mikal – Page 21 – Made by Mikal

Recording performance information from short lived processes with prometheus

Post author:mikal
Post published:January 29, 2017
Post category:Prometheus

Now that I'm recording basic statistics about the behavior of my machines, I now want to start tracking some statistics from various scripts I have lying around in cron jobs. In order to make myself sound smarter, I'm going to call these short lived scripts "ephemeral scripts" throughout this document. You're welcome. The promethean way of doing this is to have a relay process. Prometheus really wants to know where to find web servers to learn things from, and my ephemeral scripts are both not permanently around and also not running web servers. Luckily, prometheus has a thing called the pushgateway which is designed to handle this situation. I can run just one of these, and then have all my little scripts just tell it things to add to its metrics. Then prometheus regularly scrapes this one process and learns things about those scripts. Its like a game of Telephone, but for processes really. First off, let's get the pushgateway running. This is basically the same as the node_exporter from last time: $ wget https://github.com/prometheus/pushgateway/releases/download/v0.3.1/pushgateway-0.3.1.linux-386.tar.gz $ tar xvzf pushgateway-0.3.1.linux-386.tar.gz $ cd pushgateway-0.3.1.linux-386 $ ./pushgateway Let's assume once again that we're all adults and did something nicer than that involving configuration…

Basic prometheus setup

Post author:mikal
Post published:January 28, 2017
Post category:Prometheus

I've been playing with prometheus for monitoring. It feels quite familiar to me because its based on an internal google technology called borgmon, but I suspect that means it feels really weird to everyone else. The first thing to realize is that everything at google is a web server. Your short lived tool that copies some files around probably runs a web server. All of these web servers have built in URLs which report the progress and status of the task at hand. Prometheus is built to: scrape those web servers; aggregate the data; store the data into a time series database; and then perform dashboarding, trending and alerting on that data. The most basic example is to just export metrics for each machine on my home network. This is the easiest first step, because we don't need to build any software to do this. First off, let's install node_exporter on each machine. node_exporter is the tool which runs a web server to export metrics for each node. Everything in prometheus land is written in go, which is new to me. However, it does make running node exporter easy -- just grab the relevant binary from https://prometheus.io/download/, untar, and run.…

Gods of Metal

Post author:mikal
Post published:January 24, 2017
Post category:Book

In this follow-up to Command and Control, Schlosser explores the conscientious objectors and protestors who have sought to highlight not just the immorality of nuclear weapons, but the hilariously insecure state the US government stores them in. In all seriousness, we are talking grannies with heart conditions being able to break in. My only real objection to this book is that is more of a pamphlet than a book, and feels a bit like things that didn't make it into the main book. That said, it is well worth the read.

BonkersCon video: something introductory about radio

Post author:mikal
Post published:January 23, 2017
Post category:Events Technical Topics TT December 2016

Michael Carden kindly gave a talk at BonkersCon about the origins of radio at my request. Tim Ansell was there during the day to record these videos with his bonkers home brew video capture hardware. Sorry about the sound quality at the end of the video. We had some issues on the day with the radio mics, so these videos were recorded with a conference microphone which did admirably as long as the speaker was facing in the right direction. There are a few of these videos that I'll post in the next little while as I have time to make sure the recording worked out (by watching the video).

Betrayal at House on the Hill

Game review: Betray at House on the Hill

Post author:mikal
Post published:January 22, 2017
Post category:Board games Games

Here’s our second game. We played this one tonight after dinner.

(more…)

Game review: Guillotine

Post author:mikal
Post published:January 22, 2017
Post category:Card games Games

AJ, Matt and I have decided that we need to play more board games and that we should write up our thoughts about them as we play them. I've decided to keep quick notes here to keep us honest. We start with a card game named "Guillotine". AJ: A fun by simple game. Matt: Fun, but don't play it with people who over think things. Mikal: A fun game we've been playing for a while. It works well with younger kids -- I think the boys were about 6 or 7 when we started playing it with them. Play is relatively quick too, a good after dinner game before the kids bed time. Would play again.

Event wrap up

Post author:mikal
Post published:January 11, 2017
Post category:TT December 2016

Thanks to everyone who made Technical Topics 2016 a success. I enjoyed the talks, and I think the turnout was much better than I expected. I've also given up on convincing people to use the big boy name for the event, and have accepted that "BonkersCon" has stuck as a name. So congratulations on that! A special giant thanks to those who agreed to speak, video record the event, or flew all the way from places-that-are-not-Canberra to attend. Your commitment to a random idea is impressive to me and I appreciate your efforts more than you can imagine. I've included some photos of the event below, with almost all of these having been taken by Richard Jones, so thanks to him as well for documenting the event. Tim Ansell made some videos of the talks, and I'll put these online separately in the next day or two. Having asked attendees if they'd come to another BonkersCon, the answer was a resounding yes. So, I'm thinking mid-2017 is about the right timing, and you'll hear more details about that soon.

A Walk in the Woods

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 19, 2016
Post category:Book

I found this tale of Bill Bryson walking the Appalachian Trail (rather incompetently I must say) immensely entertaining. Well written, interesting, generally exaggerated, and leaving me with a desire to get out somewhere and walk some more. I'd strongly recommend this book to people who already care about bush walking, but have found other pursuits to occupy most of their spare time.

Leviathan Wakes

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 12, 2016
Post category:Book

I read this book based on the recommendation of Richard Jones, and its really really good. A little sci-fi, a little film noir, and very engaging. I also like that bad things happen to good people in the story -- its gritty and unclean enough to be believable. I don't want to ruin the book for anyone, but I really enjoyed this and have already ordered the sequels. Oh, and there's a Netflix series based off these books that I'll now have to watch too.

Technical Topics weekly update, week starting 31 October

Post author:mikal
Post published:November 2, 2016
Post category:Events Technical Topics TT December 2016

(This just got emailed out to registered attendees of Technical Topics). So, I went quiet for a while because I got busy with other things, but now its time to focus on getting Technical Topics [1] ready for action. There is a program of things people are currently talking about at this URL: http://wiki.madebymikal.com/index.php?title=Technical_Topics:December_2016 If people who are down for a talk can ensure that they are happy with their nominated timeslot, and have added at least some information to their linked wiki pages for each talk what would be cool. We also still have two full slots free, and some space for lightning talks if anyone else is interested in telling us what they're hacking on at the moment. I'll keep pinging people I think might have interesting things to talk about, but having other people suggest things would be cool too. Finally, it would be cool to have a few more people at the event. I'm not worried, but I figure the more the merrier, so if you haven't let your geeky friends know yet that would be cool too. Thanks, Michael 1: Or BonkersCon as some of my co-workers have named it.