Earlier this week I brought some security cameras from my house to the computer shop to hookup not only for security but also so we could make some funny clips about what happens in the store and on the sidewalk outside of the store. I ended up bringing 4 cameras which included a D-Link DCS-3220 and three D-Link DCS-950G’s. The D-Link DCS-3220 is a much nicer surveillance camera than the D-Link 950G’s however it doesn’t have wireless capabilities like the DCS-950G. The first camera I attempted to get working was the DCS-3220 but almost immediately I ran into issues which made me think I had damaged the camera bringing it to the shop.

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The rar command can be useful on Linux to not only compress a file but also split the file into multiple parts during the compression. This will make the files easier to transfer to other servers or easier for other people to download. First rar needs to be installed which can done on CentOS using the directions below. After that we describe how to easily compress and break a file into multiple chunks using one simple rar command.

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A friend of mine called yesterday asking if there was a way to make his iTunes music files that he had imported from his CD collection smaller. I was pretty sure this was possible but didn’t remember the exact method to accomplish this so I told him I would call him back. I was able to figure out an easy method to convert files located in your iTunes library to make them smaller in size both by modifying the type of file and the bitrate of the music itself. Below I describe how to convert music files already imported into iTunes to a smaller size to conserve space either on your computer or on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

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Nagios is an awesome open source application that provides a way to monitor pretty much anything that you can think of on your network. There are tons of plugins written for Nagios that will monitor anything from PostgreSQL database size to the number of users logged into a server. Today I needed to start monitoring the size of a Ruby process that has been growing out of hand so the below is what I came up with being the best solution. Follow the directions below to deploy a Perl script that will use SNMP to retrieve Linux server process size.

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Setting up log rotation for multiple Ruby on Rails projects on the same Linux server is easy using logrotate. If all of your projects are in the same directory structure it is even easier by using variables to work for each different project as explained below in detail.

First you will need to install logrotate which can be installed on CentOS Linux via yum as shown in the below command.

yum install logrotate

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