So another year has passed and I have made 0 entries to the blog. This shall be the 8th post in 6 years. I thought it would be only fitting that I atleast end the year with a blog post and a commitment to blog more in 2011.
This blog post will be about what I have learned in 2010 and some plans for 2011.
So what have I learned, enjoyed and hated in 2010?
– I love puppet
– Adobe flash is the bane of my life. Flash on 64bit linux is nothing short of a pain, it causes the most problems, the most crashes and should rot in hell.
– I am starting to like chrome but have not made the full switch from firefox yet.
– I am quite a lazy programmer, more worrying I actually don’t care.
– I love MongoDB and expect big things from it.
– I am unsure weather to love or hate r1soft. On one hand I like what it brings on the other hand it’s very buggy and I don’t think the release of 3.0 is going to address many of these. This should be an entire blog post in itself later.
– Started using ksplice uptrack, already have this running on a few hundred systems and no problems to date. Only time will tell.
I am looking forward to 2011, I am hoping to continue on with getting large portions of the “todo list” completed. Some of the ones off the top of my head are,
– Make the switch from cacti to collectd+MongoDB. Been working on this on and off for awhile. Primary goals is to make it more flexible, more automated and easier to maintain. Since we maintain so many different environments it has to fit some very specific needs. Hoping to replace the primary cacti install and also some of the other secondary customer-specific ones (such as munin).
– Upgrade to nagios 3.x. We still are running nagios 2.x so an upgrade is needed. At the same time need to rebuild and rewrite the automation systems, templates, hosts and groups. Especially to tie better into collectd, the existing nagios+cacti setup is pretty “hacky”.
– Rebuild the client database, notes and task list systems. This work is already under-way so should be completed in Q1 2011. Better encryption, more functionality, more flexibility, easier to manage.
– Build a new ticket system and drop Kayako. I don’t particularly like the direction Kayako has taken in their latest release so it’s time to stop using it (Very hacked up anyway).
– Better documentation. I, along with many others, really fail in this area and I would love to improve on it. Still toying with the idea of internal wiki’s combined with the existing notes systems and to make better use of them.
– Improve the existing yum repo, make more use of mocks, include some newer RPM’s and update all systems to use this. Replace all custom builds to an RPM from the repo (nginx, memcached, etc).
– Make more use of the nessus systems and plugin feeds. At the moment this is mostly semi-manual , need to work on making it fully automated and easy to maintain.
– Post more blog entries? Goal of atleast 20 more blog posts (Less than 2 per month).
– Rewrite the nagios r1soft/buagent check and release it.
– Make the vbulletin static cache into a plugin. This is just a simple patch we provide to customers who don’t have enough capacity and are receiving a sudden burst of traffic (IE a thread slashdotted/etc). It simply stores the threads for guests in memory for 2 minutes and then displays the cache for guests (supports online counters, multiple themes, browsers, mobile, etc).
That’s my list for the time being. Lets hope I can stick to it. Do you have your list ready? Feel free to share.
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