Category Archives: VMware

News from the Blog 2022-06-22

For the first part of June I’ve been quiet on Social Media as I was on holidays and taking some scheduled tests for my health in the hospital.

Carles in the Media/Press/Streaming

Twitch

I started streaming live Python coding sessions in Twitch. I’m giving it a try to see if coders have engagement.

The Software I use to broadcast from Linux is OBS.

I started with my Open Source project ctop.

I had a very long and interesting session on 2022-06-06 about OpenZFS, Data Centers, NVMe, iSCSI, Hard Drives, Storage, performance, Data Centers…

More funny things happened like when I was installing a VirtualBox VM live, and the ZFS pool became irresponsible due hardware errors in one SATA Spinning drive.

Things from broadcasting live…

Some of the feedback I got from talented Engineers is that even if the original matter to talk about was interesting, seeing everything falling apart live due to unexpected hardware problems, and me troubleshooting live is being the best of the show… which I found very amusing.

RAB Radio the new digital world

I keep doing my radio space for Radio America Barcelona, once per week, addressed to the Catalan Community across the world and expats.

This radio program, streamed also via Twitch, is available in Catalan language only. RAB.

Open Source

carleslibs

I’ve been working in version 1.0.8 branch, and after a session of refactor on Twitch where I found a bug in MenuUtils class, I fixed it and released v. 1.0.8. You can see the video on the link.

Now I’m working on the branch v. 1.0.9.

ctop

I’ve been working in the branch 0.8.9.

My first Twitch broadcast was about adding Unit Testing to MemUtils class.

You can see all my videos:

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYzY-2wJ9W_ooR64-QzEdJg

Infrastructure

OpenStack

I recommend you the videos in this page about Operating OpenStack at Scale.

Some of my Blizzard colleagues talk on it.

Upgrades in Large Scale OpenStack Infrastructure | OpenInfra Live Recap

https://www.openstack.org/videos/summits/denver-2019/how-blizzard-entertainment-uses-autoscaling-with-overwatch

My last physical server in a Data Center

This week I decommissioned my last physical server in a Data Center.

It has been a long journey since I created my company to launch my own projects, and I started having my own infrastructure, back at 2000.

I was offering VPS at that time, with VMWare as Hypervisor.

This last Rack Server served me well for 21 years.

Now everything is Cloud, and is not viable to host and maintain servers unless this is your main occupation. Server’s motherboards die, hard drives die and they need to be replaced. Maintaining infrastructure it’s a full time job and you require somebody to do it. Also using fixed servers only prevents you from moving fast, locks a lot of money, and from spawning more compute capacity.

If you are curious this Rack Server is a Super Micro with Intel Xeon processor and SCSI drives.

Security

Firewall

I keep blocking thousands of IP Addresses every day.

When I see a pattern of an IP trying an attacks against the Server I look at the IP and if it’s from a hosting provider I just block the entire range.

I keep blocking any IP Address coming from Russia or Belarus since they invaded Ukraine.

My Health

I visited the hospital for a programmed following on my health.

The analysis are super good, and it’s super clear that I’ve improved radically. My discipline with the diet, taking the medicines and doing exercise regularly has been crucial.

My Doctor is confident that I’ll have a full recovery, but to do so I need to loss a lot of weight in a year or two.

So, I need to focus on my health and in doing exercise, being happy and avoid any kind of negative stress.

The cost of the travels and the medicines have put some stress into my economy, but I’m fortunate that I can handle it.

Entertainment / Life / Reflections

Star Wars and racism

I’m really enjoying new Start Wars series Obi Wan, and I’ve been profoundly shocked to read that there are fans being racist against the black characters.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/31/23148468/star-wars-obi-wan-moses-ingram-third-sister

So just writing here to show my support to human beings from all races, genders including transgender, LGTB+, conditions and preferences.

News from the Blog 2021-11-11

New Articles

How to communicate with your Python program running inside a Docker Container, using Linux Signals

Hope you’ll have fun reading this article:

Communicating with Docker Containers via Linux Signals and Python

I migrated my last services from Amazon and the blog to Google Compute Engine (GCE / GCP)

I wrote a Postmortem analysis about the process of migrating my last services from my 11 year old Amazon account.

Updates

Updates to articles

I updated the article about Python weird things that you may not know adding the Ellipsis …

I’ve been working in some Cassandra examples. I may publish an article soon about using it from Python and Docker.

Updates to My Books

I updated my Python and Docker books.

I’m currently writing a book about using Amazon AWS Python SDK (boto3).

Updates to Open Source projects

I have updated ctop, fixed two bugs and increased Code Coverage.

I made a new tag and released the last Stable Version:

https://gitlab.com/carles.mateo/ctop/-/tags/0.8.7

On top of my local Unit Testing, I have Jenkins checking that I don’t commit anything that breaks the Tests.

Some time ago I wrote some articles about how you can setup jenkins in a Docker Container.

Miscellaneous

Charity

I’ve donated to Wikipedia.

Only 2% of the viewers donate, so I answered the call every time it was made.

This is my 5th donation to Wikimedia.

I consider that Freedom is very important.

I bought these new books

One of my secrets to be on top is that I’m always studying.

I study all the time, at work and in my free time.

I use Linux Academy and I buy books in paper. I don’t connect with reading in tablets. I think information is stored better when read in paper. I use also a marker and pointers to keep a direct access to the most interesting points on the books.

And I study all kind of themes. Obviously I know a lot of Web Scraping, but there is always room for learning more. And whatever new I learn helps me to be better with my students and more clear writing my books.

I’ve never been a Front End, but I’ve been able to fix bugs in the Front End engines from the companies I worked for, like Privalia. I was passed a bug that prevented the Internet Explorer users to buy just one hour before we launching a massive campaign. I debugged and I found a variable named “value” so the html looked like <input name="value" value="">. In less than 30 minutes I proved to the incredulous Head of Development and the CTO that a bug in Internet Explored was causing a conflict when fetching the value from the input named value. We deployed to Production the update and the campaign was a total success. So I consider knowing Javascript and Front also a need, even if I don’t work directly with it. I want to be able to understand all the requirements and possibilities, and weaknesses, so I can fix bugs and save the day. That allowed me to fix scalability problems in Nodejs and Phantomjs projects too. (They are Javascript Server Side, event driven, projects)

It seems that Amazon.co.uk works well again for Ireland. My two last orders arrived on time and I had no problems of border taxes apparently.

Nice Python article

I enjoyed a lot this article, cause explains part of what I did with my student and friend Albert, in a project that analyzes the access logs from Apache for patterns of attempts of exploits, then feeds a database, and then blocks those offender Ip Addresses in the Firewall.

The article only covers the part of Pandas, of reading the access.log file and working with it, but is a very well redacted article:

https://mmas.github.io/read-apache-access-log-pandas

Nice Virtual Volumes article from VMware

I prefer Open Source, but there are very good commercial products too.

I liked this article about Virtual Volumes from VMWare:

Understanding Virtual Volumes (vVols) in VMware vSphere 6.7/7.0 (2113013)

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2113013

Thanks Blizzard (again)

There is a very nice initiative where we can nominate 4 colleagues a year, that we think that deserve a recognition.

My colleagues voted for me, so I received a gift voucher that I can spend in Ireland stores like Ikea, Pc World, Argos, Adidas, App Store & iTunes…

So thanks a million buds. :)