After a few solid days of Linux server wrangling, I found getting Munin to monitor our Apache server more hassle than I thought it would be.

Salient system details:

• Ubuntu Hardy
• Nginx web server (port 80) proxy
• Apache web server (port 8080)

After a good few hours of increasing frustration, I managed to work out why the Django unit tests I was working on were doing funny things. As it turns out, the individual test case methods are, by default, sorted alphabetically by the TestLoader.

This is worth knowing if you're testing things that rely on the tests being run in order, such as creating, editing and deleting of records in the database.

After the rip-roaring success of our initial forays with StatSVN, we thought how convenient it would be to have these useful statistics generated automatically.

I gave StatSVN a whirl after Alistair recommended it a while back. It's a nifty tool that analyzes Subversion repositories and returns aggregated statistics and graphs. All very interesting and great stuff for a left-brain dominant stats obsessive like me. However, it was recently very useful in helping me convince a client that their change control requirements were maybe going too far.

Just thought I would quickly share a pretty powerful way of backing up subversion repositories.