hypergeometric

Month: July 2012

  • Solr Upgrade Surprise and Using Kill To Debug It

    At work, we’ve recently upgraded to the latest and greatest stable version of Solr (3.6), and moved from using the dismax parser to the edismax parser. The initial performance of Solr was very poor in our environment, and we removed the initial set of search features we had planned to deploy trying to get the…

  • What I Wish Some Had Told Me About Writing Cron Jobs

    Much like Doc Brown and Marty McFly, cron and I go way back. It is without doubt one of thing single most valuable tools you can use in linux system management. Though what I’ve learned over the years is that it can be hard to write jobs that reliably produce the results I want. I…

  • 6 Phone Screen Questions for an Ops Candidate

    My company is hiring, and I’ve been thinking a lot more about what types of question are appropriate for a phone interview, but still give enough detail to lead me to a conclusion as to whether I think the person on the other end is competent. Having been on both sides of the table I…

  • Rally Cars and Redunancy: Understand Your Failure Boundaries

    I occasionally watch rally car racing, and if you haven’t seen it before its worth a watch. Guys drive small cars very fast down dirt roads, and while this is going on a passenger is reading driving notes to the driver. Occasionally these guys hit rocks, run off the road, and do all sorts of…

  • Two Helpful Data Concepts

    I’ve been batting around a couple terms while talking about various technical solutions for years, and I’ve found them useful while selecting and constructing technical solutions for managing data. They’ve helped me both build, and provide input on what I need from a technical solution. 1. Real-Timey-ness When considering solutions for your data needs, you…

  • Keep it Simple Sysadmin

    I’ve been thinking about what I hate about my configuration management system. I seem to spend a lot of time when I want to make a change looking at the various resources in chef, and sometimes I end up using providers like the ops code apache2 cookbook to manage enabling and disabling of modules. A…

  • Monitoring – The Challenge of Small Ops – Part 2

    So your building or have built a web service, you’ve got a lot of challenges a head. You’ve got to scale software and keep customers happy. Not surprisingly that likely involves keeping your web service up, and that typically starts by setting up some form of monitoring when something goes wrong. In a large organization…

  • Three First Pass Security Steps

    I’m no security expert, but in my experience these are three simple things you can do to avoid a security incident. 3. Fix Authentication Don’t allow users to log in to your systems just using passwords. Passwords are easy to setup and get running, but also are easily lost. For SSH use SSH keys at…

  • Monitoring Your Customers with Selenium and Nagios

    In a brief conversation with Noah Sussman at DevOps Days, when discussing the challenges of continious deployment for B2B services with SLAs, we got side tracked discussing using Selenium and Nagios in production. A few years back while working for a B2B company that was compensated by an attributable sales, I got on a phone…

  • The Challenge of Small Ops (Part 1)

    I missed a open session at DevOps days, and I’m really disappointed that I did after hearing feedback from one of the conference participant. He said many people in the session we’re advocating for eliminating operations in the small scale. I realize that the world is changing, and that operations teams need to adjust to…