JoeDog | Release

Siege 3.0.9

By jdfulmer | Published December 23, 2014 | Leave a comment

What’s Your JoeDog doing now? He’s knee-deep in old C code. This code generates software that calculates the optimum way to cut sheets of linoleum as they roll off a production line. Aren’t you glad you asked? How old is this code? It was last updated in 1999 when it was ported to HP-UX.

You know how an old song can take you back — sometimes to a good place, sometimes to hell? Old code works like that. This project was coded by other humans, but Your JoeDog sees his own flaws in it. He sees techniques that remind him to hang himself back in 1999.

Nobody codes like that anymore. There’s a reason why we’ve abandoned some techniques in favor of others. For the past two weeks, Your JoeDog has been dereferencing variables, debugging memory leaks and trying to figure out what’s whacking his stack. Context is everything, people. In this one, you don’t want anything whacking your stack.

Now siege already encapsulates much of his current programming philosophy. It’s written in C but it relies on object-oriented architecture. If you encapsulate memory management it makes it easier to pinpoint flaws.

Unfortunately, his personal projects haven’t kept up with industry standards. This coding experience has prompted him to fix his sins before they become unmanageable. Your JoeDog updated to gcc-4.7.4 and he watched the warnings fly! This version fixes all of those warnings. There’s nothing sexy about it but you should probably upgrade anyway.

[JoeDog: Siege-3.0.9]

Fido 1.1.5 SIGHUP and Reload

By jdfulmer | Published December 4, 2014 | Leave a comment

Good morning, JoeDoggers. Let’s bask in the glow of Your Fido this morning; he’s all grown up and ready for love. What does that mean? Well, it means it now behaves like a contemporary modern daemon. Starting with version 1.1.5, if you send it SIGHUP, it will reload its configuration file.

Really? It’s been out since 2011 and you’re only adding that feature now?

Hey, what do you want from me? It’s free, isn’t it?

Here’s how it works: if you change fido’s configuration file, you can send it SIGHUP to reload its key = value pairs. There’s just one thing it won’t reload: its filenames.

Remember, a fido configuration file is divided into two parts; it contains global settings and file settings. The file settings are distinguished by a filename followed by two brackets like this: {}. Here’s an example:

/usr/local/var/my.log {
 # key = value pairs go here.
}

So if you change /usr/local/var/my.log to anything else, you’ll have to restart fido. If you change any other values, then you can just send it SIGHUP.

So how do I send it SIGHUP?

There’s several ways of doing this.

1.) You can look for the process ID (PID) with the ps command and send it SIGHUP (which is signal number 1):

# ps -aef | grep fido
root 31952 1 0 09:21 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/fido -f /etc/fido/fido.conf
# kill -1 31952

2.) Check your system documentation. Some kill commands support name values such as this:

# ps -aef | grep fido
root 31952 1 0 09:21 ? 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/fido -f /etc/fido/fido.conf
Pom # kill -HUP 31952

3.) We can eliminate the ps command by using fido’s pid file like this:

# kill -1 $(cat /var/run/fido.pid)

You can verify a successful config reload by looking at /var/log/messages.

[Download: Fido]

Fido 1.1.3

By jdfulmer | Published September 27, 2014 | Leave a comment

Your JoeDog had a requirements change. “Stupid requirements!” He had to ensure each file in a directory and all its sub-directories was less than eight days old. Unfortunately, Your Fido didn’t traverse directory trees. He stood watch only at the top of the tree.

That’s the problem with dogs: they have a mind of their own.

Without much effort, fido learned a new trick. It now recursively searches a directory for files. To leverage this feature, you’ll have to give it a command. “Recurse, boy, recurse!”

/export {
 rules = exceeds 7 days
 exclude = ^.|CVS|Makefile
 action = /usr/local/bin/sendtrap.sh
 recurse = true
}

recurse takes one of two values, true or false. True means search the tree and false means remain at the top level. If you don’t set a recurse directive, then fido will treat it as false, i.e., it will remain in the top directory.

[Trending: Fido-1.1.3]

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