A few months back I wrote csconnect to make it easier for myself to logon to our Cloud Sigma-nodes. It’s a pretty simple application. All it does is to poll Cloud Sigma’s API and lookup the IPs for the node(s) specified. Yet, since this was one of the first Python-programs I ever wrote (beyond Hello World), the state of the code was pretty terrible. Last …
I love Munin. It’s a great monitoring tool, quick to set up, and doesn’t come with too many bloated requirements. It’s also very flexible and easy to write plugins for. On Ubuntu, Munin comes with most (non-custom) plugins I use. Unfortunately, the Nginx-plugins (nginx_status and nginx_request) are incorrectly documented. In the header of the plugins, one …
I’m not sure if I’m the only one having issues with Time Machine, but it has been completely broken for me since I upgraded to Mountain Lion. As you can see above, Time Machine basically freezes and reports outrageous ETA statistic. What is strange is that I did a fresh install. I do have FileVault2 activated on both the Time Machine-drive (which is brand …
One of the most hyped pieces of hardware in recent time is the Raspberry Pi. It is hyped for a very good reason. For $35 you get a fully functioning Linux-computer which is about the size of a deck of cards. While there have been plenty of micro-computers around in the past, none at this extremely low price point. The Raspberry Pi is simply any DIY’ers wet …
I hate iTunes with passion. It’s bloated and annoying. However, since it is a major revenue stream for Apple, they try hard to push it into your face as often as possible. Since I started using Spotify a few years back, I don’t think I’ve used iTunes to play music once (only to upgrade iOS-devices before the over-the-air-updates came out). As long as you …
If you have nothing booked for August 30th, I suggest you mark it ‘busy’ in your calendar, as that’s the date for NoSQL Road Show in Basel, Switzerland. At the event, I will be giving a presentation about MongoDB titled “MongoDB’s Replica Sets – Painless scaling and High Availability (HA).” As the title implies, it is a talk about MongoDB’s Replica Sets. I …
If you haven’t heard of Bottle, it’s a lightweight web framework for Python. It is perfect if you have a small project that requires a web interface, but you don’t want to go all in with a complex framework like Django. Since Bottle is so lightweight, it doesn’t always have all the features you need built-in. One thing that I was missing was access control. …
In recent time, I’ve really started to appreciate Munin. I’ve deployed Munin in multiple architectures already, and I still get impressed every time by how easy it is to setup. I also really like how easy it is to write plugins. For a crash-course in writing plugins for Munin, take a look at this page. Since I first deployed Munin to monitor YippieMove‘s …
In the last few years, we‘ve spent a lot of time migrating away from all our physical servers and into the cloud. This has been a very interesting task, that presented its own set of challenges, but it has certainly been worth it. One of the issues though with working in a public cloud environment is that you don’t necessarily have the same static IP …
Some time ago, I posted a question on Serverfault about how people managed and deployed ports in a large environment. Despite a fair number of comment, nobody seemed to really have the anser to this (or at least that suited my needs). It simply appears to be the case that the built-in tools in FreeBSD (primarily portsnap and portupgrade) are not built for a …
Let me first admit that I am new to Munin. I’ve played around with most monitoring tool, but never Munin for some reason. I really don’t know why, since it appears to be a great tool. As a result, this might be obvious to seasoned Munin-users, but it wasn’t to me at least. It appear as most stock-plugins are configured in /etc/munin/plugin-conf.d/munin-node. …
This week I was interviewed (Swedish) by the Swedish hosting provider City Network for their blog. In the article I talk about the background of WireLoad and a bit about our network architecture and philosophy.