A botnet test, or aberrant traffic?

This morning, we received an email stating that our estimated bandwidth usage over the past 10 minutes was 35Mbit per second. This would be an ok thing if our average usage wasn't closer to 9Mbit per second.


MySQL and support for Daylight Saving

I've already written once about Daylight Saving and how much I hate it. It came back to bite me anyway.


The App Store, 25 billion downloads, and some perspective

In a few days, The Apple App Store will hit 25,000,000,000 downloads. They're making a grand promotion out of it, even giving the "winner" a $10,000 App Store gift card.


PV, one of the most useful applications around

pv, or pipe viewer, has quickly become one of the most useful applications for me. Many times, I've started a long-running task, only to wonder after starting it, how much longer it was going to take.


Monitoring master-master replication in MySQL

UPDATE: I've added the guts of the script in the following post. A few months ago, we got our secondary MySQL server online.


Templating with Perl

One of my duties, as I explained in my last post is to automate things, as everything we allow to be done by human hands causes the chance for error to increase. So scripting things not only reduces that chance for error, but also speeds the process along.


UTC, EDT, and why Daylight Saving should be abolished

My employer has a lot of different services; one of these services is called an Email News Alert (EMNA for short). For a long time, these EMNAs were prepared manually by a team of 3 based on articles posted on our sites.