my life

Recently, I moved one of my SVN repositories onto a new server. Everything seemed fine until I tried to commit.

SVN complained:

Turns out, DAV keeps some cache files around in your SVN ‘dav’ directory. Removing all the ‘activ*’ files solved my problem.

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.

Simply run