Name: Nathan, aka "nathan"
Posts by nathan:
- I got some good leads on scaling graphite
- Learned how others approach their orchastration tools
- Learned NOT to use RVM in production.
Stop! mysqlHammerOfThor.py time!
February 1st, 2012
So, expanding upon my previous post, I wrote a simple python script that would kill all queries running on a MySQL instance based on a host wildcard or runtime of a query.
Yes, yes, I know about mk-kill, but I enjoy writing little scripts. Writing trivial scripts is always a great way to get better. 
I wield the MySQL hammer of Thor! Mass killing queries by host.
January 30th, 2012
Just a quick protip. I’m not a DBA, but I’m about to whack you with the clue hammer.
I had an errant application node hammering a MySQL slave with metric butt loads (engineering term) of junk queries that were locking the slave up.
If you find yourself in a similar position without your own surly DBA around, I’ll save 20 minutes of googling:
Automating Some Cassandra Maintenance
January 29th, 2012
Lets talk about Cassandra maintenance.
Nothing crazy here… these are just some notes I jotted down for folks I work with explaining a cronjob I put into production as well as providing the simple script. Thought some other people might benefit.
In which I give a server to some kids.
January 29th, 2012
So, I am at one of my data centers late last Friday night bringing up some new Hadoop nodes when I look up to see Atlantic Metro‘s eminent ‘head cheese of facilities’ Christian walk by at the lead of a crew of 3 kids and their parents carrying a little 1U server.
Odd, I thought, so I asked Christian what they were doing. These kids were racking thier first server. They are starting a game company!
How cool is that!?! How cool are these kids!?! How fantastic are these kid’s parents?!
Here I am, impressed as hell by these short entrepreneurs, sitting next to a stack of 4 year old servers that we’ve recently decommissioned and I’ve freshly wiped. We still haven’t figured out what to do with them, where to donate them, since their resell value is ~3-5% of their original purchase price and I’m too lazy to put them up on eBay for the company only to have the company make ~$100 bucks for my time.
So, I asked them if they wanted a server.
Adjust your slab! Memcached 1.4.12 RPMs on CentOS 5.7.
January 28th, 2012
So, memcached 1.4.11 lets you rebalance and reassign slab memory!
This is epic!
Info why this is epic here.
Info on the implementation is in the release notes
From the release notes, please remember that the slab reassignment feature is in beta and is subject to some changes.
I just took the regular spec file I found for the project elsewhere and modified it a little. I disabled the SASL stuff in my spec file since we don’t use it and I didn’t want to mess with building it.
EDIT: Actually, this article has revised for less yak shaving. With the help of Dormando and Justin Lintz. I was able to shed some unneeded dependencies.
So here you go:
Kicking the tires on Hadoop 0.23: Pseudo-Distributed mode.
January 10th, 2012
Thought I’d play a little with Hadoop 0.23 (a.k.a YARN, MR2, NextGen Hadoop) and dump my notes here.
Gotta keep my skillz sharp y’all so I don’t become irrelephant. (Yes, that just happened.)
Below I just setup a pseudo-distributed mode setup and run some examples on it, nothing crazy.
I’m hoping to test and write more on how 0.23 differs from the main line 0.20.x, 1.0 and CDH3 releases as well as playing with the NameNode federation and using some other paradigms like MPI, Hama and Spark.
Code Example: Linux + PyUSB & the Dream Cheeky Thunder/Storm USB Missile Launcher
January 7th, 2012
Went to Staples the other day to grab some assorted accessories for work and I saw they had some Brookstone USB Desktop Missile Launchers in the clearence section, so I grabbed one.
What fun, I thought. Plugged it into my work desktop (running LinuxMint Debian Edition) only to find there were no linux drivers for this particular device.
This turned into a nice little weekend project
Building and Installing Python 2.7 RPMs on CentOS 5.7
January 4th, 2012
I was asked today to install Python 2.7 on a CentOS based node and I thought I’d take this oportunity to add a companion article to my Python 2.6 article.
We’re all well aware that CentOS is pretty backwards when it comes to having the latest and greatest sotware packages and is particularly finicky when it comes to Python since so much of RHEL depends on it.
As a rule, I refuse to rush in and install anything in production that isn’t in a manageable package format such as RPM. I need to be able to predictably reproduce software installs across a large number of nodes.
The following steps will not clobber your default Python 2.4 install and will keep both CentOS and your developers happy.
So, here we go.
Cassandra NYC 2011 Talk on YouTube
January 4th, 2012
Datastax posted my talk (see below)!
SysDrink in 2012!
January 4th, 2012
SysDrink is now rocking it’s own site, twitter account as well as sponsorship from Outbrain!
At the last SysDrink I was able to chat aimlessly with ops engineers at NYC’s top startups.
It is always good when you put a bunch of enthusiastic engineers (who usually end up at the more fascinating infrastructures solving the harder problems) in a room together outside of a meetup/talk.
Meetups/Talks set agendas for conversations. People come to the SysDrink to socialize, network, vent, compare notes and swap war stories about diverse subjects that don’t always fit into a talk or meetup.
This is the value of a SysDrink. If you’re not in NYC and would like to run a SysDrink in your area, ping me and I can set you up on the sysdrink.info calendar and twitter account to post events.
Sign up for the next NYC SysDrink here