Sysadmins

Today I would like to share a jamendo album with you : Waste Your Time from Loudog

This album and especially this song below are special because this is the music we usually listen to while going live with a new Jamendo website version or other main jamendo components

Just listen !

Today I struggled with time.

I wanted to use it in a bash script, so I checked the man page, where I found interesting things :

$ man time
time - run programs and summarize system resource usage

[...]
OPTIONS
-o FILE, --output=FILE
-f FORMAT, --format FORMAT
--quiet
[...]

Ok great. So I built my command like this :

$ time -f %E wget -q --timeout=60 --connect-timeout=60 -O - 'http://my-url' >>/dev/null
-su: -f: command not found

hm. Maybe I did something wrong. Let’s try the example line from the man page to understand how it works :

$ time -f "%E real,%U user,%S sys" ls -Fs
-su: -f: command not found

wtf??! The example line doesn’t work either !
And then
$ time --help
-su: --help: command not found

ok… so, searching a little bit further helped me find the explanation :

Your shell (apparently bash) provides a builtin time function. If you want to use time binary, call it by absolute path (/usr/bin/time)

let’s try :
$ /usr/bin/time -f %E wget -q --timeout=60 --connect-timeout=60 -O - 'http://my-url' >>/dev/null
0:00.20
Finally! But it was stupid…

Just to remember, when using the bash time, to get the time in minutes/seconds:
$ TIMEFORMAT=$'%0lR'
$ time wget -q --timeout=60 --connect-timeout=60 -O - 'http://my-url' >>/dev/null
0m2s

and in seconds only :
$ TIMEFORMAT=$'%0R'
$ time wget -q --timeout=60 --connect-timeout=60 -O - 'http://my-url' >>/dev/null
2

Today I learnt a new command

$ xargs

Ok I’m a little bit lying : I knew it before but I was using it only to put several lines into one unique line, like this :
$ ls |xargs

Now, thanks to the new guy in front of me (the colorblind one), I will be able to replace a lot of “for” and ` ` by xargs

Some interesting uses of xargs :

$ ls | xargs -n 8
Display the content af the current directory in 8 colums

$ find /path -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm
Seems to be more efficient than “find /path -exec rm {} \;”, because xargs splits this list into sublists and calls rm once for every sublist, while find calls rm once for every single file.

$ xargs -i ssh {} uptime < ./server.list
to get uptime of each server in server.list

Everybody is waiting for us, quite enthusiastic about moving 15 servers !

A great place to have coffee at 

 

 

She was awake … at least apparently
….

!

To start this journey in a good mood I got controlled by the “Gendarmerie” just before picking Amandine up at her place… Apparently they did have some problems with their servers cuz I had to wait 15 min for them to check my driving license…

 

Alux

Here are some pics of the first step in our relocation, we can see the quality of our rack fixation system back in Esch.

@lux

Since a few days, we’re slowly beginning to move our server into a new datacenter. Here are the photos :

They seem to feel much better in there, aren’t they?

Under windows : just reboot

Under Unix : just be root

__
@lux
Xenificator