md (software RAID) and lvm (logical volume management)
md Building a RAID array using mdadm – two primary steps: “mdadm –create” to build the array using available resources “mdadm –detail –scan” to build...
Supporting old Debian distros
For old servers that need to stay that way (for whatever reason) updates are no longer available but you can access the packages that were...
A quick start for Python decorators
Synopsis #!/usr/bin/env python3 import shutil # Decorator which pre-checks the space in /tmp # and throws an exception if the space is more than #...
PyCon(line) AU 2020 Rube Codeberg competition
This is for fun, for silliness and for do not use anywhere-ness – or to quote the instructions: If you’ve ever wondered just how egregious...
A tale of two burst balances (AWS EC2 and EBS performance)
When using and monitoring AWS for EC2 instances and their attached EBS volumes there are a couple of very important metrics to keep an eye...
Adding tasks to a background screen
A bunch of processes have failed – and you’d like to restart them in a screen session in case you need to rerun them in...
perl oct(‘0b…’) to interpret binary strings
This is really a quick reminder about a perl function which does a little more than you’d perhaps expect. Need to convert a binary (or...
single quote characters in a single-quoted string in shells
A very quick and simple comment on building single-quoted strings in shell scripts which include single quotes. Note that it’s not possible to include a...
LINES and COLUMNS environment magic
Ever wondered why you can read the $LINES and $COLUMNS environment variables from your text shell and have them seemingly aware (or indeed, actually aware)...
Arctic Death Spiral
The Arctic Death Spiral describes events unfolding such that we have a feedback loop whereby the the increasing amount of ice melting over summer is...