By default, Debian only sends results of cron jobs by email. In some cases, however (no direct internet connection), you want them logged in a regular log file in /var/log. In Debian Squeeze it's not the default but it's very easy to change it. Just edit /etc/rsyslog.conf and uncomment the following line:
cron.* /var/log/cron.log
Then, restart rsyslogd by executing service rsyslog restart. Viola!
Amazon has released a new tool: Glacier. Similarly to S3, it is storage, but Glacier is a different beast. It's for keeping long term backups which you will hardly ever need, but which you need to store for one reason or another. The storage fee is just 1 US cent per gigabyte per month. The catch is, however, getting back your data. Retrieval of storage is free if you're only grabbing 5 percent of your data per month.
There has been a frequently encountered problem with vztop on OpenVZ making the tool totally useless - it worked perfectly except for it didn't show virtual machine IDs for processes. Instead of actual numerical ID, it showed "N/A" in the VEID column.
So I spent an hour or so debugging, and it turned out that vztop, when requested to show the VEID column, didn't set a flag which enabled collection of VEIDs and other data. While diving into vzprocps source, I also made vztop show VEID by default. The result is this simple patch against vzprocps 2.0.11-2.
Apply with patch -p1 <vztop_veid.txt
If you need to debug a problem with some piece of software, I'm for hire at Massive Scale. I have never seen vzprocps source code before and still the solution was available in just 1 hour of work. That's $70. Would your $15/h programmer solve the problem as efficiently?
