I have an old G4 mac mini running OS X 10.5 Leopard that I've set up as a NAS for my home network. The idea was to have our laptops and other macs use Time Machine to backup to the USB drives attached to the mini. The mini draws only a small amount of electricity and I happened to have a couple of large USB drives kicking around so it seemed like a great replacement setup for my aging Linux solution. So I plugged the drives in, turned on file sharing, shared the drives, and started backing things up.

I want a list of the unique IP addresses for the machines that have requested pages from a specific directory of a Web application.

// pull out the requests for just this directory
grep DIRECTORY/request_log > DIRECTORY/request_log

// remove all hits to non-pages (e.g., graphics, CSS, JS, etc)
cat DIRECTORY/request_log | grep -v "\.gif" | grep -v "\.js" | grep -v "\.jpg" | grep -v "\.css" > DIRECTORY/page_hit_log

// pull out the IPs, sort them file and remove duplicates

For the last month or so I've been experiencing sec_error_crl_invalid errors on a couple of sites when using Firefox 3. Thanks to this post on NZGeek's blog I was able to resolve the issue. It turns out by deleting the CRLs (that where disabled anyway) I was able to solve my issue.

Unless you have intelligent backup software that can do something smart to backup your databases, restoring a backup of a running MySQL server is like restarting your database after a hard system crash, it's a crap shoot. Since I don't have any fancy backup software that can help I decided to use mysqldump to create a snapshot of my database server and write it out to a compressed SQL file. Then my (dumb) backup software can continue to be used and I will be able to recover easily if my server dies.

Here's the quick and dirty script:

#!/bin/sh
#
# This script automates a call to mysqldump
# and sends the output to a file in a backup
# directory. The script is set up to keep
# seven days of history.
#
# Before you can run this script you must
# set up a MySQL user that can perform the
# backup. This user must have permission to
# SELECT and LOCK TABLES. The user should not
# be permitted to access MySQL in any way other
# than through the local socket. Here's how the
# user should be created:
#
# GRANT SELECT,LOCK TABLES ON *.* TO 'SomeUser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'SomePassword'
# FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
#
# This script should be owned by root and only
# root should be able to read, write, and
# execute it. (i.e., chmod 700)
#