Entries posted in October 2013

The tail end of this week was mostly spoiled by the discovery that libbeanstalkclient-ruby was not included in Wheezy.

Apparently it was removed because the maintainer had no time, and there were no reverse dependencies - #650308.

Debian maintainers really need to appreciate that no official dependencies doesn't mean a package is unused.

Last year I needed to redesign our companies monitoring software, because we ran out of options that scaled well. I came up with the (obvious) solution:

• Have a central queue containing jobs to process.
  • e.g. Run a ping-test on host1.example.com
  • e.g. Run an SSH-probe on host99.example.com
  • e.g. Fetch a web-page from https://example3.net/ and test it has some text or a given HTTP status code.
  • (About 15 different test-types are available).
• Have N workers each pull one job from the queue, execute it, and send the results somewhere.

I chose beanstalkd for my central queue precisely because it was packaged for Debian, had a client library I could use, and seemed to be a good fit. It was a good fit, a year on and we're still running around 5000 tests every minute with 10 workers.

The monitoring tool is called Custodian Custodian, and I think I've mentioned it before here and on the company blog.

It looks like we'll need to re-package the Ruby beanstalk client, and distribute it alongside our project now. That's not ideal, but also not a huge amount of work.

In summary? Debian you're awesome. But libraries shouldn't be removed unless it can't be helped, because you have more users than you know.

Tags: custodian, debian, ruby | 4 comments

After seven years working from home I've resigned from my position at Bytemark.

Why? A combination of wanting to do something different coupled with the desire to reclaim my second bedroom, which is currently tied up as an office.

Working in an office in the future will be weird ("You mean I have to get dressed every day?!") but hopefully not unduly burdonsome.

My two-year plan still remains in effect: Pay off this flat as soon as possible, then purchase another and rent this one out. Giving me some income of my own, which I will need.

The "five" year plan involves me quitting work, so that I can stay home and raise children. That makes sense because sometime next year I'll become the partner who earns the least amount of monies, and I'll also be the partner with the lowest upper-bound on salary potential (short of moving to London/similar which I've always ruled out).

Having rental income for myself means I'm not utterly dependant on other money, and all being well this place will be 100% paid off within 18 months.

(After that lots of saving will take place for a deposit for the second place. We did bid on a couple of places locally, which were outstanding, but it is perhaps for the best we didn't win them. No more looking at ESPC!)

Bytemark now becomes a company I recommend 100% for hosting in the UK. In the past I've always said nice things, but I've not strongly recommended them/us, because I'm too biased.

All my personal hosting, except for one virtual machine, will remain at Bytemark indefinitely. Lovely, flexible, and great.

(I have one outside guest for the purposes of diversification. That currently lives at Mythic Beasts.)

Tags: bytemark, flat, life, work | 7 comments

Today I'm recuperating, and almost back to full health.

Unfortunately I made the mistake of online-shopping, oops.

Good job I stopped myself from registaring all the domains, but I did get two that I liked: spare.io & edinburgh.io.

I've updated my database to record them, but I wonder what do other people use to remind them about expiration dates of domains, SSL-certificates, & etc?

I googled and didn't find a definitive free/paid service, but it seems like something lots of people need to be reminded about..

Maybe people just rely on registrars sending strident emails. (Of course the redemption period for domains make it reasonably safe to forget for a day or two, until your customers complain and your emails start to bounce..)

Tags: expiration, ssl, todo | 8 comments