I use Pingdom's free service to monitor slaptijack.com. Apparently, late Friday night, oom-killer decided that the server needed more memory and took out the MySQL server. To make matters worse, I missed the alarm from Pingdom, and slaptijack.com was down for pretty much all of Saturday. The fact that oom-killer was invoked is annoying, but more on that later.

The beauty of using Pelican rather than Wordpress (or any other database-driven content engine) is one less point of failure for the site. Obviously, I don't have all of slaptijack.com converted to Pelican yet (and perhaps never will), but at least parts of the site were up and working despite MySQL being down. If nothing else, this incident is enough to convince me that moving to Pelican was a good idea.

OOM'ed

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As per redis home page,

"Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as database, cache and message broker. It supports data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs and geospatial indexes with radius queries."

Redis Installation Steps:

I am trying the below steps in an ubuntu 14.04 system. Open the terminal and issue the below commands:

1. Get the latest tar zip for redis (http://redis.io/download)

$ cd /path/to/download/directory/
$ wget http://download.redis.io/releases/redis-3.0.7.tar.gz

2. Untar it and issue below commands:

$ tar xf redis-3.0.7.tar.gz$ cd redis-3.0.7$ make$ sudo …

Welcome to the final blog in Windows PerfCounters and Powershell series and sorry for the delay. The purpose of this blog is to explain the inner workings of top-script.ps1 script and practical usage of Performance counters on Windows through Powershell. It is intended for people who want Linux top - like tool on Windows.

The script is a part of and available in our existing benchmarking package (dbt2-0.37.50.10) developed by Mikael Ronstrom.

On Top:If you ever did benchmarking on Linux or simply wondered "where did all my resources go", top is your best friend. Since this post is not about Linux, you can google "Linux top explained" for more details.


On Performance counters:To learn about Windows PerfCounters, please refer to my previous …

At Etsy, we have a nice, clean, streamlined build process. We have a command for setting up RAID, and another for OS installation. OS installation comes with automagic for LDAP, Chef roles, etc.

We came across an odd scenario today when a co-worker was building a box that gave the following error:

Traceback (most recent call first): File “/usr/lib/anaconda/storage/partitioning.py”, line 1066, in allocatePartitions disklabel = disklabels[_disk.path] File “/usr/lib/anaconda/storage/partitioning.py”, line 977, in doPartitioning allocatePartitions(storage, disks, partitions, free) File “/usr/lib/anaconda/storage/partitioning.py”, line 274, in doAutoPartition exclusiveDisks=exclusiveDisks) File “/usr/lib/anaconda/dispatch.py”, line 210, in moveStep rc = stepFunc(self.anaconda) File “/usr/lib/anaconda/dispatch.py”, line 126, in gotoNext self.moveStep() File “/usr/lib/anaconda/dispatch.py”, line 233, in …

As Norvald wrote in his recent post:

A long time ago, libmysqlclient came in two versions: one that was thread safe and one that wasn’t. But that was a long time ago. Since MySQL 5.5, the thread safe libmysqlclient_r library has just been a symlink to the libmysqlclient library, which has been thread safe at least since then.

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I posted earlier in the year how to configure a Fedora instance to test PHP code on a local VM. However, I’ve got a few questions on how to find those posts. Here’s a consolidation with links on those steps:

1. Go to this blog post and install the httpd and php libraries with the yum installer.
2. In the same blog post as step 1 (you can put the sample PHP code into the /var/www/html directory for testing), connect to the yum shell and remove the php-mysql library and then install the mysqlnd library.
3. Go to this blog …

Hello dear readers and attendees,

This is the post that I will be/ will have been referencing during my presentation to the Seattle Central Community College’s Byte club on Thursday, December 10th at 1500-1630.

I will begin with a bit of an autobio and find out what kind of students we have in attendance. Please feel free to comment if you’d like to keep in touch before or after the presentation. I will discuss some of the bits and pieces of some industry standard platforms which I’ve developed, deployed, maintained, managed, co-operated, administered and replaced. We can discuss some of the patterns that work well in the industry, and some that are a bit harder to tame.

Once we have touched most of the areas of specialization represented at the meeting, I will dive in to an AngularJS demo I am developing in github here:

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MySQL Server 5.7 was released around a month ago, and download numbers show huge interest in upgrading from older MySQL releases. As with any product that is frequently used as core infrastructure in complex systems with numerous interdependencies, major version upgrades of MySQL should be approached with some care. In this post, I will cover […]

We remember when we first started auditing MySQL servers, there were very few tools available.  In one of our early big gigs, we were battling serious performance issues for a client.  At the time, tuning-primer.sh was about the only tool available that could be used to diagnose performance bottlenecks.  Fortunately, with a lot of manual interpolation of the raw data it presented, we were able to find the issue with the server and suggest how to resolve them.  For that we are very thankful.  It was a first step in analyzing MySQL status variables, minimizing the number of formulas to learn and calculate by hand.  Obviously doing it by hand takes forever!

Now fast-forward to today.  Unfortunately, not much has changed.  Many DBAs and developers are still using open source tools such as tuning-primer, mysqltuner.pl, mysqlreport, and so on.  Don’t get the wrong; those tools have …

My job is almost completely reliant upon my ability to perform work in lab of virtual machines. Almost every action plan I write is tested locally. When I need to troubleshoot an issue for a client one of the most common first steps I’ll perform is attempting to recreate the issue in a virtual environment so I can work on it there without the risk of impacting client data.

I believe that having a place to test and grow your skills is an absolute necessity for anyone working in the IT field today regardless of your specialization, even if you’re an IT generalist. But every now and then I hear about individuals who have issues with their virtual machines or with the virtual environment provided by their employer, so I figured this was a good time to share my method of creating a virtual lab. More specifically, one that allows you to do virtual work on a commodity laptop, one that won’t break down if you lose connectivity, one that …