by Katherine Villyard | Oct 20, 2013 | scripting
I needed to SFTP a bunch of files ranging in size from 40 meg to 130 gig. The default behavior of “mput *” is to copy the files in alphabetical order, but what happens then is that all the smaller files pile up behind the large ones. This is bad because...
by Katherine Villyard | Aug 20, 2013 | cons, reading
I’ll be reading with Broad Universe at WorldCon, Sunday at 10am in 007B (Convention Center). I plan to read from “Ondine’s Curse,” which will appear in an upcoming issue of Electric Velocipede. Come by and say...
by Katherine Villyard | Jul 9, 2013 | sysadmin
At one of my previous positions, I was in charge of the PXE server. I like PXE, so I set up a PXE server here, too. It was a lot easier at my current place of employment, because I had access to the routers and the DHCP server. It ended up being a straightforward...
by Katherine Villyard | Jul 5, 2013 | short fiction
WOOHOO! My story “Saving Alan Idle” is now available as both HTML and a podcast. I’m so excited! Escape Pod 403: Saving Alan Idle Thanks to everyone who helped me critique it, including, but not limited to: Gary David Henderson, Beth Dawkins,...
by Katherine Villyard | Jun 28, 2013 | monitoring
Nagios event handlers are WHERE IT’S AT, BABY, YEAH! There are some services that I can just automagically restart without any problems. (WSUS, SQL Agent, etc.) This way, instead of notifying me, Nagios can just fix the problem for me and We Need Never Know....
by Katherine Villyard | Jun 22, 2013 | scripting
I stripped out a piece of company-specific logic, but… List the databases you want to move in a file named “control.txt.” (To migrate the entire server, paste the output of “select name from sys.databases where name not in...
by Katherine Villyard | Jun 14, 2013 | monitoring
Yeah. Twitter changed their authentication, and my old Twitter notifications (based on Ed Voncken’s work) seized up and failed. I had to update the python tweepy library to get them to work. pip install tweepy –upgrade And they’re back! I love...
by Katherine Villyard | May 25, 2013 | about me, cons
The WisCON panel description: Who gets your ebooks when you die? Your Twitter feed? The baby book that mostly exists on LJ? Do you have an estate plan for all these intangible but valuable assets? When you go, do you want your pages taken down or kept up for all time?...
by Katherine Villyard | May 17, 2013 | scripting
Virtual Log Files. Your database’s log file is made up of one or more virtual log files. Our databases have too many. Basically, our LDFs are fragmented. What to do about this? Well, Dave Levy has a script to reduce the number of VLFs, but it’s to run...
by Katherine Villyard | Apr 24, 2013 | monitoring
I like using non-email notifications, especially when monitoring, you know, email. So I have notifications going out via twitter and google talk. Of the three, the order of speediness is: Google Talk Twitter Email So I was really sad when the google talk...