Conference report: Configuration Management Summit 2010

Aleksey Tsalolikhin — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:27:45 -0700

My report from USENIX 2010 Configuration Management Summit is at http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7841

Updating Rubygems: a necessary step before installing the Amazon gem

wnl — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 10:47:08 -0700

This article shows you how to install a gem (a ruby package) that provides access to Amazon APIs for EC2, ELB, and RDS. But along the way it also provides important information on the entire Rubygems environment. This information is critical for anyone who is tasked with maintaining a working Ruby environment.

Yesterday I posted an entry about using Ruby to access the Amazon EC2 API and I mentioned a gem that provided the classes needed to make such access easy. Gem is the package system for ruby, and fills a role similar to one that CPAN provides for perl. The Amazon gem is called amazon-ec2 and it is written and supported by Glenn Rempe.

Using Ruby with Amazon Web Services, an example

wnl — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 14:10:55 -0700

I've been recently extolling the virtues of Ruby on the Lopsa IRC channel so I thought it would be fun to take a real world problem and write a Ruby-based solution. This particular problem has to do with manipulating snapshots in Amazon's EC2. Those who administer EC2 instances know (or should know) that the storage associated with an instance does not outlast the instance. If you want persistent storage you have to create a volume of elastic block store. Not only will it outlast the instance, it can be moved between them and it can be backed up into something called a snapshot.

On most of our instances we have a cron job that creates a snapshot of

Cool things I saw at SIGGRAPH 2010 exhibition hall

Aleksey Tsalolikhin — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:14:08 -0700

SIGGGRAPH 2010

Trip Report of Cool Things Aleksey Saw in the Exhibition Hall

(Coolest stuff at the top.)

- FusionIO had the coolest demo!! 1500 DVD-quality videos streaming
from a single Fusion IO (RAM-based) 640 GB drive displayed onto a large
virtual screen (composed of 16 - that's 4x4 large displayes). all 1500
videos were displayed simultaneiously in tiny little rectangles.

- Digital Double Agency - a French company (www.adnda.com) used to capture
your face (three sessions of 4 hours each) and a wide variety of facial expression; and capture your voice; and then the double can talk and interact -- so you can capture a celebrity's likeness and have the digital double act in movies; or so you can have an avatar online.

Results of trying to vary GNU tar blocking factor to increase tape write/read speed for 2K content

Aleksey Tsalolikhin — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:17:19 -0700

My results transferring 685 2K frames (11MB per file, 8.1 GB total) using GNU tar to/from LTO4 tape

Sixth Annual Triangle InfoSeCon Conference - "Call for Papers"

Liyun Yu — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 13:54:05 -0700

Sixth Annual Triangle InfoSeCon Conference - "Call for Papers"

Sixth Annual Triangle InfoSeCon Conference - "Call for Papers"
>
> Members and Fellow ITSec Professionals,
>
> CALL for PAPERS is now open! See conference webpages
> (http://raleigh.issa.org/conference.html).
>
> Spread the word within your organizations and among your cohort.
>
> The Raleigh ISSA Chapter announces the sixth annual Triangle InfoSeCon. This
> Information Security conference is on Thursday, October 21, 2010, at the
> McKimmon Center in Raleigh, North
> Carolina located on the campus of

Turning perl regular expressions from line noise into documented code

Aleksey Tsalolikhin — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 12:21:36 -0700

Problem: Sufficiently long regular expressions start to look like line noise and become unmaintainable

Solution: Use perl regular expressions with the /x modifier

perlre manpage reads:

/x
Extend your pattern's legibility by permitting whitespace and comments.
These are usually written as ``the /x modifier''...

The /x modifier itself needs a little more explanation. It tells the
regular expression parser to ignore whitespace that is neither
backslashed nor within a character class. You can use this to break up
your regular expression into (slightly) more readable parts.

The # character is also treated as a metacharacter introducing a

Do you run a LUG,sysadmin user group, SAGE or LOPSA chapters?

wbilancio — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 06:41:43 -0700

LOPSA-NJ has started a mailing list for the people that run technical user groups (LUGs,sysadmin user groups, SAGE or LOPSA chapters, and so on). The purpose of this mailing list is to encourage information sharing on topics such as:

How to promote your group, how to find speakers, how to get started, tips on how to run a meeting, volunteer retention, and anything else related to the running of such groups. The only forbidden topic is who's computer/editor/OS/language/whatever is better/worse that mine/yours.

To be on this list you must be the chair/co-chair/president/board-member or somehow be in charge of organizing a user group with live, in-person meetings (or be involved in starting one).

Notes on Zenoss ZenPacks

nickanderson — Tue, 25 May 2010 13:19:50 -0700

Recently I was building a ZenPack for Zenoss. The ZenPack included an Event Command which executed a custom script. I wanted to store the custom script in the ZenPack and I didn’t want to do anything other than have proper script dependencies in place for it to work. (Read More)

trials in LACP

doug — Mon, 24 May 2010 19:28:05 -0700

I need to transfer about 40TB from one zfs box to another box because of a problem of initial setup in box 1 that left it without redundant raid and it now has a failing disk. ZFS points this out quite nicely, but we have to get all that data off before the disk fails completely, even though it's a backup box. (Apparently you can't replace a disk in a pure stripe without zfs having conniptions).

So, what to do? zfs send/recv are a marvelous tool for this, especially combined with a pure network stream like ttcp or netcat or the like. First, start up 20 listening processes on the receiver listening on 20 different ports piped into zfs recv. Second, make a snapshot on all of the filesystems so you have a consistent starting point. zfs snapshot -r zpool1@mig1. Third, send all of these filesystems over in parallel using a quick bash script and incrementing the port number.

Analyzing I/O performance in Linux

nickanderson — Mon, 24 May 2010 10:35:44 -0700

Monitoring and analyzing performance is an important task for any sysadmin. Disk I/O bottlenecks can bring applications to a crawl. What are IOPS? Should I use SATA, SAS, or FC? How many spindles do I need? What RAID level should I use? Is my system read or write heavy? These are common questions for anyone embarking on an disk I/O analysis quest. Obligatory disclaimer: I do not consider myself an expert in storage or anything for that mater. This is just how I have done I/O analysis in the past. I welcome additions and corrections. I believe it’s also important to note that this analysis is geared toward random operations than sequential read/write workloads.

Office 2010 - a preview

dglick5 — Sun, 16 May 2010 22:30:00 -0700

I thought I would write a little about Office 2010. I realize this isn't about Windows, but Office is important too. I really think that Microsoft messed up the user interface on 2007, and I know a lot of people that feel the same way. Granted, they were looking to improve the user experience, and they primarily had the new user in mind. But what about the literally millions of users that they left behind?

Well, it looks like the interface has been improved further for 2010. The ribbons are still there, but at least it appears to look a little bit more like the 2003 interface than 2007 did. One aspect of 2010 that really gets me excited is the Office Web piece! This looks like it might be the start of a beautiful friendship between a lot of new users and Microsoft, especially because the web access is free to everyone. It includes the abiliy to store documents online so the user can access them from any computer that has access to the Internet.

CHIMIT '10 wants your stories from the trenches

nicolefv — Mon, 03 May 2010 11:47:11 -0700

Business, people, and technology: When we put them together, what works? What doesn’t? What explodes?

ACM CHIMIT '10 - Computer-Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology
November 12-13, 2010, San Jose, CA (co-located with USENIX LISA, in San Jose)

IT management is hard – in the enterprise, in small business, and even in the home. Let’s make it better. CHIMIT '10 will be co-located with LISA in San Jose this November and we would love to hear some of your stories from the trenches. This is your chance to help us understand what your job is like and how we can help!

Cool videos about PICC

lois — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 10:50:47 -0700

I am really excited that I am going to go to PICC (http://picconf.org). The organizers have put together some great short videos of some of the speakers. I like this one:

http://www.youtube.com/user/lopsavideo#p/u/12/oK4cg7R3_88

Tom Limoncelli interviews Eben Haber, PICC keynote speaker, about his research, his keynote topic, and why he is excited to come to the conference. (PICC is the Professional IT Community Conference May 7-8, 2010, New Brunswick, NJ, USA; http://picconf.org, brought to you by the New Jersey chapter of the League of System Administrators (LOPSA), a non-profit educational organization.)

More thoughts on bcfg2

jlothian — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 19:04:31 -0700

In my last post I gave some first impressions using bcfg2. We ended up selecting bcfg2 as our configuration management system for a new project. I'm going to start with the "bad" and get that out of the way.

The bad

The biggest problem so far is getting the entire team up to speed on bcfg2. It's very different from what we're used to with cfengine2. One challenge is wrapping your mind around what I think is one of the basic tenets of bcfg2 - you specify everything twice. Let me explain: bcfg2 separates out configurations into an abstract specification, and a concrete implementation. For example, you may decide a certain group needs an /etc/motdfile. So in the abstract configuration (called a Bundle), you simply say: <Path name='/etc/motd'/>. This is great for easily seeing what should be there. However, it gives no clue as to where that file comes from. It could come from the plugin that distributes static files, or one of the plugins that parses templates and distributes the results.

GNU tar Blocking Factor	Write LTO4	Read LTO4
1024	2m34s	1m16s
2048	1m24s	1m16s
4096	1m19s	1m34s

League of Professional System Administrators blogs

Conference report: Configuration Management Summit 2010

Updating Rubygems: a necessary step before installing the Amazon gem

Using Ruby with Amazon Web Services, an example

Cool things I saw at SIGGRAPH 2010 exhibition hall

Results of trying to vary GNU tar blocking factor to increase tape write/read speed for 2K content

Sixth Annual Triangle InfoSeCon Conference - "Call for Papers"

Turning perl regular expressions from line noise into documented code

Do you run a LUG,sysadmin user group, SAGE or LOPSA chapters?

Notes on Zenoss ZenPacks

trials in LACP

Analyzing I/O performance in Linux

Office 2010 - a preview

CHIMIT '10 wants your stories from the trenches

Cool videos about PICC

More thoughts on bcfg2

The bad