Some time ago, I wrote up how I created RPMs for ruby gems to simplify installation on EL-flavoured distributions. In the comments for that article, Jordan Sissel pointed me at his fpm tool which I said I’d check out if I ever needed to build any more rubygem RPMs. Well, that time has come. I wanted… Continue reading →
Redis is an in-memory key-value data store that provides a small number of primitives suitable to the task of building monitoring systems. As a lot of us are hacking in this space I thought I’d write a blog post summarizing where I’ve been using it in a little Sensu like monitoring system I have been Read More
Most Nagios systems does a lot of forking especially those built around something like NRPE where each check is a connection to be made to a remote system. On one hand I like NRPE in that it puts the check logic on the nodes using a standard plugin format and provides a fairly re-usable configuration Read More
I was recently working on a small proof-of-concept application with a back-end server written in JRuby. In this proof-of-concept, multiple clients connect to the server to poll for status changes and to request actions be performed as the result of user interactions.
Read more on Preventing JRuby Concurrency Errors with Hamster »
Karlin Fox and I have been playing around with using the MQTT protocol to distribute information about the availability of certain high-demand resources in our office (namely, the bathroom). For some time now we have had an Arduino-powered red/green light (nicknamed “PottyMon”) radiating occupancy information about the upstairs bathroom across our open workspace.
Read more on Portable Ruby Bit-Twiddling with #unpack() »
The post Portable Ruby Bit-Twiddling with #unpack() appeared first on Atomic Spin.
I recently attended RubyConf 2012 in Denver, CO. I had a great time, and I learned a lot. While getting a clearer picture of the Ruby development community was interesting — particularly the tension among MRI, JRuby, Rubinius, etc. — the talks I keep thinking about were essentially language-independent.
My current project includes a fairly large amount of static text written by our customer’s marketing team. The authors generally do not have the background to provide valid HTML or contribute changes directly to our codebase.
Read more on A Lightweight “CMS” Using Ruby and Google Drive »
Sometimes it’s hard to just say what you mean.
When writing automated system and integration tests, I occasionally find it tricky to express the precise expected value of test output. For example, I expect the timestamp on a database record to be within a second or two of “now,” but I can’t predict the exact millisecond it will be created by the web server I’m posting to. And sometimes a floating point result is off by a millionth or trillionth, because the numeric representations used in my tests are not necessarily the binary equivalent of what the code under test is using.
Read more on Convenient Trick for Tolerance-based Test Assertions Using #ish »
Justin and I have recently started using Zabbix for monitoring, in place of Nagios. We’ve also taken the opportunity to start collecting even more metrics than before.
One nice thing about Zabbix is that it can use pre-existing Nagios monitoring plugins out of the box. But what if you also want to collect metrics from say, a Ruby process? You’re in luck! Zabbix can collect various forms of information (from numerical metrics to arbitrary strings, to log data) via the Zabbix sender protocol. Let’s set this up.
Read more on Collecting Metrics from Ruby Processes with Zabbix Trappers »
The post Collecting Metrics from Ruby Processes with Zabbix Trappers appeared first on Atomic Spin.
Yesterday I mentioned on Twitter that I was playing with the MongoDB pub/sub features and that it worked quite well for my needs. What I didn’t mention was that the documentation and blog posts were a bit all over the show and the Ruby examples I saw didn’t actually do what they said they did Read More
