royans

Sysadmins love infrastructure control, and I have to say that there was a time when root access gave me a high. It wasn't  until I moved to web operations team (and gave up my root access) that I realized that I was  more productive when I wasn't dealing with day to day hardware and OS issues. After managing my own EC2/Rackspace instance for my blog for a few years , I came to another realization today that IAAS (infrastructure as a service) might be one of these fads which will give way to PAAS (Platform as a service). Wordpress is an excellent blogging platform, and I manage  multiple instances of it for my blogs (and one for my   wife's blog ). I chose to run my own wordpress instance because I loved the same control which I used to have when I was a sysadmin. I not only wanted to run my own plugins, configured my own features, play with different kinds of caching features, I also wanted to choose my own linux distribution (Ubuntu ofcourse) and make it work the way

If I say internet is running out of IPs, you might respond with "so whats new?". Whether you like it or not, this time its for real . While IPv4/8 blocks might be gone by the end of this year, it doesn't mean IPv6 trasition needs to happen right away. Fortunately, unlike the Y2K problem, we have a lot of tools and means to make this transition less painful by making it happen over an extended period of time. Most of the larger organizations have been testing IPv6 for years . And thanks to Apple , Microsoft , linux developers and other industry leaders , the latest versions of the most popular operating systems come preconfigured to work with IPv6. Whats missing, unfortunately, is the human element of this transition. Training the core network operators on IPv6 related issues isn't enough. Nor is it enough for all the softwares to support it. Every developer, engineer and users on all the 7 layers of the OSI stack has to understand it well enough to be able to troubl

This is a cross-post from my personal blog . Few weeks ago I asked a question on quora about  log aggregation . I was surprised to find that no opensource solution came close to what I wanted, but I got a lot of suggessions to try out splunk. So I did. What I wanted was an aggregation tool which collects, displays and alerts based on events logged by the various webservers across the network which could be in different datacenters. The organization where I set this up was generating about 300mb of production haproxy logs per day and something around 200mb of non-prod logs. Here is why splunk fit very well in this organization. 1) Log aggregation across multiple servers/datacenters- The organization had already solved this problem by piping haproxy logs using syslog-ng. They used a little bit of filtering to discard logs which are not interesting for splunk. Syslog-ng can be configured to use tcp instead of udp to make log delivery reliable. Splunk is capable of working as remote ag