Entries posted in January 2014

Recently I wrote about docker, after a brief diversion into using runit for service management, I then wrote about it some more.

I'm currently setting up a new PXE-boot environment which uses docker for serving DHCP and TFTPD, which is my first "real" usage of any note. It is fun, although I now discover I'm not alone in using docker for this purpose.

Otherwise life is good, and my blog-spam detection service recently broke through the 11 million-rejected-comment barrier. The Wordpress Plugin is seeing a fair amount of use, which is encouraging - but more reviews would be nice ;)

I could write about work, I've not done that since changing job, but I'm waiting for something disruptive to happen first..

ObQuote: Dune. (film)

Tags: blogspam, docker, work | No comments

In November I resigned from Bytemark.

In December I started working for a local company, here in Edinburgh, in a real office (rather than working from home).

Unfortunately today I resigned from that new job, meaning I'm currently unemployed.

I plan to take a 1-2 week vacation, then look for another job as a matter of some urgency. (I can live off savings for the next half-year, or so, if I need to, but I'd go crazy if I had nothing to do for that long.)

It is unfortunate to have to resign from a new job after only five-six weeks, but much more honest to do so now than pretend everything was OK and do it at the point I'd passed my probationary period (of three months).

The people were lovely, the office was lovely, the coffee machine was excellent, the work was interesting, but the nature of a large corporate job with the associated bureaucracy made it a less good fit for me than it looked on paper.

I shall pretend that the next week or two of down-time is our honeymoon ;)

Tags: life, work | 2 comments

Having decided to take a fortnight off, between looking for a new job, I assumed I'd spend a while coding.

Happily my wife, who is a (medical) doctor, has been home recently so we've got to spend time together instead.

I'm currently pondering projects which will be small enough to be complete in a week, but large enough to be useful. Thus far I've just reimplemented RSS -> chat which I liked a lot at Bytemark.

I have my own chat-server setup, which doesn't have any users but myself. Instead it has a bunch of rooms setup, and different rooms get different messages.

I've now created a new "RSS" room, and a bunch of RSS feeds get announced there when new posts appear. It's a useful thing if you like following feeds, and happen to have a chat-room setup.

I use Prosody as my chat-server, and I use my http2xmpp code to implement a simple HTTP-POST to XMPP broadcast mechanism.

The new script is included as examples/rss-announcer and just polls RSS feeds - URLs which haven't been broadcast previously are posted to the HTTP-server, and thus get injected into the chatroom. A little convoluted, but simple to understand.

This time round I'm using Redis to keep track of which URLs have been seen already.

Beyond that I've been doing a bit of work for friends, and have recently setup an nginx server which will handle 3000+ simultaneous connections. Not too bad, but I'm sure we can make it do better - another server running on BigV which is nice to see :)

I'll be handling a few Squeeze -> Wheezy upgrades in the next week too, setting up backups, and doing some other related "consultation".

If I thought there was a big enough market locally I might consider doing that full-time, but I suspect that relying upon random work wouldn't work long-term.

Tags: docker, http2xmpp, redis | 2 comments

Just to recap my life since December:

I had worked with Bytemark for seven years and left for reasons which made sense. I started working for "big corp" with a job that on-paper sounded good, but ultimately turned out to be a poor fit for my tastes.

I spent a month trying to decide "Is this bad, or is this just not what I'm used to?", because I was aware that there would obviously be big differences as well as little ones.

At the point I realized some of the niggles could be fixed but most couldn't then I resigned, rather than prolong the initial probationary training period - because I knew I wouldn't stay, and it seemed unfair and misleading to stay for the full duration of the probationary period knowing full well I'd leave the moment it concluded - and the notice period switched from seven days to one month.

A couple of people were kind enough to get in touch and discuss potential offers, both locally, remotely in the UK, and from abroad (the latter surprised me, but pleased me too).

I spent a couple of days "contracting", by which I really mean doing a few favours for friends, some of whom paid me in Amazon vouchers, and some of whom paid me in beer.

e.g. I tweaked the upcoming death Knight site to handle 3000 simultaneous HTTP connections, then I upgraded some servers from Squeeze to Wheezy for some other folk.

That aside I've largely been idle for about 10 days and have now picked the company to work for - so I'm going to be a contractor with a day-rate for an American firm for the next couple of months. If that goes well then I'll become a full-time employee, hopefully.

Tags: life, random, work | 2 comments

Now it is time for me to go silent for a while, and not talk about jobs, unemployment, or puppies.

This past week has also been full of software releases. Some of the public ones include:

Lumail - My console mail client, with integrated lua scripting

After three months of slow work I've issued a new release today. This release features several bugfixes for dealing with malformed MIME messages, and similar fun.

The core set of lua primitives hasn't changed very much for a good six months now, which means I guess rightly what kind of things would be useful.

Templer - My perl-based static-site generator.

This was recently updated to add two new plugins to the core:

• A redis plugin to allow you to set variables to values retrieved from redis.
• An RSS plugin to allow you to inline (remote) RSS feeds into your static HTML. Useful for building news-pages, etc.

Although there are a million static-site generators I still think mine has value, and I am consistently using it.

Months ago when I said "I'm writing a mail-client", all I need to do is handle three cases:

• Display a list of folders.
• Display index of messages.
• Display a single message.

Then some new things like "Compose", "Reply", "Forward", I remember somebody commented along the lines of "Yeah, but MIME will make you hate your life" I laughed. Now I know better. Still it works, it works well, and I'm glad I did it.

Tags: lua, lumail, software, templer | 2 comments

It is unfortunate that I've been exposed to several companies that all need the same kind of problems solving, again and again:

• Imaging systems. Quickly.
• Configuring MySQL & Postgres replication and fail-over.
• Configuring local users.
• Solving the problem of distributing usernames/passwords to 500+ client-systems within a team.

A lot of these are solved problems, yet they seem to keep cropping up. I guess the fact I've done some of these things more than once means I'm the local-expert, so that's why I get asked. But still..

There was a time when I thought my Debian Administration site would help solve these kind of problems; that writing documentation would encourage people to do things properly. Certainly it has helped me, and some other people are greatful, but it didn't do enough to help.

I'm not sure if the problem is that my documentation is a little ideosyncratic, isn't good enough, or isn't reaching the right kind of people. I suspect a combination of that and scale - You can't walk somebody though the idea of setting up a ten-node database-cluster, they need to suffer, they need to break things, they need to sweat on Christmas Day, at 5AM, as everything goes to hell. Then the next time they'll do it properly.

I'd love to take the time to write out recipes in Salt, Ansible, Puppet, Chef, CFengine, Slaughter, whatever, and support them.

Remote. Automated. System management.

Throw in monitoring of metrics, security fixes, and reporting and there's probably a valuable service there.

It probably can't happen though, for three main reasons:

• The people that need it don't know they need it. They're fighting fires, they know it is important and they will fix things "soon", but other work takes priority.
• The people that are tempted will baulk at the idea of unknown code from an external source running on their system(s).
• Companies managed by one sysadmin will wonder why they need more help, because "everything is working, right?".

I did recently write some policies for setting up a two-node Master-Slave MySQL setup, with reporting, monitoring, and custom SMS-based alerts. I guess I'm wondering if I can be cheeky and sell the same work twice. ;)

Tags: system administration | 9 comments

Today I am mostly in my bed suffering from "the plague".

Between naps I've worked on a new site a little:

• http://tweaked.io
  • Simple guides to optimizing particular services and servers.

Hopefully this will become updated, contributions welcome, and be useful to the world.

(Source available on github.)

Tags: dns, kernel, nginx, tweaked.io | 2 comments