (google how to use fio) and while it’s running it will actually tell you the IOPS.

[root@reddragon ~]# fio random-read-test.fio 
random-read: (g=0): rw=randread, bs=4K-4K/4K-4K/4K-4K, ioengine=sync, iodepth=1
fio-2.0.13
Starting 1 process
Jobs: 1 (f=1): [r] [85.1% done] [736K/0K/0K /s] [184 /0 /0  iops] [eta 00m:28s]

In this example I am getting 184 IOPS. Also if you wait until fio finishes it run - you can the IOPS reading from there. Eg.

random-read: (g=0): rw=randread, bs=4K-4K/4K-4K/4K-4K, ioengine=sync, iodepth=1
fio-2.0.13
Starting 1 process
Jobs: 1 (f=1): [r] [98.9% done] [2224K/0K/0K /s] [556 /0 /0  iops] [eta 00m:02s]
random-read: (groupid=0, jobs=1): err= 0: pid=7239: Tue Feb 25 16:49:16 2014
  read : io=131072KB, bw=747406 B/s, iops=182 , runt=179578msec
    clat (usec): min=107 , max=117530 , avg=5473.62, stdev=4112.08
     lat (usec): min=107 , max=117531 , avg=5473.93, stdev=4112.08
    clat percentiles (usec):
     |  1.00th=[  245],  5.00th=[  302], 10.00th=[  370], 20.00th=[ 2480],
<SNIP>

As you can see: iops=182 - pretty consistent with the other results!

Hate Spam? Hate Puppet Spam in var/log/messages more? Quick buy now!

# Edit /etc/puppet/puppet.conf
# In the [agent] section add:
syslogfacility = local6

# Edit: vi /etc/rsyslog.conf 
# Do a quick to see if local6 is being used somewhere else first... 
# Add a line:
local6.*    /var/log/puppet/puppet.log

# Add setup the permissions and file
touch /var/log/puppet/puppet.log
chown puppet:puppet /var/log/puppet/puppet.log
chmod 640 /var/log/puppet/puppet.log
service rsyslog reload

And your done!