Author: Josh
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ELK + EA — Silencing ElastAlert Alerts
Many shops are realizing the benefit of the ELK stack / Elastic Stack, and the great flexibility that it brings to an infrastructure in the form of centralized logging and reporting which has always been critical when troubleshooting difficult and/or distributed problems. Having many input options (via elastic beats) to choose from, and lots of…
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Adding git branch and aws profile to your bash prompt…
As a consultant who works in AWS for numerous clients, one of the most important things to keep track of is which AWS CLI profile am I currently on. To help clarify this, I’ve recently added the AWS profile to my bash prompt to remove all doubt. In addition, I’ve added a prompt for the…
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mysql2 gem version mis-match
When installing the simple bootstrap example app on osx Sierra (10.12.4) I received an error when trying to run ‘rails server’ after running bundle install when adding mysql2 as a Gemfile entry: > rails s /Users/$username/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.3/gems/bundler-1.14.6/lib/bundler/runtime.rb:94:in `rescue in block (2 levels) in require’: There was an error while trying to load the gem ‘mysql2’. (Bundler::GemRequireError)…
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systemd and varnish on Ubuntu 16.04
I recently had the opportunity to work on a Ubuntu 16.04 system with systemd and varnish. I’m not a huge fan of systemd as I’m not convinced that it’s solving any problems that I had with SysV init and it makes my work more difficult as it’s not as straight forward. The problem that I…
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ext4_dx_add_entry:2006: Directory index full!
I have rarely had a problem with ext4. One problem that I continue to have is with the directory index filling up. The first indicator will be a “no space left on device” from stdout when performing a filesystem operation, with both ‘df -h’ and ‘df -i’ showing plenty of space and inodes available. The…
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Logstash: mutate nested field
Ah, the ELK stack. It seems like everybody is using it now. Tons of data in and lightning fast searches. Yelp even created a monitoring solution that works pretty well. This is a solution for developers and data architects. It’s not quite right for the average systems professional as it’s missing some [monitoring] features. I’m…
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facter appends internal to my hostname!
One common problem that I see when working with clients with new puppet deployments in AWS is that their node specific hieradata is not properly populated based on the hostname. Most guides recommend setting the hiera hierarchy as follows: — :backends: – eyaml – yaml :hierarchy: – “node/%{::fqdn}” – common :yaml: :datadir: /etc/puppet/hieradata The problem…
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Throttling Requests with the Ruby aws-sdk
A common problem of late is throttling requests when using the ruby aws-sdk gem to access AWS services. Handling these exceptions is fairly trivial with a while loop like the following: retry_count = 0 retry_success = 0 while retry_success == 0 retry_success = 1 begin # # enter code to interact with AWS here #…
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Drone Delivery and Autonomous Vehicles
I am seeing more and more talk lately about autonomous vehicles and drone delivery, but not in the same sentence. I think that needs to change. The only way to make drone delivery feasible in areas that are not incredibly dense and near the warehouse(s) is to use an autonomous delivery vehicle with drones to…
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Book Review: Mastering Puppet Second Edition
Mastering Puppet – Second Edition was a book that I looked forward to reading. After finishing this book, it is clear that Thomas Uphill is not only experienced but a highly skilled professional in this field . Reading this book reminded me of 15 years ago when I began my IT career as a budding…