Packer: 1 command line to create a Debian VirtualBox/Vagrant box

4 September 2014 in Debian, Hi-Tech, Linux, Vagrant

I recently wanted to update my Vagrant box running Debian Wheezy. The problem is, the box size is growing on each updates for several reasons. And I prefer to create a new box from scratch on any new Debian release. Starting from scratch each time is a little bit boring, that’s why I created a preseed file (french). That made the install automatically, however I always had to do other step by hands (or need to write a script for it).

Naemon/Nagios: LXC check resources

2 September 2014 in Debian, Developement, Hi-Tech, Linux, LXC, Nagios

You may know that I really like LXC and the major problem when you want to use that solution in production is: how do you monitor memory and CPU? Regarding the CPU side, I do not have an easy answer for the moment :-(. However regarding the memory, I’ve made a Nagios/Naemon check which will check the memory (RAM) and SWAP of a container. Here is how to use it:

Mediawiki: make your search case insensitive

31 August 2014 in Databases, Hi-Tech, Web

For several years, I was wondering how to make Mediawiki search case insensitive. I didn’t really had time to look at it until I was really fed up. That’s why after a few seconds of search, I’ve found an extension for Mediawiki which is working perfectly called TitleKey. The TitleKey extension provides a case-insensitive title prefix search. It uses a separate table for the keys, so if it works cleanly it can be deployed without an expensive rebuild of core tables, and dumped when Wikimedia gets a nicer backend through Extension:LuceneSearch (pre 1.

LXC 1.0 on Debian Wheezy

29 August 2014 in Debian, Hi-Tech, Linux, LXC

I’m using for my own servers LXC for about a year now. I’m still fed up about bugs introduced by the beta version of LXC (0.8b) present in Debian Wheezy. As now LXC project has released a stable version, I’ve looked at the Debian backports, but didn’t have any chance to find a newer version on it :-(. However, a version 1.0.4 exist on Debian Jessie. I took the Debian sources and recompiled them on Wheezy (available here).

Nagios/Naemon: Free Mobile SMS notification

27 August 2014 in Debian, Hi-Tech, Linux, Nagios, Web

Thanks to Free Mobile (French mobile provider) to provides an SMS API. I enabled it for my own monitoring escalation, just in case I have problem receiving emails. I’ve made a short documentation on how to setup SMS notification through Free Mobile for Nagios or Naemon (in french). Enjoy :-)

Monitoring: switching from Nagios to Naemon (not Shinken or Sensu)

25 August 2014 in Debian, Hi-Tech, Linux, Nagios

I am using Nagios for about 8 years now for personal and professional usage. What I can say is, this is a super product, old and stable but not as scalable as I would like. We’re in the age of Cloud computing and in my opinion we shouldn’t have to take care about backup and monitoring in now days, this should be automatic. I was searching a solution for my personal usages, that’s why I first wanted a lightweight solution but with enough maturity to auto discover my newly created LXC containers.

My Book: MariaDB High Performance available for pre-order

23 August 2014 in Books, Databases, Debian, Hi-Tech, Linux, SQL

All, I’m proud to announce my first book available for pre-order! I’m really happy to have finished it and see after several months of hard work that it will be soon available. Who is this book for? MariaDB High Performance is aimed at system administrators/architects or DBAs who want to learn more about how to grow their current infrastructure to support larger traffic. Before beginning with this book, we expect you to be well–practised with MySQL/MariaDB for common usage.