ubuntu

Ever since I started playing around with Unix ~13 years ago, I’ve been a fan of automating things. What started out as writing little (maybe pointless) shell scripts slowly but surely morphed into infrastructure automation today. As for my, or maybe anyone’s, motivation to do these things, I see three main factors: I’m easily bored — because repeating things is dull. I’m easily distracted (when I’m bored). I’m German: Of course we strive for perfection and excellence....

This article briefly describes how you can setup the Giganews VPN (PPTP) on Ubuntu. I’m gonna assume 10.04 (that’s what I tested with) and the gnome desktop. Does this sound familiar: The VPN connection ‘xxxxx’ failed because there were no valid VPN secrets. If so then I’m hoping this article will help you. What is a VPN for? The use-case for a VPN — and this is for basically any VPN (not just Giganews’ service) — is security....

I really love awk. You might disagree and call me crazy, but while awk might be a royal brainfuck at first, here’s a very simple example of its power which should explain my endorsement. Figuring out space hogs Every once in a while I run out of diskspace on /home. Even though I am the only user on this laptop I’m always puzzled as of why and I start running du trying to figure out which install or program stole my diskspace....

This is a quick and dirty rundown on how to install Varnish 2.1.x on Ubuntu Hardy (8.04 LTS). Get sources setup Add the repository to /etc/apt/sources.list: Import the key for the new repository: Installation Update sources list and install varnish: Files of importance: Double-check: Further reading I recommend a mix of the following websites/links: Varnish 2.1 documentation Wiki with lots of tutorials and examples Team Soundcloud’s varnishtop (code on Github) Fin That’s all!...

We’re about to launch a new product, and this time it’s pretty client-side-intense. The application is powered by a lot of JavaScript(-mvc) and jQuery, which do xhr calls to a ZF/CouchDB powered backend. While js-mvc has unit-testing sort of covetred, I was also looking for some integration testing, multiple browsers and all that. Selenium vs. Saucelenium I can’t really say if you want one or the other. Revisiting Selenium in general, it’s IMHO the only viable and suitable thing for a PHP shop....