The USB Breathalyzer

Here's some Friday fun - ever wanted to stop your sysadmins from logging in drunk and doing an "rm -rf /" on the production servers, or prevent your developers from checking in code that was written under the influence ? You need a USB breathalyzer !

This thread on serverfault.com has some other interesting ideas for preventing GUI (Geeking Under the Influence).

Advance your career over lunch

One of the online forums I frequent had a question today about what web resources engineers can use to advance their careers. Now don't get me wrong, learning from the web is all well and good. However, you'll learn far more in a given time from interacting with people than with a web page, simply because you can have a two-way conversation. Just about every time I've asked a friend or coworker for technical help, I've come away with information that I'd never thought to ask for directly.

Here's some ways you can work on your career advancement and learn at the same time:

• Take every opportunity to learn from people with experience that you'd like to have - while being respectful of their time, of course. Even the busiest people are generally flattered to be asked and happy to talk about what they're working on; sharing coffee, lunch or beer with them doesn't hurt either !
  
• Talk to everyone in your organization who you either work with directly, or whose job interests you. For example, you might want to move on from testing into development, operations, project management or many other related fields.
• Attend conferences to meet up with your peers. Getting the budget to attend can be hard these days, but there are plenty of free opportunities around; have a look for local events at http://www.meetup.com/, for example. If you feel up to it, presenting at a conference or meetup is a great way to expand your network and gain valuable presenting experience.

Last but not least, the more people you engage with, the more you'll be giving an impression of yourself as someone who already has a particular set of skills, but is also smart and eager to learn. That certainly won't hurt your career development !

Neat trick for getting relative dates in a Linux shell script

I wanted to get the SVN updates done in the last 24 hours for a nightly script that updates and restarts one of our applications. The command would look something like:

svn log -v -r {#Calculate yesterday's date somehow }:{#Calculate today's date in yyyy-mm-dd format}

Getting today's date is easy enough using the "+" parameter with a format string, but yesterday's date seemed more tricky; checking the man page for the date command didn't look very promising. It looked like I'd have to do the famous programming exercise of keeping an array of the number of days in each month, checking whether yesterday was still this month or last month, etc. etc.

However, using info date instead of man date gave a lot more information, including this very useful option:

-d DATESTR'
`--date=DATESTR'
Display the date and time specified in DATESTR instead of the
current date and time. DATESTR can be in almost any common
format.

DATESTR can be a word or phrase like "tomorrow" "yesterday", "last week", etc. So my problem was solved in a single line:

svn log -v -r {`date -d "yesterday" +"%Y-%m-%d"`}:{`date +"%Y-%m-%d"`}

Moral of the story - always look at the info page as well as the man page !

Forced education #1 - DNS and DHCP with dnsmasq

One of the, ahem, pleasures of working at a startup is that you often have to learn something new in a hurry when something goes wrong. This happened to me the other day when people on our office network suddenly stopped being able to get to anywhere else on the internet or our internal network.

After a bit of troubleshooting, I found out that we still had inbound and outbound connectivity, but DNS had intermittently stopped working - so, since normal people don't carry a long list of IP addresses in their heads, their access to anywhere via its host name was gone.

We had all our office network clients pick up their DNS server via DHCP from our LinkSys AV-082 router. I tried switching the DNS servers defined in the router to OpenDNS in case our ISP's DNS servers were having a problem, but the problem persisted.

Some internet digging and talking with a couple of folks who know a lot more about networking than me led me to the conclusion that the router's DNS and DHCP handling was acting up. Since it still seemed to be working fine as a regular router, I decided the best thing would be to turn off the router's DHCP server and run DNS and DHCP from one of the office servers instead. I set up the people in the office to point directly to OpenDNS to get them going while I was messing around, and got to work.

There's a nice, lightweight Linux package called dnsmasq that will handle both DNS and DHCP. I found it super easy to set up on one of our Fedora servers, thanks to Keith Fieldhouse's article on linux.com; the hardest part was typing in all the MAC addresses for servers that I wanted to have a fixed IP address, since the router's web UI wouldn't let me copy and paste the DHCP MAC to IP address mappings.

The only other tweak I had to make was to configure the network adapter on the dnsmasq machine to have a fixed IP address, rather than trying to get it from DHCP.

After a couple of hours of setup and careful testing, everything was up and running. An extra benefit of having a local DNS server is that it caches all its results, so that lookups to a host that it already knows about are nice and fast. In fact, I've now set up a local dnsmasq server just for DNS at home, since anything that makes web browsing faster has to be a good thing !