Housekeeping

Apologies again for the lack of updates – has been a bit hectic here and as I havent really been doing any coding, I havent had much useful information.

So today I thought I would share some Linux Pearls of wisdom, many people need to create housekeeping scripts that clean up certain directories every so often.

Many Perl advocates will tell you that banging a load of Regex into perl will do it simply.

I disagree – POSIX gives you plenty of tools to do 99% of the tasks you need – its just a case of knowing which ones you should be using.

To get you started here are 2 of the most used:

find /your/dir/here -mtime +30 -exec ls {}\;

Lists all files modified more than 30 days ago (clearly you can replace ls with rm to delete these!)

find ./ -type f -atime +365

This finds any files that havent been access for over a year, obviously you can pipe / exec this with something else.

Hope this helps!

10TB Raid 6 Array

Been a busy week – nothing like getting elbow deep in computer guts to clear your head from coding, this week aptly demonstrates that.

My main client has a big 8TB Sun Storedge raid array, unfortunately the way it was setup (4 x 2TB partitions) is starting to cause problems for them as the main partitions are filling up very quickly and being so ridgidly partitioned isnt really ideal. So (more as a backup than anything else) we decided to build ourselves a basic raid array.

We took 12 x 1TB drives, and a raid controller and built a beast of an array with it, the array itself finished building the other day and has taken the majority of today to format it while I transferred over the various other system files required to ensure that it can be a drop in replacement for the current server should anything go drastically wrong on it.

Update

Bit of an update – I know things have been quiet but various things have been keeping me away from my coding at the moment – namely our internet connection at work. It has been going on for months now and everything seems to be taking forever to get sorted with no one at the company apparently knowing what is happening and their refusal to send anyone out to sort the problem directly means that I am having to run up and down stairs all day plugging laptops in and doing speed tests while some one sits behind a computer screen in Nottingham scratching their balls and saying “Thats not right”.

I KNOW ITS NOT BLOODY RIGHT! how can 3 bonded lines of 8mbit/s only give a 300k/s download?

/rant

Other than that I am trying to sure up the resiliancy of our main client to ensure that any acts of god are taken into account. Unfortunately its not just a case of a few burnt DVD’s / spare hard drives. There is 12TB of data that needs to be mirrored somewhere, plus a new phone system upgrade to allow call queueing and various other office bits. But hopefully next week ill be able to get properly stuck back into the cake stuff – the stuff I have been doing over the past few days has been relatively unexciting.

I would recommend any cakePHP people read my Multiple Model Pagination post as this seems to be the best piece of code I have ever come across – it really has been saving my life on multiple occasions;

http://www.nuorderwebs.co.uk/blog/code/finally-multiple-model-pagination-with-multiple-widgets/

until next time: