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Entries tagged graphite

Changing my stack ..

22 February 2014 21:50

For the past few years I've hosted all my websites in a "special" way:

  • Each website runs under its own UID.
  • Each website runs a local thttpd / webserver.
  • Each server binds to localhost, on a high-port.
    • My recipe is that the port of the webserver for user "foo" is "$(id -u foo)".
  • On the front-end I have a proxy to route connections to the appropriate back-end, based on the Host header.

The webserver I chose initially was thttpd, which gained points because it was small, auditable, and simple to launch. Something like this was my recipe:

#!/bin/sh
exec thttpd -D -C /srv/steve.org.uk/thttpd.conf

Unfortunately thttpd suffers from a few omissions, most notably it doesn't support either "Keep-Alive", or "Compression" (i.e. gzip/deflate), so it would always be slower than I wanted.

On the plus side it was simple to use, supported CGI scripts, and served me well once I'd patched it to support X-Forwarded-For for IPv6 connections.

Recently I setup a server optimization site and was a little disappointed that the site itself scored poorly on Google's page-speed test. So I removed thttpd for that site, and replacing it with nginx. The end result was that the site scored 98/100 on Google's page-speed test. Progress. Unfortunately I couldn't do that globally because nginx doesn't support old-school plain CGI scripts.

So last night I removed both nginx and thttpd, and now every site on my box is hosted using lighttpd.

There weren't too many differences in the setup, though I had to add some rules to add caching for *.css, etc, and some of my code needed updating.

Beyond that today I've setup a dedicated docker host - which allows me to easily spin up containers. Currently I've got graphite monitoring for my random hosts, and a wordpress guest for plugin development/testing.

Now to go back to reading Off to be the wizard .. - not as good as Rick Cook's wizardry series (which got less good as time went on, but started off strongly), but still entertaining.

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Two minor toys ..

23 February 2014 21:50

Two minor things:

graphite_send

A simple shell-script to submit metrics to a graphite server, extensible via local plugins, but covers the obvious metrics by default.

Metrics are submitted via simple calls to netcat.

Trivial, but much more lightweight than collectd and similar.

HTML::Emoji

A perl module for converting HTML like "<p>:smile:</p>" into something graphical.

This was written for my markdown sharing site, but is pretty fun.

The konami-code page demonstrates usage.

(This parses the HTML so it won't transform attributes, ids, or anything that isn't in the "text" part of any HTML input.)

The graphite sending script is perhaps the most useful, but at the same time it feels too small to be a package of its own. I'm tempted to bundle it up into my sysadmin-util collection, but I can't quite decide if it belongs there either.

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