This ought to work for Airport Express devices too, although I’ve not tested it. Ditto it should be similar on a BSD like machine.

On your debian / ubuntu box

• If you have a firewall / iptables setup, enable UDP port 514 from your local network (or at least the IP of the Airport)

• Add the following line to /etc/syslog.conf

  local0.* /var/log/AirPort.log

• To prevent the Airport messages also appearing in /var/log/messages, find the stanza in /etc/syslog.conf that controls that file and add

  !local0.*;\

• Restart your syslog deamon

  sudo /etc/init.d/sysklogd restart

Access the Airport via your Airport Utility

• Advanced tab
• Syslog Destination Address is the IP or hostname of the Debian / Ubuntu linux box that you want to contain the logs. Start with the IP address to get it working, then flip to a hostname if you prefer.

See also AirPort Extreme: Remotely logging base station activity

Take a default Ubuntu/Debian install using the Mutt mail client (MUA) then switch to exim4.

You get the most monumental FAIL - your bcc addresses will be included in the message to everyone else. Dangerous and embarrassing!

Happily there is a fix, but it seems insane that you should even need it. Read on for details.

Some top picks from the last few days:A good overview and comparison of various Virtualization technologies from the ever interesting Kris Buytaert.The High Scalability blog pulls together a list of places that are discussing the state of the art in scaling in the cloud. Not entirely un-related is High Scalability’s overview of the Second Life Architecture. 12Gbit/sec in 2007 and growing huh?The Bend in the Weather blog covers how to setup your networking in VirtualBox.Enjoy! Comments or email always welcome.

How cool - Stanford’s three-course Introduction to Computer Science and seven more advanced courses in artificial intelligence and electrical engineering.  Online and free.Materials, tutorial notes, handouts, exams and a social network to interact with other students.Not any old rubbish either - the Introduction to Computer Science is “taken by the majority of Stanford’s undergraduates”http://see.stanford.edu/

Munin offers a number of options to control the appearance and style of the graphs it generates.

One is how the data is drawn on the graph.

• LINE1, LINE2, LINE3 - various thicknesses of lines
• AREA - a solid coloured area (below the line)
• STACK - Lines or areas “stacked up” on top of previous lines or areas.

What the documentation doesn’t currently do is show you visually how these different options render. So we thought we’d do that.

We’ve recently been learning and using git, the version control or distributed source code management tool, similar to Mercurial or Bazaar.

There’s some really good documentation out there already, however we wanted a simple step-by-step tutorial that guided you through learning git without cluttering the process by explaining a whole bunch of theoretical jargon or concepts first.

Git by Example

One of the annoyances we find with using Munin is writing plugins. It’s not hard or complicated per se (or any worse than with any of the other monitoring tools). However it often seems confusing and fiddly to our little brains. We’ll admit we aren’t Munin Experts, nor want to be.

The implementation details we do know tend to leak out of our heads over time as, although we use the reports frequently, we typically don’t fiddle with the guts of Munin very often. Which is perhaps a good thing.

Yet from time to time we need to tinker and it is mostly with the plugins.

This is a “quick start” to installing munin on a set of Debian / Ubuntu based servers.It covers just enough to get you started … check the munin documentation for additional things you might want to do.

We wanted a Jabber server running on our own debian / ubuntu based machines and we wanted it to “Just Work”.Installation is easy with Apt, but then you need deal with configuration and this we found a little fiddly and confusing. We found the existing documentation did not suit our requirements, so we’re outlining what we did in the hope it might help someone else.Comments or feedback are most welcome - details at the end of this post.

One of the clever things Munin can do is just guess the correct scale for your graphs. It will dynamically adjust the y axis depending on the data it’s graphing.Sadly, it doesn’t always do such a great job of being smart. And un-breaking this smartness proves not to be as easy as you might hope … but it can be done.