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Linux

Easily accessing containers/KVM hosts using ProxyPass

This is a short and sweet guide, however its something that needs to be documented as it is extremely fiddly!

At home I have a few KVM-based virtual machines, and quite a few Docker containers running using internal networks that (by design) only the server and themselves can access.

This is all well and good and secure, however its a bit of a pain in the ass when you want to test things or even worse use them (without a plethora of routes, or having to NAT the hell out of everything…).

LinuxOpsview

Atlassian Hipchat and Opsview

I’ve recently been on a bit of an integration push witah Opsview, wanting to have my software integrate with other software tools to make not only my customers lives easier, my also my own!

At Opsview, I run a range of tools from JIRA and Jenkins, through to Opsview – and also look at Twitter, Salesforce and more. This is a lot of stuff, therefore as mentioned in my late 2014 piece “Collaboration and innovation in 2014” I wanted to find a way to unify all of this disparate information into a single source of truth, or as marketers like to say “Single pane of glass”, yikes.

featureLinux

Creating a distributed Redis system using Docker

A common problem I face on a daily basis is a lack of hardware / resource in order to test things out to the fullest. For example, in days gone by I’d have needed 3 servers for what i’m about to do – and in more recent times, 3 virtual machines. I dont have the time to continuously build these items, nor the resource if we were going physical. This is where my new found interest in Docker can help me out!

What I want to do on my Ubuntu ‘host’ server is create 3 Docker containers running Redis, and link them all together so that I can then develop and test the best way to monitor h-scaled Redis. Below I will show you how i’ve done it, and the benefits (even beauty) of it!

Linux

Docker: A how-to

Over Christmas/New Years I had a fair amount of spare time for relaxation; so naturally this was spent tinkering around with various bits of software and kit I havent had time to play with during the past few months. One of the things I wanted to test and try in anger was Docker; a wrapper/software suite that wraps LXC into something a bit more usable. There is a video below that explains what Docker is and how it works:

featureLinux

Setting up a RELK stack from scratch (Redis, Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana)

Recently I thought i’d re-do all of my ELK stack setup, as i didnt fully understand every facet of it and i was really interested in introducing Redis into the mix. I’ve also messed around with the existing Kibana and Logstash front-end to the point it was fairly bricked, so it was ripe for a change.

What I wanted to get to, was having my 2 servers and my main router having their logs and syslog data sent into my log box so I could view and correlate across multiple systems.

LinuxMonitoring

Integrating Opsview with ELK Log Monitoring

This is a brief blog post to explain how I quickly integrated my existing Opsview server, with my existing ELK deployment. I basically wanted a way that within Opsview, i can see that a host has failed or is having problems and go “Hmm, lets have a look at the logs to see whats happening” without:

A) Having to SSH to the box and start tailing or

B) Have to fire up ELK and start filtering.

Engineering

Collaboration and innovation in 2014

As those of you who know me personally can attest, i’m never particularly enamoured with the phrase – “Thats just what we’ve always used”, or “Thats just how its been since i started”. Im a firm advocate of the Winston Churchill quote “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” and yet I feel that a lot of companies fail to do this.

A lot of us in IT like to reminisce about “Oh wow, 2.5″ floppy drives – I bet you dont even know why there isnt a B drive in Windows do you?” (Or worse still with the older generation – “Oh VAX was the best..”), instead of looking at the drawbacks which led to the eventual demise of these technologies. I feel the same can be said for email; its so engrained in corporate culture that no one has actually thought to product analyze email itself – in terms of:

EngineeringLinux

Slack and IRC

As part of my Slack evangelism I’ve been hellbent on trying to integrate as many products I/we use into the aforementioned tool, to test out where the limit is on what this awesome product can do. Next on my list of things is IRC – that old warhorse. Opsview has a large number of users on IRC, yet I continually forget to start my IRC client after reboots, etc meaning i miss out on all the useful questions, comments and other items that our community have to offer.

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