Linux.conf.au 2015 – Day 3 – Session 2

EQNZ – crisis response, open source style – Brenda Wallace

  • Started with a Trigger warning and “fucker”
  • First thing posted – “I am okay” , one tweet, one facebook
  • State of Scial Media
    • Social media not as common, SMS king, not many smartphones
    • Google Buzz, twitter, Facebook
    • Multiple hashtags
  • Questions people asked on social media
  • Official info was under strain, websites down due to bad generators
  • Crisis Commons
  • Skype
    • Free
    • Multi-platform
    • Txt based
    • Battery Drain very bad
    • Bad internet in Chc hard to use, no mobile, message reply for minutes on join
  • Things pop up within an hour
    • Pirate Pad
    • Couch apps
    • Wikis
    • WordPress installs
  • Short code 4000 for non-urgent help live by 5pm
    • Volenteers processing the queue
  • All telcos agree to coordinate their social media effort
  • Civil defence didn’t have site ready and refused offers, people decided to do independantly
  • Ushahidi instance setup
    • Google setup people finder app
    • Moved into ec2 cluther
    • hackfest, including added mobile
    • Some other Ushidis, in the end newspaper sites enbedded
  • Council
    • chc council wordpress for info
    • Very slow and bad UI
    • Hit very hard, old information from the previous earthquake
    • staff under extreme pressure
  • Civil Defence
    • Official info only
    • Falls over
    • Caught by DDOS against another govt site
  • Our reliability
    • Never wen tdown
    • contact and reassured some authorities
    • After 24h . 78k page impressions
  • Skype
    • 100+ chatting. limitations
    • IRC used by some but many no common enough
    • Gap for something common. cross platform, easy to use
  • Hashtag
    • twitter to SMS notifications to add stuff to website
  • Maps were a new thing
    • None of the authorities knew them
  • Council and DHB websites did not work on mobile and were not updating
  • Government
    • Govt officers didn’t talk – except NZ Geospacial office
    • Meeting that some people attended
  • Wrap up after 3 weeks
    • Redirected website
    • Anonymous copy of database
  • Pragmatic
    • Used closed source where we had too (eg skype)
    • But easier with OS could quick to modify
    • Closed source people could install webserver, use git, etc. Hard to use contributions
  • Burned Bridges
    • Better jobs with Gov agencies
  • These days
    • Tablets
    • Would use EC2 again
    • phones have low power mode
    • more open street maps

 

collectd in dynamic environments – Florian Forster

  • Started collectd in 2005
  • Dynamic environments – Number and location of machines change frequently – VM or job management system
  • NOTE: I use collectd so my notes are a little sparse here cause I knew most of it already
  • Collects timeseries data, does one thing well. collectd.org
  • agent runs on each host, plugins mostly in C for lots of things or exec plug to run random stuff.
  • Read Plugins to get metrics from system metrics, applications, other weird stuff
  • Write plugs – Graphite, RRD, Reimann, MongoDB
  • Virtual machine Metrics
    • libvirt plugin
    • Various metrics, cpu, memory, swap, disk ops/bytes, network
    • GenericJMX plugin – connects to JVM. memory and garbage collection, threads
  • Network plugin
    • sends and receives metric
    • Effecient binary protocol. 50-100 byte UDP multicast/unicast protocol
    • crypto available
    • send, receive, forward packets
  • Aggregation
    • Often more useful for alerting
  • Aggregation plugin
    • Subscribes to metric
    • aggregates and forwards
    • Limitation, no state, eg medium, mean are missing
    • only metrics with one value
    • can be aggregated at any level
    • eg instead of each CPU then total usage of all your CPUS
  • Reimann
    • Lots of filters and functions
    • can aggregate, many otions
  • Bosum
    • Monitoring and alert language
  • Storage
    • Graphite
    • OpenTSDB based on hadoop
    • InfluxDB – understand collectd protocol native (and graphite).
    • Vaultaire ( no collectd integration but… )
  • New Dishboard – facette.io
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