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Abbreviations lower our performance

I don’t know why people started doing abbreviations, maybe in the past, the bytes were expensive. I suppose life was harsh and there was no enough food for all and the way they named their programs and variables is mirroring their life. Nowadays we have enough goods and time and free space everywhere and we still name our variables/etc. like we are at the dark ages.

My point is that when we are solving some problem is good to have all neurons of our brain to work solving the problem. If we have to decrypt variables, our project structure is not good, we haven’t used with our editor then we are putting bariers which block us of seeing the best solution because our brain is dedicating 5-10% of its power for nonsense.

I am not saying that we should use full sentences of naming the variables/methods/classes/packages/programs. Only that we do not need to spent time decrypting the abbreviation.

I would love to see an operating system where there is no hackish syndrome.

In the cloud

AWS give examples in their documentation with hackish. How it is possible AWS to have so high expectations for hiring developers and let them act as a woodcutter.

The load balancer names in AWS have a size limit in their names so you that you can have YOUR-APP-us-east-1-production load balancer. You have to name it Your-APP-us-east-1-prod.

At Home

My son is learning his computer language and yesterday he asked me what do the method Intn(n Int) – I can’t answer.

“Mom brg me sndwch!”

At Work

Here are some very popular examples

  • dev > development
  • prod > production
  • ctx, ctx > context vs
  • obj > object

Linux

Do you know why we write “mount” to mount some file system, and “umount” to unmount? Why?

The opposite command “mount” is not abbreviated to “mnt” or even “mt”. This inconsistency is crazy!

For RobotsFor Humans
lsblkblock-devices
mountunmount

Running chef test-kitchen with newer vagrant

If you get

VBoxManage: error: The specified string / bytes buffer was to small. Specify a larger one and retry. (VERR_CFGM_NOT_ENOUGH_SPACE)

This means that the virtual machine needs a shorter name for the VM.

---
driver:
  name: vagrant
  customize:
    name: pdcsmb
    memory: 4144
    cpus: 4
  network:
    # - ["forwarded_port", {guest: 3000, host: 3000}]
    # - ["private_network", {ip: "192.168.33.33"}]

Bonus tip:

If you get

No live threads left. Deadlock?

Then remove all gems and reinstall chefdk.

Export database tables, fields comments as markup with Ruby on Rails

When you have to export the comments from the database you can use this short snippet to get the schema as markup.

content = ""
database_name = "DATABASE_NAME"
ActiveRecord::Base.connection.tables.each do |table_name|
  content << "h5. #{table_name}\n"
  rows = ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("SELECT table_comment 
    FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES 
    WHERE table_schema='#{database_name}' 
        AND table_name='#{table_name}';");
  puts rows.to_a.inspect
  content << rows.to_a.first.first << "\n"

  rows = ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("select table_name, column_name, DATA_TYPE, column_comment from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS where 1 AND TABLE_SCHEMA='#{database_name}' AND TABLE_NAME = '#{table_name}'")
  rows.each(:as => :hash) do |row| 
    puts row.inspect
    j = [ row["column_name"], row["DATA_TYPE"], row["column_comment"] ]

    content << "|#{j.join('|')}|\n"
  end
end; ''
puts content

The output should be something like

Table name

table description

column name, type, description

….. the next table

Running chef kitchen with cookbook dependencies

Berksfile

source 'https://supermarket.chef.io'

metadata

group :test do
  cookbook 'company_firewall', path: "../company_firewall"
  cookbook 'company_nginx', path: "../company_nginx"
  cookbook 'company', path: "../company"
  cookbook 'data-incoming', path: "../data-incoming"
  cookbook 'aws', path: "../aws"
end

metadata.rb

name             'data-listener'
maintainer       'Company'
maintainer_email 'sd@company.com'
license          'All rights reserved'
description      'Installs/Configures data-listener'
long_description IO.read(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'README.md'))
version          '0.2.32'

depends 'sysctl', '~> 1.0.5'
depends 'copany_firewall'
depends 'company_nginx'
depends 'aws'

 

Restrict /manage or /admin in Rails

You can do it from the Ruby on Rails application or even better way is to do it where you define your infrastructure and configure your proxy/loadbalancer etc. to allow it.

constrains manage
  class Whitelist
    def matches?(request)
      vpn = IPAddr.new("10.1.0.0/16")
      return true if Rails.env.development? || vpn.include?(request.remote_ip)

      Rails.logger.info("Blocking access for #{request.remote_ip} to #{rifiniti_vpn}")
      false
    end
  end

  constraints Whitelist.new do
    namespace :manage do
	...protected
    end
  end

 

mdadm: Duplicate MD device names in conf file where found.

remove the doublicate file from /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf

cp mdadm.conf mdadm.conf.backup
grep -v "2 UUIDsomehing..." mdadm.conf.backup > mdadm.conf

Make sure the raid is up

mdadm --assemble --scan

Load the lvm volumes

lvm vgchange -ay
  • -a – activate
  • -y – complete

exit to try the changes

$(initramfs) exit

Now you system will boot

Making the changes permanent

Fix the /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf file by removing the duplicate definition.

update-initramfs  -u -k all

If you are still in initramfs busybox

mkdir /target
mount /dev/md1 /target
mount -o bind /dev /target/dev
mount -o bind /proc /target/proc
mount -o bind /sys /target/sys
mount -o bind /dev/pts /target/dev/pts
chroot /target /bin/bash

Cheat

mdadm –detail /dev/md0 mdadm –detail /dev/md1

mdadm –detail –scan > /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf

Stop an array & assemble array mdadm –stop /dev/md1

mdadm –assemble /dev/md0 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 mdadm –assemble /dev/md1 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb2 /dev/sdc2 /dev/sdd2

 

38693387_2127079967530580_4018998239729549312_n (1)

Run kitchen with vaults

Way of testing kitchen with vaults

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suites:
  - name: default
    run_list:
      - recipe[....
    data_bags_path: ../../data_bags_test
    attributes:
      chef-vault:
        databag_fallback: true

copy your data_bags/ and decrypted vaults/ content in a new folder containing the merged content from both folders.

Do not forget to add data_bags_test folder in .git_ignore.

 

image from www.wannapik.com

Online conference software aka meetings

If you want your developers and stuff to be happy please AVOID webex !

Webex is bad service

It has bad International connection. It doesn’t run on linux or unix and can’t be run in a browser. The IOS application is bad and doesn’t integrate with the links. The integration with the website and the calendars is bad. The website is slow and buggy and you can’t see the meeting on which you are invited. It is the worst of the software out there.

Zoom – It is like the webex. They look and feel the same one idea better, because it has client which can run in linux

Good one

https://www.bluejeans.com/ – works perfectly!

http://appear.in – free and great!

 

Sending a bunch of data to Zabbix with one request

One can send a bunch of key => values to zabbix with the zabbix-trapper items.

Using this nice article  as a base I have packed everthing in a class so that you can use it:

Example usage:

values = {
  total_ram: 0,
  wrong_data_center: 0,
  linode_hosts: 0,
  missing_from_zabbix: 0,
  missing_from_graylog: 0,
}

zabbix_sender = ZabbixSender.new(Figaro['zabbix_server'])
zabbix_sender.message('super_druper_hostname', values)
require 'json'

class ZabbixSender

  def initialize zabbix_host
    @zabbix_host = zabbix_host
  end

  def message hostname, values
    values_with_host = with_host(hostname, values)

    params = {
      "request" => "sender data",
      "data" => values_with_host,
    }

    body = JSON.generate params
    data_length = body.bytesize
    data_header = "ZBXD\1".encode("ascii") + \
    [data_length].pack("i") + \
    "\x00\x00\x00\x00"
    data_to_send = data_header + body

    send data_to_send
  end

  private

  def with_host hostname, hash
    values = []

    hash.each_pair do |key, value|
      values << {
        key: key,
        value: value,
        host: hostname,
      }
    end
    values
  end

  def send data_to_send
    socket = TCPSocket.new(@zabbix_host, 10051)
    socket.write data_to_send.to_s
    response_header = socket.recv(5)
    if not response_header == "ZBXD\1"
      puts "response: #{response_header}"
      raise 'Got invalid response'
    end

    response_data_header = socket.recv(8)
    response_length = response_data_header[0,4].unpack("i")[0]
    response_raw = socket.recv(response_length)
    socket.close
    response = JSON.load(response_raw)
  end

end

 

Tired of the old Rails scaffold?

Why Rails scaffold doesn’t work

The need to write a replacement of the Rails scaffold was because the build in one in Ruby on Rails:

  • Does not support namespaces on the controllers and the models it generates funny paths in the views and/or controllers
  • The native way to extend the Rails scaffold was changed frequently I have to spend hours tracing github issues
  • It uses the ugly scaffold.css and it generates it all the time breaking my styles
  • Does some freaky copy/paste optimizations in the controller to get the model. Scaffold should be a starting point from where with few deletes or add few lines of codes to make a usable screen.

The new approach

With scaffold_pico you can create your own pretty administration in a second.

  • No learning curve – if you know Rails you know it.
  • No 3rd party gems slowing your development/production startup times.
  • Clean code
  • Supports namespaces in the models and the controllers

There is also some sugar. With the pico_scaffold you can generate from the beginning fabricators and take care of N+1 by specifying joins/includes clauses. There is separation of the fields for index and editing. There is a search – almost every screen now days has search.

Supports Zurb Foundation, Materializecss CSS frameworks

Here is the github: https://github.com/gudata/scaffold_pico

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