RT has its own internal accounting & tracking system for logging activity, but I was interested in even more granular stuff, like seeing who looked at which tickets. I figured it wouldn’t be that hard to log this in Apache. Well, I was kind of right, in that it wasn’t “hard,” but it took me a long time to find the right place to do it. I did finally get it though.
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A few people have emailed me asking me to integrate the perl code snippet into I wrote to strip illegal headers when sending email via Amazon SES into something actually usable. I’ve done so! I haven’t really tested this beyond sending some test emails, but here it is. Use this at your own risk, I make no warranty, blah blah blah.
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In a recent “debate” with a friend, I looked for historical data about the US public debt. I found Google Public Data, which has info about the annual budget deficit/surplus, but apparently (oddly) doesn’t have the debt. Odd because this info is available on the Treasury website.
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Having migrated our DB to a new machine, I was left with a pretty good machine unused. I decided to rebuild it and try out Postgres 9.0.
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fioWith the old database phased out, I figured this was a good time to benchmark IO on it before either repurposing it or mothballing it. In the past I’ve used dd for elementary sequential read/write testing, but I recently found fio which is much more versatile. Apparently developed by FusionIO, fio lets you control concurrency, blocksize and many other parameters and reports lots more data, most notably IOPS.
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MongoDB has log rotation functionality built in, but since I run CentOS I like to have everything managed through logrotate. The 10gen RPM I installed doesn’t have a logrotate script, so I wrote one. Create file /etc/logrotate.d/mongod:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 | /var/log/mongo/mongod.log { daily rotate 30 compress dateext missingok notifempty sharedscripts postrotate /bin/kill -SIGUSR1 `cat /var/lib/mongo/mongod.lock 2> /dev/null` 2> /dev/null || true endscript } |
logrotate runs at 4 AM daily by default (via the script in /etc/cron.daily/logrotate). The file above rotates the mongod.log file daily, retaining 30 days of files, appending the date to each one after rotation (rather than the “.1″ or “.2″ suffix) and then gzipping it.
After reading up on the new VMware licensing&pricing model I understand the uproar. Limiting vRAM is a reasonable constraint, but 32GB per socket for Enterprise? 48 GB for “Enterprise Plus”? If you have a dual CPU server with 144 GB (easily configurable last year), with 4.1 you’d only need 2 enterprise licenses to use all 144 GB, since in 4.1 an “Enterprise” license covered 1 CPU (up to 6 cores) and up to 256 GB memory on the host.
But with 5.0 you’ll either have to buy 5 Enterprise licenses (160 GB) or 3 Enterprise Plus licenses (144 GB) just to use the full 144 GB. I guess VMware has done away with memory overcommit as a selling point? They used to tell us it was recommended to go up to 2:1 so we could safely put ~140 GB of VMs on a 72 GB machine – with the new model that’s completely gone.
To put it in monetary terms, on the machine with 144 GB ram from above, the cost for 4.1 would be $2875 * 2 = $5750. To stick with Enterprise it would be $2875 * 5 = $14,375, or $3495 * 3 = $10,485. A gigantic price jump. I haven’t read up on any features of vSphere 5, but I don’t think any feature can make up for at minimum nearly doubling the cost, with loss of a major selling point (memory overcommit). I mean, you can still overcommit as long as you’re willing to pay for the overcommitted memory. Also, the above numbers are per-host, so if you’ve got a 5-host cluster you’re looking at a $25,000 price hike.
VMWare has long been one of my favorite products, but this is making me consider alternatives. Almost 100% of the feedback I’ve read about this change has been negative. Seems like a huge mistake on VMware’s part.
I seem to have what may be an irrational dislike for differential backups in general. No matter what system I’m backing up, I feel far more confident in doing complete backups than differential ones. The significant exception to this is rsync, but even rsync does “full” backups of the files that have changed. Even so, I usually add the -W flag to rsync so it moves the entire file if it’s been modified. I guess I just like knowing there’s a single file that contains the entire database rather than having to restore a huge file and then replay a bunch of differential files in sequence.
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