Recently I noticed that some Amazon EC2 instances I had deployed had an extremely high load.  The servers were basically idle, so I knew something had to be wrong!

Looking at /var/log/messages, I discovered messages like the following:

Nov 27 11:19:55 /sbin/mingetty[14342]: tty5: No such file or directory

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve recently discovered bitlbee, a proxy that allows you to chat on your favourite IM clients from IRC.  As I’ve always got an irssi session running in a screen somewhere, I realized this would be a great way to take my IM’s on the go!  

Setting up commonly supported protocols like GTalk, MSN, and AIM were easy, but what about Skype? 

Read the rest of this entry »

Connect BitlBee to Gtalk

• account add jabber username@gmail.com password
• Get the account # using ‘account list’
• account set 1/port 5223
• account set 1/server talk.google.com
• account on 1

I’ve been using FreeBSD on and off for several years, in conjunction with several flavours of Linux.  Occasionally I run into compatibility issues between the two.  Today the issue I ran into was with a Nagios plugin used to determine the amount of available memory.

The check_mem script bundled with Nagios uses the ‘free’ command to get its numbers, which isn’t available on FreeBSD.  Read on to see my workaround.

Read the rest of this entry »

My business requires that I both make and receive a lot of international calls, and my current cell plan just isn’t hacking it as far as the rates go. I looked into the deals I could get on various cellular providers, but they just didn’t seem good enough. With Skype offering unlimited calling of landline/cellphones in North America for $3, is this now a viable option?

Read the rest of this entry »