my life

I was recently contacted by someone who got stuck setting up Starling and realized that the documentation is relatively sparse on setting up Starling. The process is easy once you know how Starling works on the inside, but not looking in.

To get started, I will assume you have ruby and ruby gems already installed. This will depend on your flavor of distribution, but should not be difficult and come standard on every modern version of Linux I’ve used.

run:

Create the Starling queue directory in /var/spool/starling

Start staring with these minimum set of arguments:

Also, if you’ll be running Starling in a PHP environment, make sure your version doesn’t have the EOL bug described in my post: http://osterman.com/wordpress/2008/07/18/starling-protocol-bug-in-stats-response

Also, note that Starling creates a queue file for each key verbatim. So if a key is, ‘namespace/something’, then Starling will fail to do the set if the ‘namespace’ directory does not exist under the /var/spool/starling directory. You can also just not use ‘/’ in your keys.

Also, note that Starling does not automatically purge the queue files after it rotates them. You’ll want to cron a job to run periodically to delete them. We run this nightly to purge files not accessed in 4 days:

All that being said, we’re still very happy with it and process about a million jobs a day.

Please let me know in the comments if your still having problems!

If you want to install CPAN modules as Debian packages, this HOWTO is for you.

First, install dh-make-perl:

Then build & install the package. For example, if you wish to install the module Nagios::Plugins::Memcached from CPAN, simply run:

You’re done.

Configuring Mutt with IMAP is as easy as editing your .muttrc and adding the following lines.

You can then change folders inside of Mutt by pressing ‘c’ and then ‘?’ to get a folder list.

I was getting the error “ERROR 1286 (42000): Unknown table engine ‘InnoDB’” when trying to create/alter tables with the InnoDB engine. You can check for this warning by issuing the create or alter statements and then running

Check if you have InnoDB support enabled:

The problem is that InnoDB is not enabled by default in Debian distributions of my.cnf.  To enable it, simply comment the following lines under the [mysqld] section.

#skip-innodb

This is the easiest way to find a JetDirect printer on port 9100 on your local network. Useful in those cases you’re on site with a client and need to print something.

At times, it is convenient to force Wordpress to use the hostname of the current virtual host context. By default, new versions of wordpress rely on DB configured values for siteurl, home, and url. If for instance, you run multiple codebases for testing, it might be convenient to not have it force the values to the configured ones. To accomplish this, add the following code to a custom wp plugin or just add it to the wp-config.php at the very bottom.



function set_codebase()
{
return 'http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
}
remove_action('template_redirect', 'redirect_canonical');
add_filter ( 'pre_option_siteurl', 'set_codebase' );
add_filter ( 'pre_option_home', 'set_codebase' );
add_filter ( 'pre_option_url', 'set_codebase' );


This code can further be wrapped in a conditional so it only gets executed under explicit circumstances.

Simply run