Rootdev

I spent years wondering why there aren’t timestamps in the bash history file, and why there’s no obvious way to add them as they would be so fundamentally useful.

Turns out there is a nice easy way to do it after all:

Set HISTTIMEFORMAT to some suitable string in your .bashrc, ie "%F %T", this puts a unix timestamp in the history file, and displays your easily readable format via the history command.

As usual, if you think something is worth doing then the chances are, someone’s already done it and you really should just go and look!

More bash stuff in the wiki

The wiki is finally online. Had a slight legacy issue with versions of PHP between my dev and live environments that took a little while to work out.

There are still a lot of gaps in the wiki, and quite a few dead links, but they should be sorted out in the next couple of weeks as I port the content across.

Meanwhile, if you find anything that is broken or any info that is clearly wrong, please let me know.

www.rootdev.com/wiki

What’s Wrong With Nagios?

Don’t get me wrong, I like Nagios. I think it’s an excellent piece of software and I have spent many years working with it, but I have just completed a proof of concept and gained approval to deploy OpenNMS as a new Enterprise Grade Network Monitoring System. And the main system targeted for replacement here? That’s right, it’s Nagios, which is primarily running via the remote plugin model, using the NRPE daemon to run scripts on remote hosts and report back to base.

Now anyone who has ever played with Nagios will know that it can be a beast of a thing to set up and get working satisfactorily. In fact, most places will devote a good year or so to the process. As a newbie, sitting in front of a freshly installed Nagios instance and wondering how to get it to do something can be an extremely disheartening experience. Once it’s up and running though it’s usually fairly low maintenance to keep it going, and not too difficult to add new devices or custom plugins as you go along. And, for the most part, it is good at what it does, so why would you want to replace it?

Well, despite having almost unparalleled abilities to monitor at the application level and perform any manner of esoteric checks, Nagios does have its limitations.

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I just watched two girls having a conversation over the balcony in a department store which ended as follows:

Girl1: I was looking for you, I’ll come up and visit you.
Girl2: No, I’ll come to you. Where are you?
Girl1: I’m just here.

I know I should say something here, but I’m sorry, I’ve got nothing…

You want the Moon on a Stick.

Or: Project Management the Wrong Way

Having spent the last 6 months working in Project Management after being thrown in the deep end, the best advice I can give is make sure your requirements are signed off before you start.

It all started so simply. I was taken on as a technical specialist on a project and given a simple brief with a clearly understood, seemingly straightforward requirement. When I took over management of the project very soon after I discovered that there was no supporting documentation and even though everyone knew what the requirement was, it had never been written down anywhere.

In reality, this project should probably never have been given funding. As it was, despite the fact that I had initially been asked to undertake the product evaluation phase of the project, I had to abandon that and go back to square one, creating the supporting documentation that should have been prepared in order for the project to be given the green light in the first place.

And that’s where the trouble started…
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Took this photo a while ago and thought I’d share it with people on the off-chance any of you are as sad as me.

This is what black looks like on our super cheap DVD player over our super expensive
component cable compared to how it looks over a normal video lead.

Both sides of the screen are from the same DVD via alternate inputs (DVD player has dual output, TV has more inputs than you can shake a stick at, plus split screen, obviously).

The component cable is on the left, the ordinary AV cable is on the right.

Fairly astounding huh?

And don’t get me started on colours.

Unfortunately we have spent more time watching the Wiggles than anything else since we got the new cable, and no one should have to suffer that much exposure to primary colours…

Without doubt the best thing I have seen on the internet for quite some time:

“Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the
Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about
schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern
life?”

Garfield Minus Garfield

Absolute genius.