"Weren't you on a boat somewhere last year when we spoke?" asked Atiqur when I called him yesterday to talk about our server upgrade / annual contract. Indeed I was, and I was impressed not only by his memory (he assures me it's not just his computer system of notes!) but by the speed of upgrade; our server was upgraded in the early hours of this morning and our service was down for just nine minutes.

Our daily log file is around 20 Mbytes ... how did I find out how long we were off air? A quick little Perl program run against that file:

  while (<>) {
    ($h,$m,$s) = m!:(\d+):(\d+):(\d+)!;
    $sid = $h * 3600 + $m * 60 + $s;
    if ($osid and $sid - $osid > 500) {
      print "$oh $om $os -> $h $m $s\n";
      }
    $osid = $sid;
    $oh = $h; $om = $m; $os = $s;
  }

Run against the log file, this reported:

  wizard:jul12 graham$ perl gap_report ac_20120709
  00 39 42 -> 00 48 42
  wizard:jul12 graham$

So that's a thorough recommendation for UK2. And if you want to learn about Perl, and who you can extract information to quickly from such a massive amount of data, take a look at our Perl courses - fully described on that server that was just upgrades. All our samples and support materials are there too - after the course you'll find you have knowledgable access to hundreds of indexed source code examples and articles. See (for example) the resources on Perl Hashes [here].

Illustration - on this day, last year!

(written 2012-07-10, updated 2012-07-14)

 

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