sweet tool

Been using this as a sweet little tool which places stress on linux systems. hats sweet about is that you can stress IO, memory, CPU cycles, and/or disk.

its also good for testing monitoring/alert software such as cacti/munin/etc and of course testing scalability.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/stress

ive been using it overnight to test the machine that went over on me last week. It seems my fears were not unfounded as its now had SATA disk,ram replacement and a new kickstarted OS and its still crashing, but thanks to stress we've managed to narrow it down t to disk. Surprisingly the machine ran quite sweetly all night with quite a high load avg.

Today ive been playing with puppet, which $bossman and i have installed quite recently. Today im chuffed to get puppet to deploy my heartbeat configuration and postfix for my MTA's in our dev environment. But i still have to figure out how to change the iptables to let heartbeat through ( this has been configured manually, just need puppet to do it ) and then ill be (re)deploying the configuration into production. The MTA's will be our first 2 machines running off puppet. Im actually quite excited about this prospect!

Tomorrow i am offically $oldfart. And ill be spending the day cutting cables (literally) in the datacentre, which were put up by 2 very sleep-depped sysadmins and are therefore a bit useless.