Karl Katzke

JIRA Standalone runs, by default, as the user that starts the process on Linux. Running tomcat as root is generally a Bad Idea. Therefore, if you run JIRA as a service by adding a script under /etc/init.d and calling /etc/init.d/jira start … it’ll be running as root.

I opened a ticket with JIRA support several weeks ago pointing this out, and the only result has been adding one line of documentation that tells you how to add a user. This is not the best solution. Their solution would create a privileged user with a shell — you want to avoid this. Also, they don’t say anything about running JIRA as a service under init.d.

After the fold, there’s my init.d script for OpenSUSE 10.3. Gotta love JIRA, it’s more flexible than any other project management tool out there, but Atlassian apparently is not a company with a great deal of understanding of Linux.

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Is your MySQL server running multiple processes with each running a single thread? Read this: Enabling Threading in MySQL. Ran into this on someone else’s legacy server today.

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(Since this started out as a log for me to keep track of what my brain actually needs to be doing, and y’all just started reading it by accident, I’m gonna take my blog back for me for a sec.)

Reading I need to do over the weekend:

• EVMS-HAwSAN w/ SLES

…

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This article got posted on Digg earlier today: When Acts of God Bring Down Web Hosts … and it’s got to be the lamest collection of such stories that I’ve ever seen. Anyone who deals with other people’s servers

Here’s my list of stories from the past year:

- Softlayer Dallas: …

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At the new job, we’ve got several ACNC JetStor drive arrays. They’re pretty nice units for the price… we have several 3TB SCSI arrays and several 12TB Fibre Channel arrays.

One of the features that’s always been set up and in place at work has been that the units send email notifications if they have an ‘event’. This is great, but wouldn’t indicate pending problems nor would it indicate the failure of the management card. (Well, ‘cept that all the websites would go down…) Since I’ve been implementing Nagios, I’ve also been implementing monitoring of all of our devices via SNMP. I’m doing performance monitoring on things like fan speeds and (where available) drive spindle speeds/smartd scores, monitoring power supplies, etc.

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This took me some time to figure out… here you go.

1. Add the Telephony network repository in YaST2. The URL is http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/network:/telephony/openSUSE_10.3/ …

2. There’s a bug in the deps for Asterisk with mISDNuser (the version in the repository is more recent, but is “uninstallable”) that will block the install process…

…

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It’s easy to miss the single line in the auth_nz_ldap documentation that says “When using mod_auth_basic, this module is invoked via the AuthBasicProvider directive with the ldap value.”

It would help, of course, if someone provided a complete example for an auth_nz_ldap configuration, so here you go:

<Directory /path/to/my/web>
…

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Ok, so you’ve got this [ hot new APC unit, new RAID array, network switch, router ]. The vendor, in their infinite wisdom, supplied a driver disk. But the device got a web management interface, so you just monitor things through there and watch for any problems to pop up. …

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I really, really like the check_yum plugin. Here’s a link: http://www.openfusion.com.au/labs/nagios.

If you’re installing on CentOS, you’re going to want to
yum install elinks
, then run cpan as root and install
install Nagios::Plugin
… after that, you can install and add to your nagios command config. I usually run it in NRPE on …

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Subversion is a software package that helps you manage versions and releases of your software, similar to the older CVS (Concurrent Versioning System).

There are several strategies for managing software releases with Subversion, mostly dealing with how you branch and merge branches back into the trunk. The proper one for your organization will depend on what kind of software you write, and how you schedule and label your releases.

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