NetHui 2015 – InTac morning

Introduction – Dean Pemberton, InternetNZ

Dean was going to do an intro but got cock-blocked by some guy in a High-Vis vest.

The People Factor: what users want – Paul Brislen, ex-CEO of TUANZ

  • Working from home since 1999, 30kb/s at first. Made it work
  • Currently has 10Mb/s shared with busy family, often congested, not using much TV yet
  • Television driving demand.
  • Some infrastructure showing the strain
  • Southern cross replacement will be via Sydney. A couple of thousand km in the wrong direction when going to the US
  • Rural broadband still to deliver on the promise, no uptake stats, not great service level
  • Internet access critical path for economic development. lack of political will
  • Dean got to do his intro talk now.
  • Will Internet be priced on peak usage? A: Already offpeak discounts, some ISPs manage home/biz customer ratio to keep traffic balanced
  • Average usage per customer is 5Mb/s for ISP with streaming orientated ISP (acct sold with device).
  • 60% of International traffic going to Aus (to CDNS)
  • Consumers don’t accept buffering, high quality video (bitrate and production quality). Want TV to just-work.
  • NZ doesn’t want to be a “rural” level of internet access, equiv to a farm in more connected countries
  • Could multicast work for live events like sport?
  • Hard to get overage to work to work when people leave TV on all day
  • Plenty of people in Auckland not getting UFB till 2017 (or later)

The connected home and the Internet of Things – Amber Craig, ANZ

  • At top of Hype cycle
  • Has home Switches on Wemo (have to get upgraded)
  • Lots of devices generating a lot of data
  • Video Blogging – 10GB of raw data, 1GB of finished for just 5 minutes. Uploading to shared drives, sending back and forth through multiple edits
  • Network capacity if probably not much for IoT compared to video, but home will be a source of a lot more uploads
  • With IPv6 maybe less NAT, harder to manage (since people are not used to it).
  • Whose responsibility is it to ensure that Internet works in every room
  • Building standards, what are customers, government, ISP each prepared to pay for?
  • What about medical dependency people who need Internet. A lot of this goes over GSM since that is more “reliable”

Lightbox – content delivery in New Zealand – Kym Nyblock, Chief Executive of Lightbox

  • Lightbox is part of Spark ventures, morepork, skinny, bigpipe
  • Lighbox – On line TV service, $12.99/month thousands of hours of online content
  • 40% of US household have SVOD, but pay-TV only down 25%
  • Many providers around the world, multiple providers in many countries. Youtube also bit player in the corner
  • SVOD have some impact on piracy, especially those who only pirate cause they want content same day as programme airs in the US
  • Lots of screens now in the house, TV not only viewed on TVs
  • Lightbox challenges
    • Rights issues, lots of competition with other providers, some with fuzzy launch dates
    • NZ Internet not too bad
    • Had to work within an existing company
  • Existing providers
    • Sky – 850k homes, announced own product, has most sports
    • Netflix – approx 30k homes, coming to NZ soon
  • From Biz plan to launch in 12 months
  • Marketing job to be very simple – “Grandma Rule” ( can be explained to Grandma, used by her)
  • Express service delivers content right after views in the US. Lots of views for the episodes that are brand new. One new episode can be 10% of days total views
  • Very agile company, plans changed a lot.
  • Future
    • Customers will have several providers and change often
    • Multiple providers in the market, more to come
    • Premium and exclusive content will drive, simple interface will keep it
    • Rights issues are a problem but locked into the studio system
    • Try to “grow the category”, majority on consumers still using linear, scheduled TV
    • Try to address local rights ownership. This is the bit where they dug at US based providers and people using them.
    • Working on a Sports offering
    • and then she showed a Lightbox ad 🙁
    • Question costs of other ISPs of getting good lightbox due to charges from Spark-Wholesale for bandwidth exchanged. Not really answered

Quickflix – another view of content delivery in New Zealand – Paddy Buckley, MD of Quickflix NZ

  • 1st service to launch in March 2012
  • Subscription service for movies and TV shows and Standalone pay-per-view service for new-release movies and some TV shows
  • Across lots of devices, Smart TVs, phones, computers, games consoles, tablets, tivo, chromecast. No Linux Client 🙁
  • Just 15% of views via the website now
  • Content: New release movies, subscriptions content movies, TV shows
  • Uses Akamai for delivery. Hosting Centers in Sydney and Perth. AWS/Azure
  • Unwritten 5 second rule. Content should play within 5 seconds of pressing play
  • The future
    • Multiple Models, Not just SVOD, eg TVOD, AVOD, EVOD, EST
    • More fibre, fast home wifi and better hardware
    • VOD content getting nearer to the viewer. HbbTV combines broadcast and on-demand being done by freeview
    • Android TV
    • Viewing levels to increase (volume and frequency), people will pick and mix between providers
    • Aiming at 50% of households, 1 million is quite a lots for any scale.
  • Coming soon
    • 1080p/4K , 5.1 surround sound
    • Fewer device limits. All services and all devices
    • More streams
    • Changing release windows
    • Live streaming
    • PPV options to compliment
    • Download now, view later
  • What we need from ISPs
    • Significant bandwidth
    • Mooorrreee bandwidth
    • People will change ISPs if the ISP can’t provide the level of service
    • Netflix is naming and shaming. Netflix best/worst list
  • Prediction that NZ could hit 50% SVOD within a couple of years
  • Asked if they will be going broke in next few months. Says he’s done deal with Presto in Aus and will ease funding problems but business as normal in the NZ
  • SVOD has evolved from back-catalog TV shows a few years ago to first-run now. Will probably keep going forward with individual shows being provider-exclusive for now, especially since services are fairly low cost per month
  • A few questions about subtitles. Usually available (although can cost extra) but not good support with end devices to turn on/off .
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Feeds I follow: Citylab, Commitstrip, MKBHD, Offsetting Bahaviour

I thought I’d list of the feeds/blogs/sites I currently follow. Mostly I do this via RSS using Newsblur.

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Reading the Lord of the Rings aloud

The reading project that I am working on is a re-read of the Lord of the Rings. I’ve read the book/trilogy around a The_Lord_of_the_Rings_Trilogydozen times over the years but the two main differences this time are that I am reading it aloud and that I am consulting a couple of commentaries as I go. The references works I am using are The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion and the The Lord of the Rings Reread series by Kate Nepveu. The Companion is a fairly large book (860 pages) that follows the text page by page and gives explanations for words, characters and the history/development of the text. These can range from a simple definition to a couple of pages on a specific topic or character. The reread has a quick synopsis at the start of the article for each chapter and then some commentary by Kate followed by some comments from her readers (which I usually only quickly skim).

I started my read-aloud on February 15th 2015 and I am now ( April 7th ) just past the half-way point ( I completed The Fellowship of the Ring on March 27th) . My process is to read the text for 30-60 minutes ( I’m reading the three-book 1979 3rd edition paperback edition, which amusingly has various errors that the Reader’s Companion points out as I go) which gets me though 5-10 pages. I read aloud everything on the page including chapter titles, songs, non-English words and footnotes. A few times I have checked the correct pronunciation of words ( Eomer is one ) but otherwise I try not to get distracted. Once I finish for the session I open the Reader’s Companion and check the entries for the pages I have just read and at the end of each chapter ( chapters are usually around 20-30 pages) I have a look at Kate’s blog entry. I try an read most days and sometimes do extras on weekends.

One thing I really need to say is that I really am enjoying the whole thing. I love the book (like I said I’ve read it over a dozen times) and reading it aloud makes the experience even better. The main difference is that I do not skip over words/sentences/paragraphs which tends to happen when I read normally. So I don’t miss phrases like the description of Lake Hithoel:

The sun, already long fallen from the noon, was shining in a windy sky. The pent waters spread out into a long oval lake, pale Nen Hithoel, fenced by steep grey hills whose sides were clad with trees. At the far southern end rose three peaks. The midmost stood somewhat forward from the others and sundered from them, an island in the waters, about which the flowing River flung pale shimmering arms. Distant but deep there came up on the wind a roaring sound like the roll of thunder heard far away.

LOTR_Readers_Companion
Nor do I skip the other little details that are easy to miss, like Grishnakh and his Mordor Orcs leaving the rest of the group for a couple of days on the plains of Rohan or the description of country leading up to the west gate of Moria. Although I do wish I’d seen the link to the map of Helm’s Deep halfway down this page before I’d read the chapter as it would have made things clearer. The Companion is also good at pointing out how things fit in the chronology, so when somebody gazes at the horizon and sees a cloud of smoke it will say what event elsewhere in the book (or other writing) that is from. You also get a great feel for Tolkien’s language and words and his vivid descriptions of scenes and landscape (often up to a page long) such the example above. Although I do find he uses “suddenly” an awful lot when he has new events/people break into the narrative.

The readers companion is a great resource, written by two serious Tolkien scholars but intended for general readers rather than academics. Kate Nepveu’s articles are also very useful in giving a more opinionated and subjective commentary. I would definitely recommend the experience to others who are fans of the Lord of the Rings. I’m not sure how well it would work with other books but certainly it enhances a work I already know well and love.

At the current rate I am expecting to finish some time in June or July. The next project I’m planning is Shakespeare’s plays. I am planning on reading each one (multiple times including possibly at least once aloud) and watching the BBC Television Shakespeare and other adaptations and commentaries. My plan is that I’ll cover the majority of them  but I’ll see how I go, However I’d like to at least get though the major ones.

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Parallel Importing vs The Economist

Simpson-economistFor the last few years I have subscribed to the online edition of  The Economist magazine. Previously I read it via their website but for the last year or two I have used their mobile app. Both feature the full-text of each week’s magazine. Since I subscribed near 15 years ago I have paid:

Launched Jun 1997   US$ 48
Jun 1999            US$ 48
Oct 2002            US$ 69
Oct 2003            US$ 69
Dec 2006            US$ 79
Oct 2009            US$ 79
Oct 2010            US$ 95
Oct 2011            US$ 95
Mar 2014            NZ$ 400 (approx US$ 300)

You will note the steady creep for a few years followed by the huge jump in 2014.

Note: I reviewed by credit card bill for 2012 and 2013 and I didn’t see any payments, it is possible I was getting it for free for two years 🙂 . Possibly this was due to the transition between using an outside card processor (Worldpay) and doing the subscriptions in-house.

Last year I paid the bill in a bit of a rush and while I was surprised at the amount I didn’t think to hard. This year however I had a closer look. What seems to have happened is that The Economist has changed their online pricing model from “cheap online product” to “discount from the printed price”. This means that instead of online subscribers paying the same everywhere they now pay slightly less than it would cost to get the printed magazine delivered to the home.

Unfortunately the New Zealand price is very high to (I assume) cover the cost of shipping a relatively small number of magazines via air all the way from the nearest printing location.

econ_nzecon_us

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So readers in New Zealand are now charged NZ$ 736 for a two-year digital subscription while readers in the US are now charged US$ 223 ( NZ$ 293) for the same product. Thus New Zealanders pay 2.5 times as much as Americans.

Fortunately since I am a globe-trotting member of the world elite® I was able to change my subscription address to my US office and save a bunch of cash. However for a magazine that publishes the Big Mac Index comparing prices of products around the world the huge different in prices for the same digital product seems a little weird.

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LInks: WW1 Maps, Shawshank, Microservices, Dev Interviewing

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Books for Sale – Part 2

I’m doing a book clean-out. The following are all for sale. Remainders will be given away to charity or something. Pickup is from either my house (Dominion Rd/Balmoral, Auckland) or my I can meet during the week near my work in Wyndham Street in the Auckland CBD.

Prices as mark, discount if you want to by more than 5 or so. Links may not match the exact edition I am selling.

If you are interested in any please contact me via email ( simon@darkmere.gen.nz ) or over twitter ( @slyall ). Sale will run to end of April or so.

See Part 1 for more books

Business

Commentary / Opinion / Speculation / Politics

Technical

Travel / Misc

 

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Books for sale – Part 1

I’m doing a book clean-out. The following are all for sale. Remainders will be given away to charity or something. Pickup is from either my house (Dominion Rd/Balmoral, Auckland) or my I can meet during the week near my work in Wyndham Street in the Auckland CBD.

Prices as mark, discount if you want to by more than 5 or so. Links may not match the exact edition I am selling.

If you are interested in any please contact me via email ( simon@darkmere.gen.nz ) or over twitter ( @slyall ) Sale will run to end of April or so.

See Part 2 for more books

Science Fiction / Fantasy

Deryni Books by Katherine Kurtz, all paperbacks of used quality unless otherwise named.

  • Deryni Rising – $4
  • Deryni Checkmate – $4
  • High Deryni – $4
  • Camber of Culdi (2 copies) -$4 each
  • The Bishops Heir (Hardback, ripped jacket) – $4
  • The Quest for Saint Camber – $4
  • The Deryni Archives – $4

Science Fiction Short Story Collections

Sci-Fi Novels

Other Fiction

History

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Static networking in Ansible the quick and dirty way

I’m in the process of setting up a server at home to replace an old one. I’m maintaining the new one via Ansible to try and get keep as tidy as possible. Part of the setup involves setting up a bridge interface so that I can run kvm virtual machines on the box.

In order to make the box a little more stable I decided to make the ethernet settings static rather than via DHCP. Unfortunately ansible doesn’t really have a nice standard way of setting up network ports (there are a few modules around but none in the main distribution).  After looking around I decided just to make a simple ansible role to handle the files.

The machine is running centos7. The networking initially looked like:

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-enp2s0
::::::::::::::
HWADDR=9C:B6:54:07:E8:49
TYPE=Ethernet
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
NAME=enp2s0
ONBOOT=yes
#

I decided the easiest way was to just manually create and copy the files. So I created a static_networking role.

roles/static_networking/handlers/main.yml
roles/static_networking/files/grey/ifcfg-enp2s0
roles/static_networking/files/grey/ifcfg-bridge0
roles/static_networking/tasks/main.yml
roles/static_networking/tasks/setup-redhat.yml

Inside the tasks the main.yml just loads up the setup-redhat.yml which is:

---
- name: copy files if they are listed in var
  copy: src={{ ansible_hostname }}/ifcfg-{{ item }} dest=/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ owner=root mode=0644
  with_items: static_interfaces
  notify:
  - restart network

Which is fairly simple. It just goes though a list of “static_interfaces” for a host and copies these files from the local machine to the machine I am setting up. If the copy makes any changes it sends a notify.

For the machine “grey” I just create some entries in hosts_vars/grey.yml

static_interfaces:
 - enp2s0
 - bridge0

and then the files themselves:

roles/static_networking/files/grey/ifcfg-bridge0
::::::::::::::
DEVICE="bridge0"
ONBOOT="yes"
TYPE=Bridge
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=10.1.1.28
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
GATEWAY=10.1.1.1
::::::::::::::
roles/static_networking/files/grey/ifcfg-enp2s0
::::::::::::::
DEVICE="enp2s0"
ONBOOT="yes"
NM_CONTROLLED="no"
BOOTPROTO="none"
BRIDGE=bridge0
HWADDR="9c:b6:54:07:e8:49"

which are the actual files to be copied. If any files are actually updated the handler will be triggered

roles/static_networking/handlers/main.yml 
---
# Called by "name" when network config files are changed
- name: restart network
  service: name=network state=restarted

Overall it seems to work and I only broke networking once (the ip on enp2s0 keep getting re-added until I forced network manager to forget about it). I wouldn’t really recommend this sort of thing for non-trivial sites though. Keeping per-site configs in roles isn’t really the best way to do things.

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Linux.conf.au 2015 – Day 5 – Session 3

NoOps with Ansible and Puppet – Monty Taylor

  • NoOps
    • didn’t know it was a contentious term
    • “devs can code and let a service deploy, manage and scale their code”
    • I want to change the system by landing commits. don’t want to “do ops”
    • if I have to use my root access it is a bug
  • Cloud Native
    • Ephemeral Compute
    • Data services
    • Design your applications to be resilient via scale out
    • Cloud scale out, forget HA for one system, forget long-lived system, shared-nothing for everything. Cloud provides the hard scale-out/HA/9s stuff
    • Great for new applications
  • OpenStack Infra
    • Tooling, automation, and CI for the openstack project
    • 2000 devs
    • every commit is fully tested.
    • each test runs on a single use cloud slave
    • 1.7 million test jobs in the last 6 months. 18 TB of log data
    • all runs in HP and rackspace public clouds
  • Create Servers manually at 1st
  • Step 1 – Puppet
    • extra hipster because it is in ruby
    • If you like ruby it is awesome. If don’t is it less-awesome
    • collaboration from non-root users
    • code review
    • problem that it blows up when you try and install the same thing in two different places
    • 3 ways to run. masterless puppet apply. master + puppet agent daemon . master + puppet agent non-daemons
  • Secret stuff that you don’t want into you puppet git repo
    • hiera
  • Step 2 – Ansible for orchestration
    • Control the puppet agent so it runs it nicely and in schedule and on correct hosts first
    • Open source system management tool
    • Sequence of steps not description of state like puppet
    • ad-hoc operation. run random commands
    • easy to slowly grow over time till it takes over puppet
    • yaml syntax of config files
  • Step 3 – Ansible for cloud management
  • Ansible config currently mixed in with puppet under – http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack-infra/system-config/

 

Conference Closing

  • Steve Walsh wins Rusty Wrench award
  • Preview of Linux.conf.au 2016 in Geelong
    • Much flatter than Auckland
    • Deakin University – Waterfront Campus
    • Waurn Ponds student accomadation 15 minutes with shuttles
    • Feb 8th – 12th 2016
    • CFP 1st of June 2015
    • Theme “life is better with linux”
    • 4 keynotes confirmed or in final stages of discussion, 2 female, 2 male
    • NFS keytags
    • lcabythebay.org.au
  • Announcement for Linux.conf.au 2017 will be in Hobart

 

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Linux.conf.au 2015 – Day 5 – Session 2

When Everything Falls Apart: Stories of Version Control System Scaling – Ben Kero

  • Sysadmin at Mozilla looking after VCS
  • Primarily covering mercurial
  • Background
    • Primarily mercurial
    • 3445 repos (1223 unique)
    • 32 million commits
    • 2TB+ transfer per day
    • 1000+ clones per day
    • Biggest customer = ourselves
    • tested platforms > 12
  • Also use  git (a lot) and a bit of:  subversion, CVS, Bazaar, RCS
  • 2 * ssh servers, 10 machines mirror http traffic behind load balancer
  • 1st story – know what you are hosting
    • Big git repo 1.7G somebody asked to move off github
    • Turned out to be mozilla git mirror, so important to move
    • plenty of spare resources
    • But high load straight away
    • turned out to be mercurial->git converter, huge load
    • Ran garbage collection – took several hours
    • tweaked some other settings
  • 2nd story
    • 2003 . “Try” CI system
    • Simple CI system (before the term existed or they were common)
    • flicks off to build server, sends status back to dev
    • mercurial had history being immutable up until v2.1 and mozilla was stuck on old version
    • ended up with 29,000 brashes in repo
    • Around 10,000 heads some operations just start to fail
    • Wait times for pushes over 45 minutes. Manual fixes for this
    • process was “hg serve” only just freezein gup, not any debug info
    • had to attached debugging. trying to update the cache.
    • cache got nuked by cached push, long process to rebuild it.
    • mercurial bug 4255 in process of being looked at, no fix yet
  • The new system
    • More web-scalable to replace old the system
    • Closer to the pull-request model
    • multi-homing
    • leverage mercurial bundles
    • stores bundles in scalable object store
    • hopefully minimal retooling from other groups (lots of weird systems supported)
  • Planet release engineering @ mozilla

SL[AUO]B: Kernel memory allocator design and philosophy – Christopher Lameter

  • NOTE: I don’t do kernel stuff so much of this is over my head.
  • Role of the allocator
    • page allocator only works in full page size (4k) and is fairly slow
    • slab allocator for smaller allocation
    • SLAB is one of the “slab allocators”
  • kmeme_cache , numa aware, etc
  • History
    • SLOB: K&R 1991-1999 . compact
    • SLAB: Solaris 199-2008 . cache friendly, benchmark friendly
    • SLUB: 2008-today , simple and instruction costs count, better debugging, defrag, execution time friendly
  • 2013 – work to split out common code for allocators
  • SOLB
    • manages list of free objects with the space of free objects
    • have to traverse list to find object of sufficient size
    • rapid fragmentation of memory
  • SLAB
    • queues per cpu and per node to track cache hotness
    • queues for each remote node
    • complete data structures
    • cold object expiration every 2 seconds on each CPU
    • large systems with LOTS of CPUs have huge amount of memory trapped, spending lots of time cleaning cache
  • SLUB
    • A lot less queuing
    • Pages associated with per-cpu. increased locality
    • page based policies and interleave
    • de-fragmentation on multiple levels
    • current default in the kernel
  • slabinfo tool for SLUB. tune, modify, query, control objects and settings
  • can be asked to go into debug mode even when debugging not enabled with rest of the kernel
  • Comparing
    • SLUB faster (SLAB good for benchmarks)
    • SLOB slow
    • SLOB less memory overhead for small/simple systems (only, doesn’t handle lots of reallocations that fragment)
  • Roadmap
    • More common framework
    • Various other speedups and features

 

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