I’ll be posting some updates from Linux.conf.au in Ballarat in the next few days. I arrived on Sunday but this is my first post. I’ll see if I do an out-of-order blog post on that later.
The keynote from Bruce Perens was really good. He talked a lot about the failure of open source to engage the public and policy makers. He also covered a bunch of cool hardware projects and cheap (and often open) small boards and other electronic products.
Smashing a square peg into a round hole – David Basden and Chris Collins
- Automation your automation.
- Anchor – Hosting provider, doing built solutions, non-standard requirements
- Puppet is one step, PXE & dbootstrap just another, hundreds of others
- A “simple” build used to take a day, down to 10 minutes
- instead of defining all steps define dependencies to get a “partial ordering”
- figure out what has to be done, in what steps, keep track of what has been done
- Lack of security in many queuing systems, bad agents can grab tasks they aren’t supposed to etc
- Outline of “Audience” job control system. Design goals and decisions
- Code on github.net/anchor
Extracting metrics from logs for realtime trending and alerting by Jamie Wilkinson
- passive system, query application about it’s metrics. However sometimes hard to parse
- However most apps log to system or other logs
- emtail – exporting modular tail
- plugins – on event X do Y – usually regex
- Metrics are values, times ( name, value, when, type (counter, gauge) , string, tag
- metrics are exported over a common protocol ( google protocol in G version, json in open source version )
- exported over http using json or CSV, sent to something slse to save and do something with
- Written in Go. Old version in python but too google specific
- 20 minutes talking about the source code (I browsed the web during this bit)
- I and a few others in the audience seemed to think this duplicated a lot of other tools with no obvious huge advantage over them. Bit of google NIH.
