hypergeometric

Category: DevOps

  • Just Enough Ops of Devs

    A few weeks ago I was reading through the chef documentaion and I came across the page “Just Enough Ruby for Chef”. This inspired me to put together a quick article, on how much linux a developer needs to know. I’m going to be doing this as a series, and putting out one of these…

  • Solr Upgrade Surprise and Using Kill To Debug It

    At work, we’ve recently upgraded to the latest and greatest stable version of Solr (3.6), and moved from using the dismax parser to the edismax parser. The initial performance of Solr was very poor in our environment, and we removed the initial set of search features we had planned to deploy trying to get the…

  • What I Wish Some Had Told Me About Writing Cron Jobs

    Much like Doc Brown and Marty McFly, cron and I go way back. It is without doubt one of thing single most valuable tools you can use in linux system management. Though what I’ve learned over the years is that it can be hard to write jobs that reliably produce the results I want. I…

  • Rally Cars and Redunancy: Understand Your Failure Boundaries

    I occasionally watch rally car racing, and if you haven’t seen it before its worth a watch. Guys drive small cars very fast down dirt roads, and while this is going on a passenger is reading driving notes to the driver. Occasionally these guys hit rocks, run off the road, and do all sorts of…

  • Keep it Simple Sysadmin

    I’ve been thinking about what I hate about my configuration management system. I seem to spend a lot of time when I want to make a change looking at the various resources in chef, and sometimes I end up using providers like the ops code apache2 cookbook to manage enabling and disabling of modules. A…

  • Monitoring – The Challenge of Small Ops – Part 2

    So your building or have built a web service, you’ve got a lot of challenges a head. You’ve got to scale software and keep customers happy. Not surprisingly that likely involves keeping your web service up, and that typically starts by setting up some form of monitoring when something goes wrong. In a large organization…

  • Three First Pass Security Steps

    I’m no security expert, but in my experience these are three simple things you can do to avoid a security incident. 3. Fix Authentication Don’t allow users to log in to your systems just using passwords. Passwords are easy to setup and get running, but also are easily lost. For SSH use SSH keys at…

  • Monitoring Your Customers with Selenium and Nagios

    In a brief conversation with Noah Sussman at DevOps Days, when discussing the challenges of continious deployment for B2B services with SLAs, we got side tracked discussing using Selenium and Nagios in production. A few years back while working for a B2B company that was compensated by an attributable sales, I got on a phone…

  • The Challenge of Small Ops (Part 1)

    I missed a open session at DevOps days, and I’m really disappointed that I did after hearing feedback from one of the conference participant. He said many people in the session we’re advocating for eliminating operations in the small scale. I realize that the world is changing, and that operations teams need to adjust to…

  • Good Nagios Parenting, Avoids a Noisey Pager

    Monitoring configuration is complicated, and the depths that you can configure alerts and tests seems endless. It may seem like a waste of time to invest in some options, but others can really help you eliminate states that send hundreds of alerts. Your end goal in your configuration is to narrow down any alert sent…