It's important to know when cron jobs fail. One way to do this is to put an entry in the crontab like MAILTO=me@example.com. But for this to work, the system needs a sendmail agent. A rather simplistic option is ssmtp; this is a good option…
Sails has grand goals. It's a smartly built and underappreciated framework that pulls together some of the best utilities available to the node.js community and combines them into one super framework of awesome. ....except that it doesn't.... My main gripe comes from the explanation of…
To swap, or not to swap still seems to be a common question. Modern computers often provide massive amounts of memory, which is great because memory is fast. Swap, being disk based, is slow. The benefit of swap is that it provides more memory resources for a system with high…
I wanted to make a gulpfile to restart a server when files changed. It seemed easy enough at first: var gulp = require('gulp') var child = require('child-process') gulp.task('default', function(){ var ps function spawn(){ if(ps) ps.kill() //spawn becomes respawn automatically ps…
This is a brief post to describe how to spy on rs232 traffic for the purpose of investigating protocol between two devices that don't provide an interface traffic log. As example, we're examining traffic between a Property Management System (PMS) and a PBX. The basic concept…