Matt D's Blog

Introduction

In updating the website infrastructure to be more modern, I figured it would overall be simple - and it was. Put each item into a container, and then run it under an Orchestrator (Nomad) for…reasons. But, like all good plans, the devil was in the details. All was fine when it was one node. Then I thought, well, why not make it a 3 node cluster, providing some resiliency and allowing the underlying Orchestration and service discovery components to work in a cluster like they are designed to. So that works great…except how do I make sure the data I’m referring to (like this website) is the same on all of the nodes?

Load Balancing Options available

Once jobs have been migrated to running on Nomad, you’ll need to put something in front of it in order to route traffic to the correct destination, if you are running multiple web sites.

Phase 4 Follow-up

This is a follow-up on my post from a couple of months ago. Since then I’ve tested a few things out, some studies have come out, and I think I know at least my short term plan.

Background and Rationale

It’s been a busy year in many, many ways. Back in July last year I decided that I weighed a little too much, when my BMI (Body Mass Index) tipped out of the ‘normal’ range (18-24 I think) into the ‘overweight’ range when I went from 24.9 to 25…This made me re-evaluate what I was doing and adjust my eating. The first things I did were to ensure the only thing I was drinking was unsweetened items (water, tea, coffee). Soda was definitely a very infrequent thing at this point. Since moving to OR, I consume less alcohol than when I was in NY, so that also helped, but wasn’t making the impact I hoped for. I cut down on my sweets consumption - less ice cream and chocolate, but I have a huge sweet tooth, so that only worked to a smaller extent.

I’ve modernized the blog a bit. This is now powered by Jekyll CMS. I’ll be replacing the comments section over the next few days as I gather some additional time to get it done. I’ll probably move some of my Facebook posts over here too, if I can figure out how to export them.

I did some more housekeeping and now we’re on a non-ancient OS again. I almost accidentally lost the backup of the site. Whoops.
Using some options which should improve the site even more than before. I have a nice puppet manifest to set it all up, too. This makes it easy to reinstall things.

As of today, I finally have working Bi-Xenon functionality. Wiring up two simple pins took almost an hour due to having to remove panels by the driver footwell to get ahold of the wire as it’s being fished back into the passenger compartment. But it was completely worth it, and I can now say my Halogen to Bi-Xenon conversion is complete.

Moved the server off of Lighttpd. I added in some vhosts for use later, and cleaned up the generated URLs. I also used puppet to make it happen, so it only took me about ~7 minutes to switch everything over.

Upgraded Serendipity, changed the theme, and turned on captchas. Too much comment spam. Thankfully it all got auto-moderated anyway.

Things are good. Just got back from Japan with grandma. Car stuff is still fun.

Life is busy.

Lots of stuff going on with my car, I’ve added a turbocharger to it.

I’m using the Technique Tuning Stage 1 kit for the BMW 330.

See here for more information on the original install.

See here for what I’m doing with it now.

I was an idiot and forgot to re-enable PHP after upgrading my OS on my virtual machine.

Oops.

Clearly, fixed now.

-Matt

Well, this was much harder then expected. Even after switching repos back to Ubuntu, and doing an OS upgrade, there was Mint garbage left on my system.

You need to remove and reinstall a few packages, and my biggest problem was grub - you have to do a

apt-get install –purge –reinstall grub-pc

in order for it to properly remove the “Linux Mint” boot menu entries. I don’t think I have it 100% right, but the major problem was that they have bumped version numbers of things, and you have to tell aptitude to install the latest available from Ubuntu to make it right…

So as I said before, definitely not a fan of Mint.

While I’m not a big fan of Unity, back I go.

I am a huge fan of ZFS. It’s usually quite awesome. I have been using ZFS for about 4-5 years now. In most scenarios, ZFS is highly resilient, and will let you know of problems before they become a major issue. There are times where the right set of circumstances can make things fail spectacularly.

I have been dealing with issues on-and-off with our storage environments using ZFS at work. Most times things were easily recovered. However, there are times where the words that come to mind are “Why is this so difficult?” when getting into perfect-storm scenarios.

We had purchased two failover cluster setups from a vendor. One cluster for our LA location, one for our NY location. The units were installed, and except for a few initial hiccups worked well. Soon we started encountering kernel panics. One of the head-units was swapped out in the NY location. We encountered SAS errors. We encountered yet more kernel panics, coupled with failover issues. We tried replacing cables. We tried different kernel builds. We tried lots of things. All of this, over a mutli-month period and lots of time on the phone, led to us keeping the hardware and moving to software which had more robust clustering.

As alluded to in an earlier post, I was running Linux Mint both version 12 and 13. However, while the OS itself is good, I do not recommend it for a simple reason - you have to do a clean install for each release. Or, at least, you’re supposed to. That’s because they do something wacky after installs, and I’m not 100% certain what that is. It’s the first Debian-based Linux distribution that cannot do a apt-get upgrade cleanly. There were some ordering issues when doing it. I did make it work. So, I’m running Linux Mint 13. Sort of. It still thinks it’s Linux Mint 12.

I also disabled all of the Linux Mint sources, and am running a mostly-stock Ubuntu 12.04 LTS now. Using cinnamon for my desktop though. May try KDE out at some point.

Ubuntu’s Unity is still not quite for me, but some things are kind of cool in that you just start typing what you’re looking for, and open it. So, it’s not terrible, but I still like my old-school (read: slow) methods.

A while ago, while I was waiting for the Evo to come out on Sprint, I had T-Mobile for a while when I had gotten completely fed up with AT&T’s terrible data speeds. T-Mobile had very good customer service, the pricing was good, the data speeds, the voice quality, everything was good - except coverage. There were times where I was without coverage in Eastchester, NY, where AT&T worked just fine. As it has been, AT&T had a monopoly on Grand Central Station’s underground.

Fast forward to Friday. I had read on some site how T-Mobile was getting rid of all of their post-paid plans except for their Value Plans. So I looked into it, and my god, it’s cheap!
For three lines of service - 1 5GB with Tethering, 1 iPhone unlimited, 1 200MB, unlimited Texting, 700 minutes shared….$240 a month after taxes. The same plan on T-Mobile? With 1000 minutes, 5GB of tethering on all lines – $140 a month before taxes. Almost $100/month difference. Quite worth looking into. Well, I stopped by T-Mobile, and 20 minutes later walked out with a SIM card, 500 minutes, 5GB data, and tethering…Just to give it another shot. Annnd, it only took 1 day to figure out that outside of NYC, T-Mobile still sucks. Near Cross County in Yonkers, which is near a very main road, there was no 3G/4G service - back to old 2G data, which is just not acceptable today…So I will be canceling the service on Monday.

Ah well. Oh, and AT&T’s data is starting to suck again, if you’re not on LTE.