I have updated CTOP.py so now it detects if is running in a Google GCP instance.
So the list of instances/type of virtualization detected is:
Amazon AWS
Google GCP
OpenStack
VirtualBox
Docker containers
LXC
I’m working in detecting Raspberry Pi, models running CTOP, and in enabling the plugins system so anybody can easily expand the functionality of ctop.py.
v.0.7.8 Commented annotations and type hinting, to make CTOP compatible with Python 3.5.0. Added Available RAM. Added Google GCP detection. Inform if it doesn't have permissions to decode DMI. Print the userId (numeric) and the User (string), like: 1000 carles or 0 root. Logic for swappiness <= 10 Ok, >10 and <= 30 warning, >30 red (alert). Reduced digits for swap to 2, to avoid confusions.
I have updated my book Python 3 Combat Guide, with another full cycle, step by step, to convert an ugly script that escapes to shell to a nice OOP code with Unit Testing, step by step.
I have updated my book ZFS for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, adding how to create a pool and Datasets for home, sharing NFS for the Media Player.
If you like Star Wars and the Mandalorian, you may laugh has much as I did with this video:
As you see I’m writing more articles about Windows, Mac Os X, and proprietary Software. Some of my colleagues work in companies and use proprietary Software, so I’ll be writing more articles about those ecosystems. I spend more time now with colleagues working on all kind of projects, and with students that have other problems too, so I help them. However my main focus is Open Source, Architecture, Scaling, programming in Python and Java.
Is something very simple, but will help my student friends to validate Input from Keyboard without losing too many hours.
The Input Validation Classes I create in PHP for Privalia or in my PHP Catalonia Framework, are much, much, more powerful, allowing the validation of complete forms, rendering errors, etc… although they were created for Web, and not for Keyboard input.
It recursively goes to all the subdirectories looking for .py files, and then it counts the lines.
I updated the price of my books to be the minimum allowed by LeanPub, to $5 USD, and created a bundle of two of them for $7 USD.
So people can benefit from this during the lock down.
I’ve updated the Python Combat Guide book with a sample of using Paramiko Libraries for SSH, and increased the Object Oriented Programing and Unit Testing, sections. I also added some books to the Bibliography.
I’ve read the postmortem initial analysis from Slack’s incident. It’s really interesting.
I cannot share it, but I guess that at some point they will publish it on their blog:
I’ve published a class to validate input from Keyboard in Java. Is something very simple, thinking basically about university students struggling to Scanner and nextInt() methods, and that can save many hours.
I decided to lower the price of my book to the minimum in LeanPub $5 USD while covid is going on in order to help people with their lives. https://leanpub.com/u/carlesmateo
I read with surprise that Comcast is capping the Internet use to 1.2TB per month, and that they will be charging excess.
So… if I contract a Backup with Carbonite or BackBlaze or DropBox or another company and I backup my 10TB files, Comcast will ruin me charging excesses… Or if I work from home, or the family watches a lot of Netflix… I can only thinK on their Cast Strategy of CastNumberOfClientsToBankrupcy.
A joke to indicate that I think they will loss clients.
Imagine yesterday I downloaded two images of Ubuntu, being 5 GB, installed Call of Duty in one computer 180 GB, installed few Xbox games 400 GB, listened to Spotify 10 Gb, watched youtube 3 GB, watched Netflix 4 GB, so 602 GB in one day.
Not counting the bandwidth WFH (Working from Home).
Not counting Windows Updates, TV updates, consoles updates, Android Updates, Ubuntu updates…
And this is done in the middle of the covid-19 pandemic, with so many people lock down at home, playing video games, watching movies, and requiring desperately distractions.
I think what is most interesting of this article are the explanations about the Memory. Adding a swapfile is something easy, but there is related information that may be of interest for the young Engineers.
Free Games: Epic Games allow you to download these games for free for a limited period of time
However the 12 Gbps SAS SSD were returning Checksum errors in ZFS when I did copy information or I ran scrub. I’m afraid the enclosure can only provide 6 Gbps at max, or a poor connection. Cables or expanders use to be the reason. I ordered new cables to make a direct connection to the HBA Controller without the enclosure to validate my theory and the drives stopped showing errors.
There is something good in all bad: I have been able to document and explain how to troubleshoot, actual errors in ZFS, in my book and talk about the problems with the cables, and the advantages of using a SAS controller even if you use SATA drives.
I got my first Excellent in an Assignment in an Ireland university, which makes me specially happy. And I keep going on studying in Linux Academy, the last course I did was GCP and Terraform, even if I knew both it helps me to keep my skills sharp.
I share with you some offers and charity bundles that I enrolled and enjoyed a lot:
There is an offer with Microsoft Pass which is that we can use Disney+ for free during 30 days.
I started watching the Mandalorian, Season 2, and is wonderfully displayed in 4K. The quality of the video surprised me. Not that many contents in Netflix are 4K and I really enjoyed the great quality of the image.
Humble Bundle offers a pack of 8 VR games per €13.45. If you like Virtual Reality and have your headset, this pack is amazing, and the benefits go to charity: Movember. The games are downloaded from Steam and the pack will last for 14 days.
Don’t forget to balance how much of your contribution goes to every player.
Unfortunately by default most of the money goes to O’Reilly and Humble Tip and few to the Charity cause. You can change that from the web when going to to the payment.
This article talks about how at Riot Games they use Slack. Slack is really a powerful tool, and also makes the communication more human in companies with their approach and the funny icons and /giphy. I’m very serious when it comes to work but I recognize the friendly, warm, human and lovely touch these kind of animated icons bring to the conversations.
Remember that life of the SSD is different from spinning drives. I recommend to keep your backups on external spinning drives disconnected most of the time.
I updated it the Nov-01, as I normally do, bringing more content.
I’ve been paid the royalties for he past two months and I reinvested everything (and more from my pocket) in Hardware for working with ZFS.
I was offered by an editorial in The States to publish Python Combat Guide and other of my books worldwide. I was thinking it for a while. It was very good money, translation to multiple languages and platforms and marketing and a lot of promotion, but I would had loss the rights and the Freedom I have now, like the possibility to offer discount coupons to who I want and to update the contents often. So to celebrate my decision for you, readers of the blog, during September, I provide a discounted price of $5 USD for the fist 100 sales instead of the $25 USD suggested price. Use the following link:
As part of my effort to contributing with nice Open Source products to the Community I have made some investments to keep contributing to:
OpenZFS
My old tool for managing ZFS and Network shares easily
I’m writing a new book about managing ZFS for Small Business too, so I show how to operate on this hardware, good points and downsides.
I’m assembling a new Pc with ZFS plenty of Disk Storage within a mix of:
SAS Enterprise grade SSD 2.5″
SATA 12Gb Enterprise grade SSD 2.5″
SATA SSD 2.5″
SATA HDD 2TB 2.5″
SATA HDD 2TB 3.5″
I’m a big fan of Intel, but this time I have chosen AMD. Concretely a AMD Ryzen 7 3700X AM4 8 Core / 16 Threads, 3.6 GHz to 4.4 GHz with Turbo. The reason I chose this CPU is because it only uses 65W but still has 8 Cores / 16 Threads.
Also I want to see the performance of this AMD Ryzen with CMIPS and another important reason is that AMD motherboards support PCI 4.0. I have bought a NVMe SSD Samsung 980 PRO PCI 4.0 (x4) able to read at 6,400 MB/s. I will use this AMD box for running VMs as well. Basically Virtual Box and Docker.
I’ve been surprised that for 169.99 GBP I can have a very good Asus Motherboard with a 2.5 Gb Ethernet: ASUS ROG STRIX B550-F GAMING, AMD B550, AM4, DDR4, PCIe 4.0, SATA3, Dual M.2, CrossFire, 2.5GbE, USB 3.2 Gen2 A+C, ATX.
In order to have an Asus motherboard with a 2.5 Gb Ethernet for Intel I had to jump to a 254 GBP motherboard and Intel is still PCI 3.0. Actually there are PCI 10Gb NICs at 80 GBP so at some point I’ll upgrade my home network from Gigabit to 10 Gb. That will come slowly, but if the new equipment I assemble has 2.5 Gb when I upgrade the main switches to 10 Gb, at least I’ll be able to communicate at 2.5 Gb without ant additional change.
Also memory at 3200, speed that the AMD motherboard can provide, is more than affordable.
This new server will have 64 GB of RAM (Corsair DDR4 Vengeance PC4-25600 (3200)), as I plan to run VMs and use Volumes mounted via iSCSI and locally as block devices to improve my Software. I’ve bought a new UPS to keep it running in case power goes down. That’s something that doesn’t happen often in my city in Ireland, honestly, but I never forget that this happens in Barcelona two or three times per year, and that a high tension spike can burn your motherboard, drives, or electronics like the TV or the fridge. I’ve bought as well a new KVM Switch, a HDMI 4K and USB too one, so I don’t have to have so many keyboards. My logitech M720 allowed me to use it with 3 computers, but still I want something more operational. The KVM I bought allow me to switch with a button or within a hotkey in the keyboard.
I bought a new Icy box fox handling 6 2.5 drives in just one bay of the tower, and a 850 Watt Corsair PSU that will be able to power the many drives I want at the same time.
ZFS on Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS A guide for Small/Medium Business and power users to work with ZFS. https://leanpub.com/zfs-ubuntu
Those can be purchased while I’m still working on them and get the updates that I’ll be publishing and keeping a communication with me about doubts or improvements.
Halloween Software Offers
I saw some Halloween offers and I purchased Software licenses for Software I use.
I contribute a lot to Open Source, and many years ago before Open Source existed I was creating Freeware Software. But I think that good commercial Software deserves to be supported. Like everything in life, if they are doing a good work that is useful to me, why not giving them support?. It is also a way to make sure they will continue producing amazing Software. And in the other hand, myself, I create Software. Some times commercial Software, and I like to be paid, so I apply the same principle.
One of my colleagues showed me dstat, a very nice tool for system monitoring, and bandwidth of a drive monitoring. Also ifstat, as complement to iftop is very cool for Network too. This functionality is also available in CTOP.py
As I shared in the past news of the blog, I’m resuming my contributions to ZFS Community.
Long time ago I created some ZFS tools that I want to share soon as Open Source.
I equipped myself with the proper Hardware to test on SAS and SATA:
12G Internal PCI-E SAS/SATA HBA RAID Controller Card, Broadcom’s SAS 3008, compatible for SAS 9300-8I. This is just an HDA (Host Data Adapter), it doesn’t support RAID. Only connects up to 8 drives or 1024 through expander, to my computer. It has a bandwidth of 9,600 MB/s which guarantees me that I’ll be able to add 12 SAS SSD Enterprise grade at almost the max speed of the drives. Those drives perform at 900 MB/s so if I’m using all of them at the same time, like if I have a pool of 8 + 3 and I rebuild a broken drive or I just push Data, I would be using 12×900 = 10,800 MB/s. Close. Fair enough.
VANDESAIL Mini-SAS Cables, 1m Internal Mini-SAS to 4x SAS SATA Forward Breakout Cable Hard Drive Data Transfer Cable (SAS Cable).
SilverStone SST-FS212B – Aluminium Trayless Hot Swap Mobile Rack Backplane / Internal Hard Drive Enclosure for 12x 2.5 Inch SAS/SATA HDD or SSD, fit in any 3x 5.25 Inch Drive Bay, with Fan and Lock, black
Terminator is here. I ordered this T-800 head a while ago and finally arrived.
Finally I will have my empty USB keys located and protected. ;)
I have benchmarked three different CPUs and two Compute optimized Amazon AWS instances with CMIPS 1.0.5 64bit. The two Intel Xeon baremetals equip 2 x Intel Xeon Processor and the third baremetal equips a single Intel Core i7-7800X:
If you’re surprised by the number of cores reported by the Amazon instance m5d.24xlarge, and even more for the baremetal c5n.metal, you’re guessing well that this comes from having Servers with 4 CPUs for Compute Optimized series.
When I can choose I use Linux, but in many companies I work with Windows workstations. I’ve published a list of useful Software I use in all my Windows workstations.
WFH I currently use two external monitors attached to the laptop. I planned to add a new one using a Display Port connected to the Dell USB-C dongle that provides me Ethernet and one additional HDMI as well. I got the cable from Amazon but unfortunately something is not working. In order to make myself comfortable and see some the graphs of the systems worldwide as I have on the office’s displays, I created a small HTML page, that joins several monitor pages in one single web page using frames. This way I only have one page loaded on the browser, maximized, and this monitor is dedicated to those graphs of the stats of the Systems. Something very simple, but very useful. You can extend the number of columns and rows it to have more graphics in the same screen.
If you don’t have the space or the resources for more monitors you can use the ingenious.
I have a cheap HDMI switch that allows me to do PinP (Picture in Picture) with one main source on the monitor, and two using a fraction of their original space. It may allow you to see variants in graphics.
And in you have only a single monitor, you can use a chrome extension that rotates tabs, which is also very useful.
Be careful if you use the reload features with software like Jira or Confluence. If they are slow normally, imagine if you mess it by reloading every 30 seconds… I discourage you to use auto refresh on these kind of Softwares.
This past week I have connected the XBOX One X Controller to the Windows laptop for the first time. Normally I use the Pc only for strategy games, but I wanted to play other games like Lost Planet 3, or Fall Guys in a console mode way. I figured that would be very easy and it was. You turn on the controller, press the connect button like you did to pair with the console, and in Windows indicate pair to a Xbox One controller. That’s it.
I’ve also updated my Python 3 Combat Guide, to add the explanation, step by step, about how to refactor and make resilient, and add Unit Testing to a spaghetti code, and turn it into a modern OOP. Is currently 255 DIN-A4 pages.
This is something I wanted to share with you for a while. One of the most funny things in my career is what I call: Squirrel Strikes Back
I named this as the first incident where a provider told that the reason of a fiber failure was a squirrel chewing the cable.
I popularized this with my friends in Systems Administration and SRE and when they suffer a Squirrel Attack incident, they forward it to me, for great joy.
I’m used to construction or gas, water, electricity, highways repair operations on the cities accidentally cutting fiber cables, thunders or truck accidents on the highway breaking the floor and cutting tubes and issues like that. I’ve been seeing that for around 25 years.
So the first time I saw a provider referring to a squirrel cutting the cables it was pretty hilarious. :)
In my funny mental picture: I could visually imagine a cable thrown in the middle of the forest, over trees, and a squirrel chewing it as it tastes like peanuts. :) or a shark cutting a Google’s or Facebook’s intercontinental cable thrown without any protection. ;)
The sense of humor and the good vibes, are two of the most important things in life.
I tried to continue following it since I left Sanmina. ZFS is really an amazing Software and it’s lead by an amazing Community of super cool Engineers and companies. I would like to continue contributing ASAP.
I bought some new hard drives in order to work a bit on this. You don’t need to have dedicated hardware if you want to test features. You can run in a VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation.
I received more books about DevOps and Python
None is perfect. I see flaws in all of them and bad architecture practices*, however from all I learn interesting things.
You know, I study every day. At least 30 minutes, after work. As part of my healthy routines.
But I also study and learn during the work, as we have time available for this.
I’m very fortunate that Blizzard gives me time every day to study. That’s amazing. They also send us to events paying the ticket, travel, hotel, expenses… now with covid-19 we only go to virtual events, but the company still pay for this and give free days. Is a very nice company.
I continue having purchases of my book, and I’m very happy about that. I’m working on improving it and providing more contents and samples going from the scratch, with step by step code samples. From spaghetti code reading CSV files, to OOP with Full Coverage.
My application for a Higher degree Computer Science Cloud Computing (Level 8) has been accepted. The Irish government pays me 90% of the degree, and Blizzard will pay me the other 10% after I pass the first year course.
I’m really grateful to this beautiful country, Ireland.
Having an Irish degree is something that brings me an special illusion.
I have updated CTOP.py with some interesting features
It allows to pass a fixed width and height for the terminal render. That’s very useful when you run CTOP in a Docker non interactive session, or from a Cron, with the –iterations=1 so the output can be captured programmatically.
Jetbrains has provided me with a Free License of all their products, in order to support my work in Open Source projects. That’s very nice. I’m using now mainly PyCharm and PhpStorm.
At the beginning of the covid-19 I wrote a simulator in Python. That’s why I was able to anticipate that the number of cases and deaths would be very much higher when nobody around me knew what was going to happen. My first simulations were simple, and the algorithms were growing in complexity until I had a full rich Object Oriented modeler. Maybe I’ll write an article about this someday.
I studied the evolution of several countries and I was working with simulations in Spain until their government started blocking the information and stop providing transparent and accurate metrics.
I’m seeing how the covid is affecting and transforming several kind of business:
Meetup.com I see meetups with more than 1,000 users closing, as they are no meeting anymore
Airlines, obviously
Hotels, offering less services
Metasearchers and OTAs (Online travel agencies)
I can imagine the impact on airbnb
Discos, nightclubs are closing doors
Restaurants, they will lose the Christmas season (with families and companies doing lunch and dinners)
At the same time, other companies are hitting records in sales
Videogames companies
Hardware is being sold, to accommodate WFH and remote working.
Companies like Amazon or Overstock.com are delivering well where people before were buying into stores.
VPN solutions for Remote Working are being implemented in those places that had not enabled Remote Working.
After doing a Masterclass to some colleagues about Refactor, Code Reliability, Quality, The non-happy path and Unit Testing, I’m preparing some contents that I’ll publish to the Community soon. So far I created this repo, where I added the source code for lesson 0: starting to program in Python videos that I created few months ago to help beginners.
I also added some contents to lesson 1, where we refactor pure spaghetti code with no error control, to something more elaborated with unit testing and full code coverage. Still procedural, but I will jump to next class in two weeks, where we will move to OOP and Dependency Injection.
This new scenario challenges the old companies and is driving to some internal tensions in the companies that resist to allow employees to freely Remote Work.
I published this script to read the combined bandwidth, and peak max, from all drives.
I got new sales of my book in LeanPub and I’ve to say that this really makes me happy
I’ve been working in adding new information and I released a new update this week, the version 0.77. Talking about mutable and immutable objects when passing to a function, and references.
Bought new books and resumed my routines to study daily in the Coffee Shop (recently open)
I bought some new hardware
An Arm to support the laptop and a Vesa Monitor. That’s my Desk, actually
It is exactly this model:
I bought also an HDMI switch with 3 inputs and PinP
The most cool feature is the PinP. Is a simple model with reduced but does what I wanted perfectly and cheap. Worth the price.
I bought also this Mic/headphone USB dondle with a single jack. Very cool
Does exactly what I wanted, adding a new device. I’m using on a Windows 10 Enterprise box.
I’ve bought a static bicycle for the WFH / lockdown covid-19.
