Technology Notes
Operations people are often called upon to do low level HTTP troublshooting and I often end up using tcpdump and tcptrace to break out HTTP sessions and troubleshoot. Install tcptrace on your localmachine apt-get install tcptrace or for you Mac people brew install tcptrace Run tcpdump on your server tcpdump Read more…
Patrick Buckley came and spoke about how he uses Puppet Node Classifiers – Slideshare After him, I spoke about using Puppet to configure monitoring. – Slideshare
Writing plugins to wrap a command in mcollective is very easy. What is difficult is figuring out all of the conventions that you need to follow. I’m going to walk you through an example with some tips. Conventions you need to follow 1) Agents need to go in the agent Read more…
1 ) Install RabbitMQ Prerequisites apt-get install -y erlang-base erlang-nox 2 ) Install RabbitMQ from the Download Site wget http://www.rabbitmq.com/releases/rabbitmq-server/v2.8.1/rabbitmq-server_2.8.1-1_all.deb dpkg -i rabbitmq-server_2.8.1-1_all.deb 3 ) Enable the stomp and AMQ plugins rabbitmq-plugins enable amqp_client rabbitmq-plugins enable rabbitmq_stomp 4 ) Create the rabbitmq config file in /etc/rabbitmq/rabbitmq.config %% Single broken configuration Read more…
Graphs are awesome. At work I provide all kinds of graphs to the front end/support teams and Graphite is rapidly becoming my tool of choice. In the past, I have relied heavily on RRD. However, the easy to use front end, scalability and ease of data injection into Graphite is Read more…
Many years ago when I worked for a Japanese shipping company, Taga-san bought a little red rubber stamp that she used that said “urgent”. She would stamp documents with the “urgent” stamp to try and garner more attention. Soon almost every document had the “important” stamp, so the diligent Taga-san Read more…
Due to the holidays, I’ve had to add a large number of new nodes to our infrastructure. This started putting too much CPU and memory load on the puppet master. Instead of moving to a larger instance, I looked to spread out to multiple boxes. This presented the problem of Read more…
I’ve been asked a few times about use cases for mcollective. One of the biggest wins at my company has been using mcollective to build “Oppy” an operational dashboard. Oppy allows developers and support staff to perform deploys on staging servers as well as to audit and monitor client Read more…
When dealing with external customers and non-technical people I find it beneficial to provide some sort of visual representation. Dumping a ton of data on people rarely conveys the message effectively. My go to tool for generating graphs, especially of time-series data, is gnuplot. It’s free, flexible and runs everywhere. Read more…
Continuing from Part 1 Build gems! It’s not that hard and your efforts will be rewarded. Here are my arguments for learning packaging What’s running on your system now? When you’re running hundreds of servers you need a programatic way of auditing what is running on your system. Read more…