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New job!

Jeff November 8, 2011 Sysadmin 1

The three of you who have been following this blog for awhile have probably noticed that around February of this year, the number of topics I’ve blogged about has dropped pretty significantly. That’s because I left my jack-of-all-trades systems engineer job to take a position as a systems integration lead with Time Inc., a position dealing primarily with the difficult tasks of systems automation and configuration management.

While I love the job, and have a great deal of fondness for the people I work with, I do have to say that the amount of new technology I’ve gotten exposure to has been fairly limited. Though I’ve learned a lot about how a really well-oiled machine runs things, most of my technical posts have been about the somewhat generic subjects of Puppet and Linux, and they haven’t been as varied in scope or dimension as I’d really like.

However, I’ve just accepted a position as Systems and Storage Manager for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where I expect to be spending a lot more time working with the open-source community and working with a team to develop clever solutions to the problems faced by many cash-constrained IT organizations. Being that we have a mission to better the world through scientific research, what better place to contribute to open-source?

(CSHL has a long and storied history of contributions to open-source software, likely dating back even further than Lincoln Stein’s still-used CGI.pm CPAN module).

Expect a lot more good stuff on this blog towards the end of the year as I get to finish up several things I never thought I’d have a chance to (IBM SAN data recovery, I’m looking at you).

Repo updates aplenty

Jeff November 7, 2011 Repo 0

I’ve just pushed a pile of important updates into the holyhandgrenade repo. Here’s a quick rundown of the most important changes:

-thirdparty repo

I’ve added another repository, holyhandgrenade-thirdparty, in which I redistribute rebuilds from other people’s SRPMs in an attempt to cut down on the amount of unnecessary dependencies. In particular, I’m trying to kill all the dependencies on the RBEL repo, which I’ve become increasingly unhappy with on account of them doing everything totally differently from Fedora upstream (shit, there’s unmodified rebuilds of openSUSE packages in there!)

I could probably push most of this stuff into the main repo, but I don’t want to seem like I’m taking authorship credit away from some people who really deserve it, like T.C. Hollingsworth who has put a ton of work into his packages in the Node.JS ecosystem. Since he hasn’t provided builds for RHEL 6, I have.

Moving right along.

Node.JS packages

I’ve started keeping a large supply of Node.JS packages supporting Etsy’s statsd and some other endeavors. As it stands, it’s more than enough to support Node.JS standalone, but not enough to daemonize it the de facto standard way (the Forever library). Stay tuned, as this is where I’ll be focusing most of my packaging attention in the next few weeks.

Many of these are in -thirdparty, but a large number that I’m writing will start to make their way into the main -stable and -testing repos.

More statsd and Graphite goodness

I’ve added a bunch of other statsd/Graphite-related packages, specifically:

  • collectd-carbon (collectd Python plugin to export statistics to Graphite)
  • collectd-graphite (collectd Perl plugin to export statistics for Python)
  • python-statsd (synchronous statsd client for Python)
  • python-gstatsd (asynchronous/Twisted statsd client/server for Python)

Additionally, the Graphite packages (carbon, whisper, and graphite-web) received significant updates.

A pure-C implementation of statsd will be pushed as soon as I get around to checking it out.

RHEL/CentOS init scripts for Carbon

Jeff November 7, 2011 Repo, Sysadmin 0

As part of the recent set of updates I’m pushing to the holyhandgrenade-testing repo, I pushed some updated Graphite packages which contain three init scripts for Carbon:

  • carbon-aggregator
  • carbon-cache
  • carbon-relay

As before, I’m making a special post to draw search engine attention to these in case they end up being useful for anyone not using my packages. As usual, you can find these scripts on GitHub:

Note: These are specific to my Graphite packages, which means they specify carbon-{aggregator,cache,relay}.py files in /usr/bin instead of /opt/graphite. If you are using the default /opt/graphite hierarchy, you must change the $exec variables in the scripts.

Happy graphing!