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Ramblings About IT Philosophy
Recently, I’ve been thinking that I should write down some of my views on IT. I don’t believe in a black & white world, but in one that’s full of realities, tradeoffs, and compromises. I’ve worked with people who refuse to (or are unable to) recognize that and spend energy trying to dictate instead of collaborate, typically to the detriment of themselves and frustration of everyone around them. IT exists to support and enable an organization, and should not be an end unto itself.
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Blog software du jour - Hugo
A few years ago, I’d migrated from Wordpress to a static site generator for my blog as part of migrating off a shared web host to a VPS. I’d started with Octopress since it had been getting a fair bit of buzz at the time. I was pretty happy with the rendered output, but the underlying software had its flaws. The author (Brandon Mathis) highlighted some of those flaws in his post on the road to Octopress 3.
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Distributed Monoliths
As part of developing RESTful HTTP APIs at work, there’s been a lot of discussion over the “best” way to architect/implement everything. To avoid relying strictly on my own instincts and relearning mistakes that many others have already learned from, I’ve been reading O’Reilly’s Building Microservices. I haven’t finished it yet, but have gotten a lot out of what I’ve read so far (and been pleased to see that my instincts have been largely supported by someone who’s experienced implementing such systems).
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Because I'm a Princess!
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Odd request from someone at the Public Health Foundation
Recently, someone from the Public Health Foundation contacted me because they found a blog post I had from back in 2005, specifically Corporate/Government Parodies on the Web. They asked if I’d like to update the broken reference to mypyramid.gov (which no longer exists) in favor of a new government nutrition website. Having gone back and re-read the post for context, I initially thought I’d just ignore it for the moment since I figured it had to be some automated webcrawler of sending emails to DNS contacts for any hits referencing the old .gov URL. But they actually sent me a followup email, so I thought I might go ahead and make some updates.
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First big project went public!
It’s been busy week, but I feel I’ve at least got something to show for it. The first big project I’ve worked on has gone public at ITEXPO East 2015 and I can actually talk about it now. The new service is called Switchvox Rescue.
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New job adventures
About six months ago, I took a new job and left the position I’d held at the Alabama Supercomputer Center for roughly seven years. I’ve struggled whether I should write a post about why I chose to leave my old job or focus on the positive and talk about my new job. If you’re curious, this article at the Washington Business Journal covers some of the shenanigans that motivated me to leave my job with CSC.
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VPS provider hopping
So a while back I started looking at alternative VPS hosting providers. I was impressed by the service Linode provided, but started wondering if I’d get better bang for my buck going elsewhere. At the time, I was paying $20 / month for their smallest Xen VPS or $25 / month if I wanted their backup service. My hosting needs were modest, especially since I’d migrated just about everything from dynamic stuff with a DB backend to primarily serving static content. So I could really get away with something with leaner. I shied away from the extremely cheap OpenVZ providers, and tried a couple of different KVM VPS providers before I found one that offered a balance of cost, reliability, and performance.
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NUMA and torque/Moab
TL;DR Support for NUMA systems in torque/Moab breaks existing means of specifying shared memory jobs and limits scheduling flexibility in heterogeneous compute environments.
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Btrfs production experiences
My experience is based on SUSE SLES 11 SP1/SP2 with a stock kernel, so YMMV if you’re running a newer mainline kernel without all the backports.
I tested on two Supermicro systems. One with an LSI HBA card with 22x 2TB enterprise SATA drives (originally purchased to run OpenSolaris/ZFS). Second has an Adaptec hardware RAID controller with 36x 2TB enterprise SATA drives. Some of the data loss and stability issues I experienced may be attributed to later discovering the “enterprise” drives used in the first system turned out to be less RAID-friendly than the manufacturer claimed, eventually leading to them to replace ALL of my drives with a different model.
Btrfs was a preview in SLES SP1 and is “supported” in SP2 but with major restrictions if you wanted a supported configuration. Support in SP2 requires that you create btrfs filesystems using Yast and live with the limited options it allows. I’m guessing what you can do via Yast is the subset of features they tested enough to be willing to try and support. I tried using Yast to set up btrfs on one of our systems, but found their constraints too limiting given my use case and the organization I’d settled on in the SP1 days.
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