It has been quite calm for a couple of months here. I have switched job, it explains why I had less time to post some things.I now work at fotolia, and I switched from puppet to chef (no troll intended, I still think puppet is a great tool, please read this).

Quick post : installing a mongo server is good, monitoring it is better. I wrote a very basic check that ensure your mongo DB is healthy. Grab it on my github.

In my last post I’ve been talking about mcollective (check the new website) and mongo and how awesome it is.

I run a bunch of box under OpenBSD at $WORK and I wanted to be able to run mcollective on these too. Unfortunately, there were no package available for this OS. So I took time and with some help from landry@ I was able to build a port. It has been integrated into the github repo quickly. But to be able to use mcollective you also need to have the ruby stomp connector. As I don’t like using gems and prefer them packages, I also built a port for it. You can grab it in my github repository here.

Some friends told me for a while about collectd, why I should look at it, why munin is so painful and so on. If you’ve been reading my posts you know I have tweaked a little my $WORK munin install to make it faster and lighter. But I finally took time to explore collectd, and I regret to not have done this before. It has so many pros that I decided to implement it in parallel with munin (because I can’t afford being blind on metrics). But collectd comes without an UI : it “only” collectds data, but that’s not a problem. There are various web interfaces and after giving a look to a bunch of them I fell in love with Lindsay Holmwood‘s Visage.

I already blogged about my experiments with mcollective & xen but I had something a little bigger in my mind. A friend had sent me a video showing some vmware neat features (DRS mainly) with VMs migrating through hypervisors automatically.

Today I started installing a reverse proxy at $WORK. I choose to follow this way, and all my DNS data is stored in my CMDB. Once again, the solution came from #puppet ! You can embed some “pure” ruby code in ERB templates. And, yes, you can query your database !

Je suis un adepte de remember the milk, je m’en sers de todo list pour le boulot. C’est bien pratique, joli et tout. Mais ajouter une tache est un chouia long, surtout quand on veut le faire vite fait lorsque la personne est en face de vous. Je me suis donc fait un petit script ruby qui m’ajoute directement les taches dans ma liste “Travail”.