Every true sysadmin has been in this predicament — “I need to run this command on a bunch of machines.” The typical approach is to create a for loop, and run the command serially. This works well, but if a)…

If a replica shard is in an INITIALIZATION state and the primary shard is healthy, then the shard is being replicated from the primary to the replica. You can use the cat API to get this state:

Now, we…

Promox has built-in support for installing templates, but they’re pretty outdated and not well-maintained.  openvz.org, on the other hand, regularly updates their templates, and has a wide selection to choose from. In order to make these templates available for use…

The Cyrus IMAP server (which is used by FastMail, FYI), is pretty picky when it comes to enforcing RFCs.  When performing a recent email migration (from Zoho, which is less picky), I got a boatload of errors along the way.…

There are times when I need to create a number of OpenVZ containers in Proxmox at once, which would take way too long via the user interface.  There are a number of ways to accomplish this programmatically, but the most…

It happens — you’re on a server that just can’t be upgraded any further, and you need more resources.  Or, you need to backup a Chef server.  Or, you need to setup a QA instance.  Or, you need to finally…

Just about every significant aspect of Chef Server is configurable, although the defaults are okay for most.  The configuration options are documented at http://docs.opscode.com/config_rb_chef_server_optional_settings.html . Note, though, that the chef-server.rb described in the article was nowhere to be found on my server.…

Everyone loves speed.  That includes your site’s visitors.  If you run a WordPress site, WP Super Cache is a pretty cool plugin that generates static files from your dynamic content, and serves those to your users instead of dynamically generating the same…

If you need a hands-off way to update your Ubuntu or Debian servers, Chef’s Knife utility provides an easy way to do this (and parallelize it!). The following will update your packages in an unattended way.  In other words, all…