Tips on Taylor Jasko

Why I don't care about backups and how you can too

Fri, 31 May 2013 20:03:15 +0000

Within the last few weeks, I’ve had quite a few friends lose their data. All their precious photos, videos, and other documents have vanished, forever. But here’s the thing: you don’t have to deal with this anymore. There are so many ways to take backups nowadays that losing data is somewhat of an excuse and should not happen in the first place. Here’s what I do on all of my systems/servers so I don’t have to worry about backups… ever.

Having Nginx init.d script issues? It might be your comments.

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 15:24:23 +0000

I just updated to Nginx 1.2.8 on my dedicated server and even updated the init.d startup scripts at the same time (I had some custom-written scripts that needed updated). Well, I noticed a weird issue when I tried to restart Nginx:

➜ ~ /etc/init.d/nginx restart
Restarting nginx: nginxnginx: invalid option: "/var/run/nginx.pid"

So I checked the init.d script for Nginx… at the very top it had something like this:

PID=$(awk -F'[ ;]' '/[^#]pid/ {print $2}' /etc/nginx/nginx.conf)
if [ -z "$PID" ]
then
 PID=/var/run/nginx.pid
fi

That’s perfectly valid code… so I ran “awk -F’[ ;]’ ‘/[^#]pid/ {print $2}’ /etc/nginx/nginx.conf” in my zsh prompt:

VMware vCenter and NAT

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 00:52:27 +0000

Thought I’d write up a quick post for any of you who might struggle with a similar issue with VMware vCenter in a NAT configuration. But first, some backstory.

I recently installed pfSense on my ESXi box to route all of my virtual machines through (please please, don’t send me Twitter hate messages of me virtualizing a router… I know, I know, if you’re 100% serious, you should go dedicated. But I don’t get that much traffic. :P). This setup is of course using a NAT 1:1 option, with NAT reflection on, so that when visiting any of the public IPs I have, it will route to the correct internal LAN IP. Thing is, I also have my Windows box housing vCenter on the same ESXi box, which was going through the router as well.

Quick Tip: Desk/Office Wiring

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 21:46:55 +0000

Some years ago, while digging through my father’s toolbox getting some nails, I noticed these copper things that had two holes and a nice big gap inside the middle, that I later found out was a two-hole conduit strap/hanger used to hold pipes (also called EMT straps). I then had the great idea to drill holes in my desk and run wires through them, for clean wire-management. Turns out, it worked out really well. So well, I decided to buy a pack of 100 and use them to wire my new desk in LA.