That was a long break. Should get into better habits. I’m sure I’d miss some here. Oh well.

It was a very interesting week, culminating in some very interesting things at Trafalgar Square. I feel much better as a person and more calmer/chilled out now :) Should remember to take weekends off.

  • Helped the WikiMetrics people with some puppet changes. They were requiring mysql directly instead of using the class we have in ops/puppet, which meant it put data in the /var partition instead of in /srv. This was because they want to be a ‘proper’ independent puppet module, not depending on the other modules in ops/puppet (since the module is used in vagrant as well). Puppet has terrible support for this kind of thing, and ops/puppet by itself also suffers from an incredible amount of NIH syndrome when it comes to modules. Some of the NIH-so-rewrite is justified, but I don’t think all of it is. Oh well. Hopefully something that can be fixed over time…
  • Added basic icinga/graphite based monitoring for contint project (runs our jenkins installation). Quite trivial, but should be ported over to shinken at some point soon.
  • Contributed a fair bit to the Shout Web IRC project. I was looking around for an open source replacement to IRCCloud, and found a bunch of OSS projects (Subway and http://ircanywhere.com/ being the others). Shout seemed the most active (and simplest) of them all – I couldn’t actually get the others to a working installation. I fixed a bunch of code formatting issues, and also added a couple of features (Desktop notifications being the most significant, I think). The maintainer was fun to work with, and merged most of my changes quite promptly. I hang out on #shout-irc channel now, and activity seems to be speeding along. Should be fun to see how it goes :)
  • Moved off IRCCloud. Stopped paying for it. I’ve also stopped doing email on my phone, in an effort to be more minimalistic / less distracted all the time. This meant no more IRC on phone, so my primary reason for using IRCCloud disappeared. Am back to using LimeChat with my ZNC bouncer now. And nothing on my phone. In case of emergencies, I still have the IRCCloud app on my phone, and can use the free edition to connect to my bouncer temporarily.
  • Started working on labs-specific monitoring, with shinken – test instance at shinken.wmflabs.org. Discussion in the ops list about how to best implement this. Shinken is supposed to horizontally scale much better than icinga since it is implemented as a bunch of different daemons that can talk over the network. Right now they are just one machine, but will probably expand at some point not too far away. They are running as a labs project rather than on a physical machine (labmon1001) because it is much easier from a networking perspective. Right now it only has a simple http check for betacluster, but more coming.
  • Started refactoring all our icinga code. Separating them out into nagios_commmon module for config that can be shared between shinken and icinga, and into an icinga module for everything else. Moved all the custom checks and check config we have, moving other things as we go. This is a bit hard / frustrating since I don’t have access to the machine icinga runs on (neon), and also because I still do not have +2 in our ops repo (should change in a month, tho!). Am about 40 patches in (small ones!), let’s see how many more it takes!
  • Moved our dsh code into a module. Was fairly trivial. Now to find ways to get it merged :)
  • Started trying out pinboard. Interesting, barebones design. The bookmarklet is a bit slow to load, though. Let’s see how often I use this. (I did pay for it)

Five more days left in the UK :( Let me see if I can continue doing these when here, in a more prompt manner.