Mon, 25 Jun 2007
Navigating Commented Config Files
The current trend with config files is to fill them with comments (let's
ignore the fact this isn't a substitute for documentation) and while this
is helpful watching people arrow through them line by line looking for
active options drives me nuts.
If you're using vim (as all good people
do ;)) you can jump from uncommented directive to uncommented directive
with /^[^#] as a search. Pressing n will then
move you to the next uncommented option. And save me from pulling out those
precious few hairs I have left.
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Posted: 2007/06/25 21:32 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Sun, 24 Jun 2007
Have Card Will Travel
It's been a long week that began with half the systems team coming down
with colds and ended with no water at home and dealing with plumbers. A
number of little road blocks cropped up and late Friday
night I decided to do the adult thing - and ran away.
I've not really had a non-tech break since January so about 10 Friday night I grabbed my "conference kit" (I've learned to pack for short trips both quickly and lightly - and with only cheap items) I went and bought a ticket to the coast, used the wireless in the train station to find a small "hotel" (that's a glamourous term for where I ended up staying) and buggered off to enjoy the beach for two days.
So I'm sitting here alone on a beach, on a Sunday, enjoying the sound of the waves, using the free wireless and fiddling about on my laptop in the remarkably warm sun.
And you know what? It's not the worst way to end a week.
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Posted: 2007/06/24 10:47 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Mon, 11 Jun 2007
Indian Nights?
A tech friend of mine has spent the last four months in Chennai doing
the ground work for his first VC backed start-up. He's got a years
funding (at Chennai costs), he's just got the building (including decent
aircon and a generator - which were apparently harder to get than you'd
think) and now he needs to grow his tech team from five to about thirty
over the next couple of months. Having been at startups that have tried
this before... it's going to be a challenge for him.
Joe loves India, he spent a couple of years living out there after the dot com crash (savings go a lot further that way ;)), as far back as I've known him he's only dated Indian girls (wonder why he set up near the big dance unis?) and amusingly he has almost no tolerance of spicy food. For the last year he's been consulting on different outsourced projects as their "cultural advisor"; guess all those techy pub crawls paid off in the end!
He was in London at the weekend catching up with people and tidying up before he fully moved over so I met up with him (and his lead DBA, Ayesha) for what was probably our last drink together for a good while. We chatted about what we've been up to for the last six months, places we used to work, start ups we've done (and where they went off the tracks) and where the industries going. Oh, and he offered me a job.
The product he's working on (which is actually very cool and I can see myself using it in a couple of years) falls inside a couple of my skills and he's looking for someone to run the infrastructure team and flatteringly he thought of me. He wants the old deal, you eat, sleep and breath the company for a year or two; anything less than that's seen as part time. The work sounds very interesting, the job comes with a paid for apartment, and pretty much anything else that's cheap and gets you in the office more. It's a promotion for me (although I've never really wanted to manage) and a chance to make some real money.
So why ain't I blogging my acceptance? Their are some drawbacks. Firstly moving to Chennai, I'm in the middle of a big estate dispute and I need to be here for that. Secondly I'd be paid at (damn well for) local (India) rates - which means my legal fees in the UK would kill me financially. I also know what working hours are expected of me and there'd be no weeks back in the UK until we either make it or shut the shop down which means no seeing my family for a year or two.
He's given me a week to think about it and I'm giving it decent consideration. A couple of years ago I'd have said yes on the spot and he knows it but my life's changed a lot and things are annoyingly more complex now. I'm not sure this is change for the better.
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Posted: 2007/06/11 00:37 | /career | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Sun, 03 Jun 2007
Extending the Nagios CGIs - Discouraging Casual Commiters
While working on my Nagios display tools I wanted to modify our existing
Nagios deployments to easily link the information in but after a quick
dig I discovered that something was very wrong - the Nagios CGIs are
written in C.
While shell and perl are my current languages of choice I can write (a very little and very basic) C but the idea of customising webpages in it, especially pages this critical to the company, stopped me in my tracks. While I can understand using the language you're most familiar with when writing software if you want to attract contributers you need to match the language to the task. If the Nagios front ends had been written in any of the dynamic languages I'd have spent some time to understand and hopefully add to them - but not C, it's the wrong level of language for this kind of work.
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Posted: 2007/06/03 10:51 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Nagios - Simple Trender
Continuing the release of my Nagios code - here's my Nagios
Simple Trender. It parses Nagios logs and builds a horizontal barchart
for host outages, service warnings and criticals. It's nothing fancy (and
the results are a little unpretty) but it does make the attention seeking
services and hosts very easy to find.
While the tool isn't that technically complex I've found it useful in justifying my time on certain parts of the infrastructure. Being able to show how bad NTP is for example (we had 216 NTP sync problems last month, this month we had 36; and most of those are one machine with a bad clock) on a very simple chart makes it easier to get buy in from above. And next month you can show them how much of a positive impact the work had.
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Posted: 2007/06/03 10:29 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
The Nagios Tag Cloud
We use the Nagios monitoring system
at work (in fact we use four installs of it for physically isolated
networks) and while it's damn useful (and service checks are easy to
create or extend) it's a little lacking in higher level trending and
visualisation tools. Well, at least the very old version we run suffers
from this.
Thankfully I work for a company that invests time in its core tools. Over the last couple of hackdays I've written two small scripts for parsing Nagios logfiles and presenting the information in a different, slightly more grouped way. The first of these is the Nagios TagCloud - which has a very descriptive name :)
When invoked (I typically use nagiosclouds.pl /log/files/*.log >
/webdir/nagios_tagcloud.html from a cronjob) it'll run through the log
files and produce a HTML page containing 3 tag clouds, one for host
outages, one for service warnings and one for service criticals. Tag clouds
don't suit everyones work style but I came away from running ours with a
couple of action points so I think they're useful enough to glance at once
a month.
I should note the perl module that generates the tag cloud is Leon Brocards HTML::TagCloud and the CSS was graciously given to me by Alex Monney after he burned his eyes looking at my first version.
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Posted: 2007/06/03 10:08 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
The Perk of $HOME - .bash_logout
It's not a well kept secret but I'm still surprised by how many people have
never encountered .bash_logout. Its purpose is pretty simple,
if you use the BASH shell it'll be executed when you log out (see, a well
named file!)
So what's it for? Well, I use mine to invalidate any sudo
sessions I've got open (sudo -k), clear the
screen -in case it's a local session - and nuke a history file or two.
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Posted: 2007/06/03 09:47 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Sat, 02 Jun 2007
Little Bits of Code
When I worked as a developer I played around with servers and
infrastructure in my spare time, now I get paid to worry about that kind
of stuff I quite enjoy writing the occasional useless piece of code.
This weeks were a patch (well it started as a patch) to Statistics::Lite
to make it pass its tests. And then I got distracted in to re-writing its
test script from Test.pm to Test::More.
Educational and slightly useful. Then I was sent to LOLCODE
where I whiled away a lunch hour trying to add support for I HAZ
A BUKKIT(arrays) and better file handling to one of the perl
implementations. (for the record I'm not a fan of lolcats, but the lolrus is
amusing.)
While the results are far from useful the implementation I looked at did
it's parsing with reads and regex substitutions; which I'd
never seen done before. So I did learn a new (although less than ideal)
trick or two from playing with it.
It's the learning that's important, not the seriousness of the examples or outcome.
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Posted: 2007/06/02 09:27 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Fri, 01 Jun 2007
Daemon Percentages - Perl 6 Version
After heading to the Nordic Perl Workshop and watching sessions by Jonathan
Worthington and brian d
foy I decided to have a little play with Perl 6 and see if I could port
my Daemon Percentages script (Perl 5 and
Ruby
versions already exist) to Perl 6.
Thanks to material in the slides from the above sessions and asking
a couple of questions in #perl6 I got a basically working Daemon
percentages Perl 6 script running on my Windows desktop under pugs in a
couple of hours (I had problems finding an example of the substitution). I
managed to kill pugs twice, find some non-implemented parts of the language
(I think) and eventually get output values that matched the other
versions.
While I enjoyed fiddling with the language (and the roles and traits look very interesting) it's still too early for me to invest any real time in the project or the language. It's come a long way in the last couple of years but it's no where near ready for casual users yet. I never really got past wondering if it was me or the implementation that were causing the problems. In most cases it was me.
Notes: while looking around for examples I found that some of Jonathans other Perl 6 slides are well worth a read. The people in the IRC channel were also very helpful.
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Posted: 2007/06/01 21:21 | /perl | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Copyright © 2000-2010 Dean Wilson
