Entries posted in August 2017

So I did start a project, to write a puppet-dashboard, it is functionally complete, but the next step is to allow me to raise alerts based on failing runs of puppet - in real-time.

(i.e. Now that I have a dashboard I wish to not use it. I want to be alerted to failures, without having to remember to go look for them. Something puppet-dashboard can't do ..)

• github link
• Sample Installation
  • This might go away in the future.

In other news a while back I slipped in a casual note about having a brain scan done, here in sunny Helsinki.

One of the cool things about that experience, in addition to being told I wasn't going to drop dead that particular day, was that the radiologist told me that I could pay €25 to get a copy of my brain data in DICOM format.

I've not yet played with this very much, but I couldn't resist a brief animation:

• See my brain.
  • Not the best quality, or the best detail, but damn. It is my brain.
  • I shall do better with more experimentation I think.
  • After I posted it my wife, a doctor, corrected me: That wasn't a gif of my brain, instead it was a gif of my skull. D'oh!

Tags: health, puppet, puppet-dashboard | No comments

I used to think I was a programmer who did "sysadmin-stuff". Nowadays I interact with too many real programmers to believe that.

Or rather I can code/program/develop, but I'm not often as good as I could be. These days I'm getting more consistent with writing tests, and I like it when things are thoroughly planned and developed. But too often if I'm busy, or distracted, I think to myself "Hrm .. compiles? Probably done. Oops. Bug, you say?"

I was going to write about working with golang today. The go language is minimal and quite neat. I like the toolset:

• go fmt
  • Making everything consistent.
• go test
  • Making testing an obvious and natural part of libraries and code.
  • My personal puppet dashboard went from 0% code-coverage to ~60% coverage in the space of a few hours.

Instead I think today I'm going to write about something else. Since having a child a lot of my life is different. Routine becomes something that is essential, as is planning and scheduling.

So an average week-day goes something like this:

• 6:00AM
  • Wake up (naturally).
• 7:00AM
  • Wake up Oiva and play with him for 45 minutes.
• 7:45AM
  • Prepare breakfast for my wife, and wake her up, then play with Oiva for another 15 minutes while she eats.
• 8:00AM
  • Take tram to office.
• 8:30AM
  • Make coffee, make a rough plan for the day.
• 9:00AM
  • Work, until lunchtime which might be 1pm, 2pm, or even 3pm.
• 5:00PM
  • Leave work, and take bus home.
  • Yes I go to work via tram, but come back via bus. There are reasons.
• 5:40PM
  • Arrive home, and relax in peace for 20 minutes.
• 6:00PM-7:00PM
  • Take Oiva for a walk, stop en route to relax in a hammock for 30 minutes reading a book.
• 7:00-7:20PM
  • Feed Oiva his evening meal.
• 7:30PM
  • Give Oiva his bath, then pass him over to my wife to put him to bed.
• 7:30PM - 8:00pm
  • Relax
• 8:00PM - 10:00PM
  • Deal with Oiva waking up, making noises, or being unsettled.
  • Try to spend quality time with my wife, watch TV, read a book, do some coding, etc.
• 10:00PM ~ 11:30PM
  • Go to bed.

In short I'm responsible for Oiva from 6ish-8ish in the morning, then from 6PM-10PM (with a little break while he's put to bed.) There are some exceptions to this routine - for example I work from home on Monday/Friday afternoons, and Monday evenings he goes to his swimming classes. But most working-days are the same.

Weekends are a bit different. There I tend to take him 6AM-8AM, then 1PM-10PM with a few breaks for tea, and bed. At the moment we're starting to reach the peak-party time of year, which means weekends often involve negotiation(s) about which parent is having a party, and which parent is either leaving early, or not going out at all.

Today I have him all day, and it's awesome. He's just learned to say "Daddy" which makes any stress, angst or unpleasantness utterly worthwhile.

Tags: golang, personal | 1 comment

I recently upgraded a bunch of systems from Jessie to Stretch, and as a result of that one of my hosts has started showing me a lot of noise in an hourly cron-email:

Command line is not complete. Try option "help"

I've been ignoring these emails for the past while, but today I sat down to track down the source. It was obviously coming from facter, the system that puppet uses to gather information about hosts.

Running facter -debug made that apparent:

 root@smaug ~ # facter --debug
 Found no suitable resolves of 1 for ec2_metadata
 value for ec2_metadata is still nil
 value for netmask_git is still nil
 value for ipaddress6_lo is still nil
 value for macaddress_lo is still nil
 value for ipaddress_master is still nil
 value for ipaddress6_master is still nil
 Command line is not complete. Try option "help"
 value for netmask_master is still nil
 value for ipaddress_skx_mail is still nil
 ..

There we see the issue, and it is obviously relating to our master interface.

To cut a long-story short /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/facter/util/ip.rb contains some code which eventually runs this:

 ip link show $interface

That works on all other interfaces I have:

  $ ip link show git
  6: git: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000

But not on master:

  $ ip link show master
  Command line is not complete. Try option "help"

I ninja-edited the code from this:

  ethbond = regex.match(%x{/sbin/ip link show '#{interface}'})

to:

  ethbond = regex.match(%x{/sbin/ip link show dev '#{interface}'})

And suddenly puppet-runs without any errors. I'm not 100% sure if this is a bug bug, but it is something of a surprise anyway.

This host runs KVM guests, one of the guests is a puppet-master, with a local name master. Hence the name of the interface. Similarly the interface git is associated with the KVM guest behind git.steve.org.uk.

Tags: puppet | 5 comments