/Reed( Kraft-)?Murphy(\.net)?/

I hereby commit to the neveragain.tech pledge. Please stand with me and hold me to it. »

Notes on MySQL replication terminology, how to interpret the results of SHOW SLAVE STATUS and SHOW MASTER STATUS, and how to correctly configure replication for new slave and master hosts in your MySQL clusters.

Note that the technical details of e.g. cloning a MySQL server aren’t covered; let’s consider them left as exercises for the reader.

I’ve released lita-trello, a handler plugin for Lita allowing you to control your Trello board from your chat bot.

I’ve migrated my blog to Hugo! Let me know if you find anything broken, or missing, or ugly.

Quick braindump:

• a remote code vulnerability (CVE-2014-6271) in bash has been disclosed
• bash will parse any environment variable value which begins with () { as a function, and continue parsing and executing any shell commands it encounters
• env x='() { :;}; echo vulnerable' bash -c "echo" will print “vulnerable” if your bash is vulnerable
• lots of Internet facing services put strings from requests into environment variables
• curl -A "() { :; }; touch /var/www/oh_hai_webroot" http://eg.your.webserver/cgi-bin/foo.cgi

Lessons from a year’s worth of hiring data:

While interviewing such a wide cross section of people, I realized that I had a golden opportunity to test some of the prevalent folk wisdom about hiring. The results were pretty surprising, so I thought it would be cool to share them. Here’s what I found:

Update, November 2016: Since the original appears to be down, I’ve preserved a copy. I’ve written a piece for The Feminist Observer, an awesome monthly digital magazine covering a wide range of topics within and related to feminism. It’s a succinct article on recognizing and dealing with trolls, and you can read Dealing With Trolls on The Feminist Observer’s blog, or check it out with the rest of the articles in their January 2014 issue. »

A Google Ideas project, Digital Attack Map shows you a live vizualiztion of DDoS attacks around the world.

Write programs that do one thing and do it well.

So I finally tired of implementing file rotation and retention functionality for backup scripts on an ad-hoc basis, and have sorted it out forever*.

As a systems administrator, I occasionally need to run a script on a number of machines, be it to diagnose an intermittent issue, gather some ad-hoc statistics, or what have you. As such I have a small library of scripts, each with an aptly-named Fabric task defined in a fabfile. Of course, each of these tasks is almost identical: copy script to remote server, run (either as a regular user, or as root). I finally tired of repeating myself, and decided to solve this once and for all (obligatory xkcd).

To wit: presenting a Python snippet for turning a directory of scripts into remote-running Fabric tasks. Like magic.