Bradley Coudriet - trying to make the world better, one line of code at a time.

Well… microsoft’s at it again.

If you don’t do the registry key hack explained at: http://www.windowsreference.com/general/error-there-is-not-enough-disk-space-when-installing-sp3/

1. Click Start - Run - Type “regedit” and press enter.

2. Navigate to

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup]
 
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
    \Software
         \Microsoft
              \Windows
                  \CurrentVersion
                       \Setup
                      
3. In the right pane, Right-click and select New - String value

4. Name it as “BootDir” and set its value to “C:\”

You will get a dreaded "There is not enough disk space to install Service Pack 3"

Obviously, i’m not an idiot and i had more than 4MB of space that the error message told me i was missing.

I guess it needs a registry to tell it where…. C:\ is… i don’t get it. Anyways, its fixed and SP3 is getting on my macbook right now

Its my distinct please to announce my latest ’side’ project.

METApic

Metapic is a Digital Asset Management system that tries to be as generic as possible. Find all the details at my METApic page

Its been a busy week,

On tuesday the Rochester Crusaders equipment truck was broken into, with about $40k of damage

WROC 8 covered the crime

Here are just a few of the pictures i took of the carnage. You can see the whole set at my Flickr page. 

Diggnation teas
Originally uploaded by brad coudriet

Got my Diggnation teas today!

I figure its time to put down the coffee cup and try some good teas!
So I picked up the Adagio Tea starter kit, and the Alex and Kevin Diggnation blends.

Thank you diggnation for the great tea blends and for the suggestion of a place to get REAL tea!

I needed to install logwatch a OS X machine for work, and i figured i would just document the process.

Thats is… logwatch is installed as you can see by running

sudo logwatch

(cias staff at this point look to our internal wiki)

Now you just need to tweak your /etc/logwatch/conf/logwatch.conf file to suit your needs

Also if you want it to run everynight at midnight put a script in /etc/periodic/daily

Rob wrote a great article on how to Netboot your macs across multiple subnets, like we do here at RIT

cias.rit.edu/~rrhpph/wordpress/

When place before all other output on your PHP script this little snipped will force you PHP page to be presented over SSLThis is very useful on things like Login forms.

if($_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'] != '443') {

    //Force SSL upon this page

    header("Location: https://".$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['PHP_SELF']);

}

Here at CIAS we have a bunch of linux servers, and we run logwatch on them to give us a daily look at our servers.

There are few options with logwatch and how you want to get the information, you can have it email you, which for one or two servers that is pretty standard, but we are managing 10+ servers, and i don’t want to clog up my email and i don’t want to use my inbox as a way to archive all of our logwatch reports.

So what did I come up with?

On The Server

Everything that happens here is using a simple upload script i created to facilitate the aggregation of the scripts. Machine’s logwatch runs as a cron scripts and outputs its report to a directory on the machine. Right after that script runs another scripts run and copies the logwatch report to a central web server.

On the Web Server

The ‘logwatch’ app is just a nice simple front end to a bunch of directories from this structure

archive
    server1
        12-3-07
            logwatch.txt
        12-2-07
            logwatch.txt
     server2
            12-3-07
                logwatch.txt

I created a nifty little PHP class that takes care of this structure, and allows easy access to the files through code.

RSS and <insert favorite news reader here>

Cool, so now i have a nifty little web app that organizes our logwatch reports… so whats the next step?

I already run NetNewsWire on my Mac and RSS would be a perfect solution for seeing updated logwatch reports as they come in from the servers. So create the RSS is was pretty easy…

1. use the PHP class
2. output in RSS format the last 5 logwatch reports for the specified server
3. RSS MONEY!!

I’m pretty happy with this elegant solution. I always have a hard time remembering to ‘go’ to a web app… I always keep NetNewsWire open. So this solution makes me a better System Administrator

Disclaimer: I know the following post is going to sound materialistic, but.. i’m ok with that for now. Here is the backstory: Almost 2 years ago now i bought a brand new Mazdaspeed 3. It was right around my birthday, so i told myself it was a ‘birthday’ gift (biggest lie to myself ever). Well long story short. I love this car. Its my baby, its goes fast… and just makes me smile and makes me happy. I know this feeling is very short term, and isn’t TRUE happiness. But damnit.. it works. Last night i took it out for a drive, and i really cheered me up. So what have I been driving all winter? My Beater truck! Which in its own right has given me a certain level of happiness. Over the last few years i’ve gained happiness from fixing up my ‘beaters’ Yeah… that should be fixed this weekend.

Update:

In the spirit of ’short term happiness through Vehicle Repair’ Jay and I replaced my Rotor and Pads on my truck last night. It was a great time, and thats even with an unexpected trip to the parts store because here to find out my 1993 truck actually used 1994 parts. Go figured.

Update AGAIN!

Today on the way home from RIT the belt on my truck broke. I was able to get it home and fix it up in like… 2 hours from it being broke to totally fixed. It was fun.. annoying, but fun.