Cron Jobs in the Green Data Center

Yesterday I wrote a script to monitor a UPS (running apcupdsd) server using Nagios. Today I'm looking at some of the results of the performance data. It seems that the hourly cron jobs on my server actually cause some power usage. I'll have to think over how often it's actually necessary to run those scripts given it's sucking a noticable bit of juice. Check out the graph (produced by PNP for Nagios)

4 hour Load Percentage of our new APC 2200 @ work

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dealing with Nested Documents in MongoDB and Talend (aka Baking a Cake)

Image
Abstract: MongoDB is a very popular document database that gives you a huge amount of flexibility when it comes to storing data. On the other hand, the traditional relational model is far less flexible in how data is stored - you're limited to columns and rows. Sometimes you want to go from a flexible model like MongoDB to a relational one, that's what this post attempts to explain using  Talend / JaspersoftETL  (ETL tools). I do not want to get into the relational vs non-relational model argument in this post - it's only an example if you need to do this for some reason...I'm pro choice :) Scenario: We have a JSON document in MongoDB that looks like this: { "id" : "0001", "type" : "donut", "name" : "Cake", "ppu" : 0.55, "batters" : { "batter" : [
Read more

Add sbin to user PATH in Debian

Debian does not add sbin to your path by default. I have no idea why. I know sbin is supposed to be administrative tools that you would only want to run as root, however, there are some useful ones that don't require root, and even if they need root, why hide them from useful tools like auto complete? Apparentely it's not a new disucssion - this Debian mailing list thread dates back to a decade ago! Regardless, I want it in my path - the easiest way that I've found is to modify the top of /etc/profile to remove the if statement that sets path if you're user id 0 (root) or not: Before: if [ "`id -u`" -eq 0 ]; then PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin" else PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/games" fi After: PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin" Save the file, log out and log back in and you're all set. Note that this affects all users on you
Read more

Batch convert Asterisk GSM WAV files to mp3

Image
I am working on a fun project at work to provide web based visual voice-mail for a ticketing system. I realized Flash audio players are not able to play WAV files so had to work around that. Since users are also using voicemail files in other ways I can't just change the output format from Asterisk. The type of file that I'm working with is identifed with file ms0012.WAV as: msg0012.WAV: RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, GSM 6.10, mono 8000 Hz First I'll say that I found this post http://www.thiscoolsite.com/?p=73 but like some of the commenters I couldn't get the script to work. The author assumes some other format than Asterisk spits out by default. Lame would complain that Unsupported data format: 0x0031 The Tools Sox: http://sox.sourceforge.net/ Lame: http://lame.sourceforge.net/ So here's what I do: Convert GSM encoded wav to Microsoft PCM sox msg0012.WAV -s msg0012.wav Convert the PCM wav to mp3: lame msg0012.wav msg0012.mp3 And here's a script to
Read more