I was trying to simply standby clone. Pretty basic. But I was getting a “segmentation fault”, no further log output.

I didn’t know what a segfault is, so I googled it:

A segmentation fault  occurs when a program attempts to access a memory location that it is  not allowed to access, or attempts to access a memory location in a way  that is not allowed (for example, attempting to write to a read-only  location, or to overwrite part of the operating system)

It hit me that prior to running the standby clone that I had run rm -rf $PGDATA . So, repmgr was trying to standby clone writing into a nonexisting directory. The simple fix was mkdir -p $PGDATA , and on subsequent runs, using rm -rf $PGDATA/* instead.

In our production system we have repmgr for managing failover for our Postgres databases. However, in one incident we had a while ago, our Primary (master) node went down due to a network problem, and repmgr didn’t perform the failover as expected. On reviewing the logs we saw that one of the standby(slave) instances recognized the master failure, and initiated a vote, but the other nodes ignored it and no failover occurred.

Eventually we discovered the reason why- the “ignoring” nodes and the primary server were all on the same physical compute. (In an Openstack cloud environment). This may be worth looking into!

This was really irritating.

I was trying to run a very simple ansible playbook, in fact, just one template task, to generate a file. But when I tried running it, I kept getting:

[WARNING]: Unable to parse /home/kobi/inv_file as an inventory source
[WARNING]: No inventory was parsed, only implicit localhost is available
[WARNING]: provided hoses list is empty, only localhost is available. Note that the implicit localhost does not match 'all'.

This was really frustrating because I was specifying the inv_file with -i on my ansible-playbook invocation, and all the google results were just people whose /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg was pointing to…

I was reconfiguring defaults for postgres configurations, when I got this error:

ERROR: 4 is outside the valid range for parameter “work_mem” (64 .. 2097151)

I thought that was pretty weird, since the default value is 4 and every guide and documentation all shows that you can even set kilobytes. SO why was I getting this error?

Turns out that I had made the very simple mistake of not specifying what type of value I wanted= I had to write 4MB instead of 4 . Changing this immediately resolved the issue.

The ship has sailed, folks, time to swallow your pride and get with the program.

See, Elastic is really popular and for good reason. Its blazing fast full text queries are amazing. The other members of the ELK stack are also really good at what they do. This popularity, coupled with a lot of bad information online, has lead to the misconception that Elastic is a DBMS.

So, I decided to write a post detailing why that’s just plain wrong.

The reason that many people believe it is a database are because, well, it behaves like one! …

Okay look, we all love Linux as our daily driver. We love to flout how great it is. After all, Linux powers the vast majority of all webservers in the world, so certainly it is robust…

Well, here’s the thing. Every self-respecting sysadmin has good backup policies for a reason. Disasters DO happen, it’s as much a fact of life as death, taxes, and people saying that Windows is so awesome. We all know someone who asked us to fix their pc after a mysterious crash on their work laptop which has TONS of important stuff on it that they…

The title describes the problem pretty well- I was trying to create an NFS share between 3 openstack VMs on a subnet, but the client machines could not see the share on the server.

The ports were opened as per documentation, 2049 and 111 in both udp and tcp. Telnet on both those ports could connect no problem, so why would showmount -e hang until getting a timeout?

Turns out there’s another important port, 20048. I found this out by checking what ports NFS was using on the server machine, with the command rpcinfo -p . …

It’s no secret that I like Linux for the amount of power and customizability…

I have had a lot of people see my terminal as I work on my laptop, and ask how to set it up. It does require quite a bit of manual effort but is totally worth it in my opinion.

First, some screenshots:

Right away this shows off the colors, the informationals, and some of the power of zsh. The first command is showing what happens when I run a command that takes a long time to run, without having to type time command... The second…