Nova presents configuration information to instances it starts via a mechanism called metadata. This metadata is made available via either a configdrive, or the metadata service. These mechanisms are widely used via helpers such as cloud-init to specify things like the root password the instance should use. There are three separate groups of people who…
Giving serial devices meaningful names
This is a hack I’ve been using for ages, but I thought it deserved a write up. I have USB serial devices. Lots of them. I use them for home automation things, as well as for talking to devices such as the console ports on switches and so forth. For the permanently installed serial devices…
A pythonic example of recording metrics about ephemeral scripts with prometheus
In my previous post we talked about how to record information from short lived scripts (I call them ephemeral scripts by the way) with prometheus. The example there was a script which checked the SMART status of each of the disks in a machine and reported that via pushgateway. I now want to work through…
Game review: Betrayal at House on the Hill
At the insistence of Uncle David, we had to try this one again after he filed a formal protest at our previous review. I must say this game went much better than last time… David: oh boy I want to be the traitor. Shit I’m not. Then I died. First loser! Mikal: this went much…
Recording performance information from short lived processes with prometheus
Now that I’m recording basic statistics about the behavior of my machines, I now want to start tracking some statistics from various scripts I have lying around in cron jobs. In order to make myself sound smarter, I’m going to call these short lived scripts “ephemeral scripts” throughout this document. You’re welcome. The promethean way…
Basic prometheus setup
I’ve been playing with prometheus for monitoring. It feels quite familiar to me because its based on an internal google technology called borgmon, but I suspect that means it feels really weird to everyone else. The first thing to realize is that everything at google is a web server. Your short lived tool that copies…
Gods of Metal
In this follow-up to Command and Control, Schlosser explores the conscientious objectors and protestors who have sought to highlight not just the immorality of nuclear weapons, but the hilariously insecure state the US government stores them in. In all seriousness, we are talking grannies with heart conditions being able to break in. My only real…
BonkersCon video: something introductory about radio
Michael Carden kindly gave a talk at BonkersCon about the origins of radio at my request. Tim Ansell was there during the day to record these videos with his bonkers home brew video capture hardware. Sorry about the sound quality at the end of the video. We had some issues on the day with the…
Game review: Betray at House on the Hill
Here’s our second game. We played this one tonight after dinner.
Game review: Guillotine
AJ, Matt and I have decided that we need to play more board games and that we should write up our thoughts about them as we play them. I’ve decided to keep quick notes here to keep us honest. We start with a card game named “Guillotine”. AJ: A fun by simple game. Matt: Fun, but…