script

Advanced Bash logging to handle errors.

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So we've all done a quick log from a bash script, which looks like this 

LOGFILE="logs/$(date +%F)_backup.log"
# Append to the file
restic backup /etc/ >> $LOGFILE
find /root/scripts/ -type f -name "restic*.log" -mtime +14 -delete -print >> $LOGFILE

That's great for small scripts. But sometimes you find that its not logging errors, which are also helpful, and you need to add those:

LOGFILE="logs/$(date +%F)_backup.log"
# Append to the file
restic backup /etc/ 2>&1 >> $LOGFILE
find /root/scripts/ -type f -name "restic*.log" -mtime +14 -delete -print 2>&1 >> $LOGFILE

And different commands behave differently, so it all starts to become complicated. But there's an easier way. Two actually. The first is to use curly brackets to contain all the commands you want to log, and then pipe it through tee at the end. Commands after that block won't be logged.

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php-fpm monitoring for single domain

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Ran into this one recently and the solution came out of left field, so I thought I'd throw it out to the internet at large. I've got a server which is running php-fpm and nginx. However it has several websites running on it, each of which has its own php-fpm/pool.d/ profile. We were having a problem with one of the websites, which got a lot more traffic than the others, so we needed a way to monitor its php-fpm performance.

Setting up php monitoring is not hard. There are many guides around the internet. You put the line 

pm.status_path = /status

in your fpm pool file, then add a block to your nginx config so that it can only be accessed by certain IP addresses.

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Digital Ocean spaces vs restic

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Very easy answer to a problem that's probably had you cursing for ages. When you set up a DO Spaces instance, you get a URL like https://myspace.eur3.digitaloceanspaces.com/, where eur3 is the datacenter you're in and myspace is the space name you supplied. So you just take that and append s3: to it in your restic … Read more

Linux Memory Usage Summary Script

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I was having trouble with a webserver this week, which I'd just set up for a client. When it went live, it seemed OK initially, but when we left it overnight it curled up its toes and died. It was so dead that I couldn't even ssh in to reboot it, so we had to do a remote reboot. Crunch.

Anyway, on getting it back up, I poked around in the logs and found that it was running out of memory, which it really shouldn't do given that it was a fairly low load on the webserver, and only apache, mysql and php were running on it. I looked around the Interwebs and found an excellent resource called Troubleshooting Memory Usage, which gave me some pointers about how to rein in apache and stop it from eating up memory so quickly. Thanks!

Anyway on the page was a script for summarising memory usage, which I thought was a good idea, so i grabbed that one and adapted it to my own purposes. I thought I'd make the results available here, so feel free to grab it and adapt it to your own needs.

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