Blog Posts

I catch myself sometimes needing to temporarily install a package on a server (e.g. Firefox) but when I do it installs a ton of dependencies only needed for this one temporary package. # yum install firefox ... Resolving Dependencies ... --> Finished Dependency Resolution Dependencies Resolved ...…

I've been using MacPorts https://www.macports.org/ for several years to provide several command line packages that I also use on Linux systems. But often times when I go to use these, I encounter a couple of issues. Here's how I'm currently resolving these two issues. I often can't find the MacPorts package in my path My solution: Update the default PATH environmental variable on my mac.…

On Wednesday morning several of our CentOS 7 web servers automatically upgraded to the latest kernel, 3.10.0-229.20.1.el7.x86_64.  This broke the OpenAFS client (1.6.8-1) that we use on these servers – most of our web content is hosted in AFS distributed storage. Until we have time to debug or upgrade AFS, I decided to downgrade to the previous kernel.…

I had the privilege of attending the Velocity Conference in Santa Clara, CA http://velocityconf.com/devops-web-performance-2015/ at the end of May.  While the theme was "DevOps Web Performance", it focused primarily on DevOps and cloud computing. While neither of these were new to me, I learned a lot about the culture and benefits of both, as well as how cloud computing benefits DevOps. DevOps So, what is DevOps?…

When copying a lot of files with fast disk and network IO, I have often found it more efficient to copy the files as multiple threads.  Copying 4-8 sets of files at the same time can better saturate IO and usually sees a 4x or more improvement in speed of the transfer. rsync is often the easiest choice for efficiently copying over lots of files, but unfortunately it doesn't have an option for parallel threads that is built in.  So, here's a rather simple way to do this using find, xargs,…