Category Archives: /geek

MySQL: ERROR 1286 (42000): Unknown table engine ‘InnoDB’

By Ken | Published: January 9, 2011
I was asked to review a application recently that had some performance issues. The db engine was MySQL and the database was getting hammered. Changing the behavior of the queries the app used was not a short term option so I started looking tuning at the MySQL configuration. The box in question was a “large” [...]
Also posted in /sysadmin, /unix | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Ganglia: Using the ruby gmetric gem

By Ken | Published: December 3, 2010
If you are new to Ganglia this post might not make much sense. If you are interested in Ganglia I suggest you read this paper first to get a better understanding of how it works. Over the past year I have been moving away from Munin and towards Ganglia for my server monitoring needs (for [...]
Also posted in /sysadmin, /unix, /work, monitoring, ruby | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Maven tweaks continued…

By Ken | Published: July 23, 2009
In a previous post I mentioned using the settings.xml file to force maven to use a local repository. In my case this is Jfrog’s Artifactory. This was accomplished using the “mirror” element in the settings.xml file (example). While most of our artifacts are downloaded from the “central” repository. Some of them have dependencies that are [...]
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TemPageR 3E environment monitor

By Ken | Published: May 18, 2009
Recently ran into some heat issues in a mini computer room that has a window in direct line of the sun and problematic HVAC. Picked up a network enabled environment monitor so I could have some data to show when trying to get the issues resolved. Originally I was thinking about getting the Websensor EM01B [...]
Also posted in /StupidShellTricks, /sysadmin, /unix, /work | Leave a comment

Overriding the default maven repository

By Ken | Published: May 15, 2009
If you are using maven for builds or dependency management you will notice that by default maven always attempts to pull dependencies from the public maven repository (repo1). After reading documentation and examples I thought you could easily override this by specifying a local repository in your respective project object model file (pom.xml). Example. Not [...]
Also posted in /sysadmin, /unix, /work | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

This RRD was created on other architecture

By Ken | Published: April 27, 2009
I use Munin for some graphing of system and application stats. Like most graphing open source projects its based on the widely used RRDTool. I recently was moving my munin instance from a xen instance on 64bit Ubuntu install, to a bare metal 32bit install. Moving munin consists of the moving the munin.conf file and [...]
Also posted in /sysadmin, /unix, /work | Tagged | 2 Comments

Evolution MAPI Plugin on Ubuntu 9.04

By Ken | Published: April 7, 2009
Recently upgraded my laptop to the pre release Ubuntu 9.04 ( jaunty jackalope). One of the things I have been looking forward to is the Evolution MAPI plugin that is a result of work done by the Openchange project to implement MAPI stacks on both the client and server side. Evolution has been able to [...]
Also posted in /dev/random | Tagged | 15 Comments

CUWiN Homer Mesh Project

By Ken | Published: December 13, 2007
The CUWiN folks spent some time recently adding new equipment to the Homer mesh network. My company Metrix has provided them with all the gear for this project to provide the Village of Homer with a low cost tubes.
Also posted in /freenetworks, /metrix, /seattlewireless, /work | Leave a comment

Shmoocon Labs 2008

By Ken | Published: December 13, 2007
Recently I have been getting all the stuff for Shmoocon Labs off the ground. In case you don’t know Shmoocon Labs is an event held one day prior to Shmoocon. The basic idea is as follows. Get 30 or so geeks, a handful of vendors with cool gear and spend a day hammering out the [...]
Also posted in /shmoocon, /travel, cons | Leave a comment

EaKiu: Eye Candy for the Wi-Spy

By Ken | Published: August 7, 2007
While at WWDC John and Daniel turned me on to EaKiu. Its a cool piece of software for the Wi-Spy 2.4Ghz USB Spectrum Analyzer. It touts some pretty cool 3D graphs. Unfortunately its OS X only. For Windows you can use manufacturer provided software, and for Linux you can use Dragorn’s software. Which both sport [...]
Also posted in /dev/random, /freenetworks, /metrix, /seattlewireless | Leave a comment