Category Archives: Web development

News of the blog 2021-08-16

  • I completed my ZFS on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS book.
    I had an error in an actual hard drive so I added a Troubleshooting section explaining how I fixed it.
  • I paused for a while the advance of my book Python: basic exercises for beginners, as my colleague Michela is translating it to Italian. She is a great Engineer and I cannot be more happy of having her help.
  • I added a new article about how to create a simple web Star Wars game using Flask.
    As always, I use Docker and a Dockerfile to automate the deployment, so you can test it without messing with your local system.
    The code is very simple and easy to understand.
mysql> UPDATE wp_options set option_value='blog.carlesmateo.local' WHERE option_name='siteurl';
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.02 sec)
Rows matched: 1 Changed: 1 Warnings: 0

This way I set an entry in /etc/hosts and I can do all the tests I want.

  • I added a new section to the blog, is a link where you can see all the articles published, ordered by number of views.
    /posts_and_views.php

Is in the main page, just after the recommended articles.
Here you can see the source code.

  • I removed the Categories:
    • Storage
      • ZFS
  • In favor of:
    • Hardware
      • Storage
        • ZFS
  • So the articles with Categories in the group deleted were reassigned the Categories in the second group.
  • Visually:
    • I removed some annoying lines from the Quick Selection access.
      They came from inherited CSS properties from my WordPress, long time customized, and I created new styles for this section.
    • I adjusted the line-height to avoid separation between lines being too much.
  • I added a link in the section of Other Engineering Blogs that I like, to the great https://github.com/lesterchan site, author of many super cool WordPress plugins.

My PHP Script to see WordPress Posts and Views ordered by Views

This article shows the code for my PHP program posts_and_views.php that you can see at the bottom of in the Quick Selection bar.

Page rendered of all my Published Posts sorted by Views

So I wrote this small PHP Code to display the number of Post Views recorded in my WordPress Database, sorted by Views in descending order.

In other words, sorted from Most Viewed.

Please note: In order to track the post views I use the excellent plugin WP-PostViews by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan

Here is the code for posts_and_views.php

As you can see I use wp-config.php file to get the Database Settings (username, password, database) but I don’t use the WordPress Engine, it is just a stand alone PHP. So I wrote my own function to get the slug based on the category name. I believe the slug for it is in the Database and I could have added this as a SubQuery with JOINs, which would be better, but I wanted to keep the Database workload lightweight and especially, I did not want to invest more time investigating how the get the slug.

As I tested my function I didn’t find any Category failing but I saw that I had the Category Storage repeated in two different structure tree in Categories, and I will only always link to just the first one (So I was not linkin to the slug storage-2). I fixed that Category that I found repeated but to be honest if this script was a commercial solution or an Open Source solution properly maintained rather than just a sample, I would update it to have Categories and Tags’ slugs coming from the Database.

I would probably make it work with a Cron that would generate a cached page, updated every hour or every ten minutes. I did this in other projects I worked or in my PHP Framework Catalonia Framerwork.

But honestly, the load of the page does not justify a major effort in optimizing here, in this case.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <style>
        .first {

            background-color: blue;
            padding: 12px;
        }
        .second {
            background-color: rgba(254, 253, 252, 0.7);
            text-align: center;
            padding:20px 0;
            font-size: 20px;
        }

        .centered {
            text-align: center;
        }

        /* unvisited link */
        a:link {
            color: blue;
            text-decoration: none;
        }

        /* visited link */
        a:visited {
            color: blue;
            text-decoration: none;
        }

        /* mouse over link */
        a:hover {
            color: #00A8EF;
            text-decoration: underline;
        }

        /* selected link */
        a:active {
            color: blue;
        }
    </style>
<body>
<?php

include "wp-config.php";

$s_site_name = "Carles Mateo's blog";
$s_site_link = "https://blog.carlesmateo.com";

function get_category_slug($s_text) {
    $s_output_text = strtolower($s_text);
    $s_output_text = str_replace(" ", "-", $s_output_text);

    return $s_output_text;
}

?>
<h1><a href="<?php print $s_site_link; ?>"><?php print($s_site_name); ?></a></h1>
<?php


$s_sort = "views DESC, post_date, post_title DESC";

if (array_key_exists("sort", $_GET)) {
    if ($_GET["sort"] == "date") {
        $s_sort = "post_date, views, post_title";
    }
}

$s_servername = "localhost";
$s_database = DB_NAME;
$s_username = DB_USER;
$s_password = DB_PASSWORD;


// Create connection
$o_conn = new mysqli($s_servername, $s_username, $s_password, $s_database);

// Check connection
if ($o_conn->connect_error) {
    die("Connection failed: " . $o_conn->connect_error);
}

/*
mysql> DESCRIBE wp_posts;
+-----------------------+-----------------+------+-----+---------------------+----------------+
| Field                 | Type            | Null | Key | Default             | Extra          |
+-----------------------+-----------------+------+-----+---------------------+----------------+
| ID                    | bigint unsigned | NO   | PRI | NULL                | auto_increment |
| post_author           | bigint unsigned | NO   | MUL | 0                   |                |
| post_date             | datetime        | NO   |     | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 |                |
| post_date_gmt         | datetime        | NO   |     | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 |                |
| post_content          | longtext        | NO   |     | NULL                |                |
| post_title            | text            | NO   |     | NULL                |                |
| post_excerpt          | text            | NO   |     | NULL                |                |
| post_status           | varchar(20)     | NO   |     | publish             |                |
| comment_status        | varchar(20)     | NO   |     | open                |                |
| ping_status           | varchar(20)     | NO   |     | open                |                |
| post_password         | varchar(255)    | NO   |     |                     |                |
| post_name             | varchar(200)    | NO   | MUL |                     |                |
| to_ping               | text            | NO   |     | NULL                |                |
| pinged                | text            | NO   |     | NULL                |                |
| post_modified         | datetime        | NO   |     | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 |                |
| post_modified_gmt     | datetime        | NO   |     | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 |                |
| post_content_filtered | longtext        | NO   |     | NULL                |                |
| post_parent           | bigint unsigned | NO   | MUL | 0                   |                |
| guid                  | varchar(255)    | NO   |     |                     |                |
| menu_order            | int             | NO   |     | 0                   |                |
| post_type             | varchar(20)     | NO   | MUL | post                |                |
| post_mime_type        | varchar(100)    | NO   |     |                     |                |
| comment_count         | bigint          | NO   |     | 0                   |                |
+-----------------------+-----------------+------+-----+---------------------+----------------+
 */

/*
mysql> describe wp_postmeta;
+------------+-----------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field      | Type            | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+------------+-----------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| meta_id    | bigint unsigned | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
| post_id    | bigint unsigned | NO   | MUL | 0       |                |
| meta_key   | varchar(255)    | YES  | MUL | NULL    |                |
| meta_value | longtext        | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
+------------+-----------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
 */

$s_sql = "SELECT DISTINCT post_title, post_content,
                 (SELECT CAST(meta_value AS SIGNED) FROM wp_postmeta WHERE wp_postmeta.meta_key = 'views' AND wp_postmeta.post_id = wp_posts.ID) AS 'views',
                 (SELECT group_concat(wp_terms.name separator ',') 
                         FROM wp_terms
                  INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy 
                          ON wp_terms.term_id = wp_term_taxonomy.term_id
                  INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships wpr 
                          ON wpr.term_taxonomy_id = wp_term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id
                  WHERE 
                         taxonomy= 'category' AND wp_posts.ID = wpr.object_id
                ) AS 'Categories',
                (SELECT group_concat(wp_terms.name separator ', ') 
                        FROM wp_terms
                 INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy 
                         ON wp_terms.term_id = wp_term_taxonomy.term_id
                 INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships wpr 
                         ON wpr.term_taxonomy_id = wp_term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id
                 WHERE 
                        taxonomy= 'post_tag' AND wp_posts.ID = wpr.object_id
                ) AS 'Tags',
               ID, post_name, post_date, post_modified, post_type
          FROM wp_posts
          WHERE 
                post_type = 'post' AND post_status = 'publish'
          ORDER BY
                $s_sort";

$o_result = $o_conn->query($s_sql);

if ($o_result->num_rows > 0) {
    ?><table style="border:1px solid">
    <tr class="first"><th>Title</th><th style="min-width:100px">Views</th><th style="min-width:150px">Creation Date</th><th>Categories</th><th>Tags</th></tr>

    <?php
    $i_total_views = 0;
    $i_articles = 0;

    // output data of each row
    while($row = $o_result->fetch_assoc()) {
        $s_style='style="border:1px solid"';
        $s_style='';
        $s_url = $row['post_name'];
        print('<tr>');
        print("<td $s_style>");
        print('<a href="'.$s_url.'" target="_blank">');
        print($row["post_title"]);
        print('</a>');
        print("</td>");
        print('<td class="centered" '.$s_style.'>');
        print(number_format($row["views"]));
        print("</td>");
        print("<td $s_style>");
        print("<small>");
        print($row["post_date"]);
        print("</small>");
        print("</td>");
        print("<td $s_style>");
        $s_categories = $row["Categories"];
        $a_categories = explode (",", $s_categories);
        $s_categories_content = "";
        foreach($a_categories as $s_category) {
            $s_category_slug = "/category/".get_category_slug($s_category)."/";
            $s_categories_content = $s_categories_content .'<a href="'.$s_category_slug.'" target="_blank">';
            $s_categories_content = $s_categories_content .$s_category;
            $s_categories_content = $s_categories_content ."</a>, ";
        }

        if (strlen($s_categories_content) > 0) {
            $s_categories_content = substr($s_categories_content, 0, -2);
        }

        print($s_categories_content);
        print("</td>");
        print("<td $s_style>");
        print($row["Tags"]);
        print("</td>");
        // $row["post_content"];
        $i_total_views = $i_total_views + intval($row["views"]);
        $i_articles++;
        echo "</tr>";
    } ?></table><?php
    print("<strong>Total articles:</strong> ".number_format($i_articles)." <strong>Total Views:</strong> ".number_format($i_total_views));
    print("<br>");
} else {
    echo "<p>0 results</p>";
}
$o_conn->close();

?>
</body>
</html>

A sample Flask application

Today I bring you a game made with Python and Flask extracted from my book Python 3 Combat Guide.

It is a very simple game where you have to choose what Star wars robot you prefer.

Then an internal counter, kept in a static variable, is updated.

I display the time as well, to show the use of a in import and dynamic contents printed as well.

I added a Dockerfile and a bash script to build the Docker Image, so you can run the Docker Container without installing anything in your computer.

You can download the code from here:

https://gitlab.com/carles.mateo/python-flask-r2d2

Or clone the project:

git clone https://gitlab.com/carles.mateo/python-flask-r2d2.git

Then build the image with the script I provided:

sudo ./build_docker.sh

After Docker Image flask_app is built, you can run a Docker Container based on it with:

sudo docker run -d -p 5000:5000 --name flask_app flask_app

After you’re done, in order to stop the Container type:

sudo docker stop flask_app

Here is the source code of the Python file flask_app.py:

#
# flask_app.py
#
# Author: Carles Mateo
# Creation Date: 2020-05-10 20:50 GMT+1
# Description: A simple Flask Web Application
#              Part of the samples of https://leanpub.com/pythoncombatguide
#              More source code for the book at https://gitlab.com/carles.mateo/python_combat_guide
#

from flask import Flask
import datetime


def get_datetime(b_milliseconds=False):
    """
    Return the datetime with miliseconds in format YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.xxxxx
    or without milliseconds as YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS
    """
    if b_milliseconds is True:
        s_now = str(datetime.datetime.now())
    else:
        s_now = str(datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"))

    return s_now


app = Flask(__name__)

# Those variables will keep their value as long as Flask is running
i_votes_r2d2 = 0
i_votes_bb8 = 0


@app.route('/')
def page_root():
    s_page = "<html>"
    s_page += "<title>My Web Page!</title>"
    s_page += "<body>"
    s_page += "<h1>Time now is: " + get_datetime() + "</h1>"
    s_page += """<h2>Who is more sexy?</h2>
<a href="r2d2"><img src="static/r2d2.png"></a> <a href="bb8"><img width="250" src="static/bb8.jpg"></a>"""
    s_page += "</body>"
    s_page += "</html>"

    return s_page


@app.route('/bb8')
def page_bb8():
    global i_votes_bb8

    i_votes_bb8 = i_votes_bb8 + 1

    s_page = "<html>"
    s_page += "<title>My Web Page!</title>"
    s_page += "<body>"
    s_page += "<h1>Time now is: " + get_datetime() + "</h1>"
    s_page += """<h2>BB8 Is more sexy!</h2>
                <img width="250" src="static/bb8.jpg">"""
    s_page += "<p>I have: " + str(i_votes_bb8) + "</p>"
    s_page += "</body>"
    s_page += "</html>"

    return s_page


@app.route('/r2d2')
def page_r2d2():
    global i_votes_r2d2

    i_votes_r2d2 = i_votes_r2d2 + 1

    s_page = "<html>"
    s_page += "<title>My Web Page!</title>"
    s_page += "<body>"
    s_page += "<h1>Time now is: " + get_datetime() + "</h1>"
    s_page += """<h2>R2D2 Is more sexy!</h2>
                <img src="static/r2d2.png">"""
    s_page += "<p>I have: " + str(i_votes_r2d2) + "</p>"
    s_page += "</body>"
    s_page += "</html>"

    return s_page


if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run(host="0.0.0.0", port=5000, debug=True)

As always, the naming of the variables is based on MT Notation.

The Dockerfile is very straightforward:

FROM ubuntu:20.04

MAINTAINER Carles Mateo

ARG DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive

RUN apt update && \
    apt install -y vim python3-pip &&  pip3 install pytest && \
    apt-get clean

ENV PYTHON_COMBAT_GUIDE /var/python_combat_guide

RUN mkdir -p $PYTHON_COMBAT_GUIDE

COPY ./ $PYTHON_COMBAT_GUIDE

ENV PYTHONPATH "${PYTHONPATH}:$PYTHON_COMBAT_GUIDE/src/:$PYTHON_COMBAT_GUIDE/src/lib"

RUN pip3 install -r $PYTHON_COMBAT_GUIDE/requirements.txt

# This is important so when executing python3 -m current directory will be added to Syspath
# Is not necessary, as we added to PYTHONPATH
#WORKDIR $PYTHON_COMBAT_GUIDE/src/lib

EXPOSE 5000

# Launch our Flask Application
CMD ["/usr/bin/python3", "/var/python_combat_guide/src/flask_app.py"]

Solving Oracle error ORA 600 [KGL-heap-size-exceeded]

Time ago there was a web page that was rendered in blank for certain group of users.

The errors were coming from an Oracle instance. One SysAdmin restarted the instance, but the errors continued.

Often there are problems due to having two different worlds: Development and Production/Operations.

What works in Development, or even in Docker, may not work at Scale in Production.

That query that works with 100,000 products, may not work with 10,000,000.

I have programmed a lot for web, so when I saw a blank page I knew it was an internal error as the headers sent by the Web Server indicated 500. DBAs were seeing elevated number of errors in one of the Servers.

So I went straight to the Oracle’s logs for that Servers.

I did a quick filter in bash:

cat /u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/world7c/world7c2/alert/log.xml | grep "ERR" -B4 -A3

This returned several errors of the kind “ORA 600 [ipc_recreate_que_2]” but this was not the error our bad guy was:

‘ORA 600 [KGL-heap-size-exceeded]’

The XML fragment was similar to this:

<msg time='2016-01-24T13:28:33.263+00:00' org_id='oracle' comp_id='rdbms'
msg_id='7725874800' type='INCIDENT_ERROR' group='Generic Internal Error'
level='1' host_id='gotham.world7c.justice.cat' host_addr='10.100.100.30'
pid='281279' prob_key='ORA 600 [KGL-heap-size-exceeded]' downstream_comp='LIBCACHE'
errid='726175' detail_path='/u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/world7c/world7c2/trace/world7c2_ora_281279.trc'>
<txt>Errors in file /u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/world7c/world7c2/trace/world7c2_ora_281279.trc  (incident=726175):
ORA-00600: internal error code, arguments: [KGL-heap-size-exceeded], [0x14D22C0C30], [0], [524288008], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []
</txt></msg>

Just before this error, there was an error with a Query, and the PID matched, so it seemed cleared to me that the query was causing the crash at Oracle level.

Checking the file:

/u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/world7c/world7c2/trace/world7c2_ora_281279.trc

The content was something like this:

<msg time='2016-01-24T13:28:33.263+00:00' org_id='oracle' comp_id='rdbms'
msg_id='7725874800' type='INCIDENT_ERROR' group='Generic Internal Error'
level='1' host_id='gotham.world7c.justice.cat' host_addr='10.100.100.30'
pid='281279' prob_key='ORA 600 [KGL-heap-size-exceeded]' downstream_comp='LIBCACHE'
errid='726175' detail_path='/u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/world7c/world7c2/trace/world7c2_ora_281279.trc'>
<txt>Errors in file /u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/world7c/world7c2/trace/world7c2_ora_281279.trc  (incident=726175):
ORA-00600: internal error code, arguments: [KGL-heap-size-exceeded], [0x14D22C0C30], [0], [524288008], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], []
</txt>
</msg>

Basically in our case, the query that was launched by the BackEnd was using more memory than allowed, which caused Oracle to kill it.

That is a tunnable that you can modify introduced in Oracle 10g.

You can see the current values first:

SQL> select
2 nam.ksppinm NAME,
3 nam.ksppdesc DESCRIPTION,
4 val.KSPPSTVL
5 from
6 x$ksppi nam,
7 x$ksppsv val
8 where nam.indx = val.indx and nam.ksppinm like '%kgl_large_heap_%_threshold%';

NAME                              | DESCRIPTION                       | KSPPSTVL
=============================================================================================
_kgl_large_heap_warning_threshold | maximum heap size before KGL      | 4194304
                                    writes warnings to the alert log
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_kgl_large_heap_assert_threshold  | maximum heap size before KGL      | 4194304
                                    raises an internal error

So, _kgl_large_heap_warning_threshold is the maximum heap before getting a warning, and _kgl_large_heap_assert_threshold is the maximum heap before getting the error.

Depending in your case the solution can be either:

  • Breaking your query in several to reduce the memory used
  • Use paginating or LIMIT
  • Set a bigger value for those tunnables.

It will work setting 0 for these to variables, although I don’t recommend it to you, as you want your Server to kill queries that are taking more memory than you want.

To increase the value of , you have to update it. Please note it is in bytes, so for 32MB is 32 * 1024 * 1024, so 33,554,432, and using spfile:

SQL> alter system set "_kgl_large_heap_warning_threshold"=33554432
scope=spfile ;
 
SQL> shutdown immediate 

SQL> startup
 
SQL> show parameter _kgl_large_heap_warning_threshold
NAME                               TYPE      VALUE
==================================|=========|===============
 
_kgl_large_heap_warning_threshold | integer | 33554432
 

Or if using the parameter file, set:

_kgl_large_heap_warning_threshold=33554432

Post-Mortem: The mystery of the duplicated Transactions into an e-Commerce

Me, with 4 more Senior BackEnd Engineers wrote the new e-Commerce for a multinational.

The old legacy Software evolved into a different code for every country, making it impossible to be maintained.

The new Software we created used inheritance to use the same base code for each country and overloaded only the specific different behavior of every country, like for the payment methods, for example Brazil supporting “parcelados” or Germany with specific payment players.

We rewrote the old procedural PHP BackEnd into modern PHP, with OOP and our own Framework but we had to keep the transactional code in existing MySQL Procedures, so the logic was split. There was a Front End Team consuming our JSONs. Basically all the Front End code was cached in Akamai and pages were rendered accordingly to the JSONs served from out BackEnd.

It was a huge success.

This e-Commerce site had Campaigns that started at a certain time, so the amount of traffic that would come at the same time would be challenging.

The project was working very well, and after some time the original Team was split into different projects in the company and a Team for maintenance and evolutives was hired.

At certain point they started to encounter duplicate transactions, and nobody was able to solve the mystery.

I’m specialized into fixing impossible problems. They used to send me to Impossible Missions, and I am famous for solving impossible problems easily.

So I started the task with a SRE approach.

The System had many components and layers. The problem could be in many places.

I had in my arsenal of tools, Software like mysqldebugger with which I found an unnoticed bug in decimals calculation in the past surprising everybody.

Previous Engineers involved believed the problem was in the Database side. They were having difficulties to identify the issue by the random nature of the repetitions.

Some times the order lines were duplicated, and other times were the payments, which means charging twice to the customer.

Redis Cluster could also play a part on this, as storing the session information and the basket.

But I had to follow the logic sequence of steps.

If transactions from customer were duplicated that mean that in first term those requests have arrived to the System. So that was a good point of start.

With a list of duplicated operations, I checked the Webservers logs.

That was a bit tricky as the Webserver was recording the Ip of the Load Balancer, not the ip of the customer. But we were tracking the sessionid so with that I could track and user request history. A good thing was also that we were using cookies to stick the user to the same Webserver node. That has pros and cons, but in this case I didn’t have to worry about the logs combined of all the Webservers, I could just identify a transaction in one node, and stick into that node’s log.

I was working with SSH and Bash, no log aggregators existing today were available at that time.

So when I started to catch web logs and grep a bit an smile was drawn into my face. :)

There were no transactions repeated by a bad behavior on MySQL Masters, or by BackEnd problems. Actually the HTTP requests were performed twice.

And the explanation to that was much more simple.

Many Windows and Mac User are used to double click in the Desktop to open programs, so when they started to use Internet, they did the same. They double clicked on the Submit button on the forms. Causing two JavaScript requests in parallel.

When I explained it they were really surprised, but then they started to worry about how they could fix that.

Well, there are many ways, like using an UUID in each request and do not accepting two concurrents, but I came with something that we could deploy super fast.

I explained how to change the JavaScript code so the buttons will have no default submit action, and they will trigger a JavaScript method instead, that will set a boolean to True, and also would disable the button so it can not be clicked anymore. Only if the variable was False the submit would be performed. It was almost impossible to get a double click as the JavaScript was so fast disabling the button, that the second click will not trigger anything. But even if that could be possible, only one request would be made, as the variable was set to True on the first click event.

That case was very funny for me, because it was not necessary to go crazy inspecting the different layers of the system. The problem was detected simply with HTTP logs. :)

People often forget to follow the logic steps while many problems are much more simple.

As a curious note, I still see people double clicking on links and buttons on the Web, and some Software not handling it. :)

News from the blog 2020-10-16

  • I’ve been testing and adding more instances to CMIPS. I’m planning on testing the Azure instance with 120 cores.
  • News: Microsoft makes an option to permanently remote work

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54482245

  • 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. ;)

Remember to be always nice to robots. :)

Refreshing settings in a Docker immutable image with Python and Flask

This is a trick to restart a Service that is running on a immutable Docker, with some change, and you need to refresh the values very quickly without having to roll the CI/CD Jenkins Pipeline and uploading a new image.

So why would you need to do that?.

I can think about possible scenarios like:

  • Need to roll out an urgent fix in a time critical manner
  • Jenkins is broken
  • Somebody screw it on the git master branch
  • Docker Hub is down
  • GitHub is down
  • Your artifactory is down
  • The lines between your jumpbox or workstation and the secure Server are down and you have really few bandwidth
  • You have to fix something critical and you only have a phone with you and SSH only
  • Maybe the Dockerfile had latest, and the latest image has changed
FROM os:latest

The ideal is that if you work with immutable images, you roll out a new immutable image and that’s it.

But if for whatever reason you need to update this super fast, this trick may become really handy.

Let’s go for it!.

Normally you’ll start your container with a command similar to this:

docker run -d --rm -p 5000:5000 api_carlesmateo_com:v7 prod

The first thing we have to do is to stop the container.

So:

docker ps

Locate your container across the list of running containers and stop it, and then restart without the –rm:

docker stop container_name
docker run -d -p 5000:5000 api_carlesmateo_com:v7 prod

the –rm makes the container to cleanup. By default a container’s file system persists even after the container exits. So don’t start it with –rm.

Ok, so login to the container:

docker exec -it container_name /bin/sh

Edit the config you require to change, for example config.yml

If what you have to update is a password, and is encoded in base64, encode it:

echo -n "ThePassword" | base64
VGhlUGFzc3dvcmQ=

Stop the container. You can do it by stopping the container with docker stop or from inside the container, killing the listening process, probably a Python Flask.

If your Dockerfile ends with something like:

ENTRYPOINT ["./webservice.py"]

And webservice.py has Python Flask code similar to this:

#!/usr/bin/python3
#
# webservice.py
#
# Author: Carles Mateo
# Creation Date: 2020-05-10 20:50 GMT+1
# Description: A simple Flask Web Application
#              Part of the samples of https://leanpub.com/pythoncombatguide
#              More source code for the book at https://gitlab.com/carles.mateo/python_combat_guide
#


from flask import Flask, request
import logging

# Initialize Flask
app = Flask(__name__)


# Sample route so http://127.0.0.1/carles
@app.route('/carles', methods=['GET'])
def carles():
    logging.critical("A connection was established")
    return "200"

logging.info("Initialized...")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run(host='0.0.0.0', port=5000, debug=True)

Then you can kill the process, and so ending the container, from inside the container by doing:

ps -ax | grep webservice
 5750 root     56:31 {webservice.py} /usr/bin/python /opt/webservice/webservice.py
kill -9 5790

This will finish the container the same way as docker stop container_name.

Then start the container (not run)

docker start container_name

You can now test from outside or from inside the container. If from inside:

/opt/webservice # wget localhost:5000/carles
Connecting to localhost:5000 (127.0.0.1:5000)
carles               100% |**************************************************************************************************************|     3  0:00:00 ETA
/opt/webservice # cat debug.log
2020-05-06 20:46:24,349 Initialized...
2020-05-06 20:46:24,359  * Running on http://0.0.0.0:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit)
2020-05-06 20:46:24,360  * Restarting with stat
2020-05-06 20:46:24,764 Initialized...
2020-05-06 20:46:24,771  * Debugger is active!
2020-05-06 20:46:24,772  * Debugger PIN: 123-456-789
2020-05-07 13:18:43,890 127.0.0.1 - - [07/May/2020 13:18:43] "GET /carles HTTP/1.1" 200 -

if you don’t use YAML files or what you need is to change the code, all this can be avoided as when you update the Python code, Flash realizes that and reloads. See this line in the logs:

2020-05-07 13:18:40,431  * Detected change in '/opt/webservice/wwebservice.py', reloading

The webservice.py autoreloads because we init Flask with debug set to on.

You can also start a container with shell directly:

sudo docker run -it ctop /bin/bash

Making responsive WordPress Theme Twenty Twelve to support greater resolutions

This is the first article I write about FrontEnd in here, as this is very casual and trivial, and I wanted to specialize the blog in Extreme IT, going deep into knowledge and difficult questions. And in any case, more for BackEnd, Engineering, and Hardware and Operations.

But as it is something useful and myself didn’t found an answer when I googled it, I think is no bad to share it here. Nevertheless I’ll not make it appear in the front page to be loyal to my essence.

So I like Twenty Twelve WP Theme. It’s clear, that’s what I expect from a blog from an Engineer: easy to read. Maybe is to Spartan, but that’s grant.

The instructions to do like me:

  1. Make a copy of your original Twenty Twelve Theme in another directory, at the same level
  2. Edit the file /var/www/blog.carlesmateo.com/wp-content/themes/2021-blog-carlesmateo-com/style.css
  3. Add a new section like this

So I defined a new @media screen with min-width of 1800px.

Why 1800px and not 1920px like Full Hd?. Because Ubuntu use some width for the lateral bar.

Then over body .site section I set a max-width: 1800px that will do the trick for some browsers, and the rem value that will do the trick for Chrome.

Now the main section of the block can be correctly displayed using most of the space available.

Resources for Microservices and Business Domain Solutions for the Cloud Architect / Microservices Architect

First you have to understand that Python, Java and PHP are worlds completely different.

In Python you’ll probably use Flask, and listen to the port you want, inside Docker Container.

In PHP you’ll use a Frameworks like Laravel, or Symfony, or Catalonia Framework (my Framework) :) and a repo or many (as the idea is that the change in one microservice cannot break another it is recommended to have one git repo per Service) and split the requests with the API Gateway and Filters (so /billing/ goes to the right path in the right Server, is like rewriting URLs). You’ll rely in Software to split your microservices. Usually you’ll use Docker, but you have to add a Web Server and any other tools, as the source code is not packet with a Web Server and other Dependencies like it is in Java Spring Boot.

In Java you’ll use Spring Cloud and Spring Boot, and every Service will be auto-contained in its own JAR file, that includes Apache Tomcat and all other Dependencies and normally running inside a Docker. Tcp/Ip listening port will be set at start via command line, or through environment. You’ll have many git repositories, one per each Service.

Using many repos, one per Service, also allows to deploy only that repository and to have better security, with independent deployment tokens.

It is not unlikely that you’ll use one language for some of your Services and another for other, as well as a Database or another, as each Service is owner of their data.

In any case, you will be using CI/CD and your pipeline will be something like this:

  1. Pull the latest code for the Service from the git repository
  2. Compile the code (if needed)
  3. Run the Unit and Integration Tests
  4. Compile the service to an executable artifact (f.e. Java JAR with Tomcat server and other dependencies)
  5. Generate a Machine image with your JAR deployed (for Java. Look at Spotify Docker Plugin to Docker build from Maven), or with Apache, PHP, other dependencies, and the code. Normally will be a Docker image. This image will be immutable. You will probably use Dockerhub.
  6. Machine image will be started. Platform test are run.
  7. If platform tests pass, the service is promoted to the next environment (for example Dev -> Test -> PreProd -> Prod), the exact same machine is started in the next environment and platform tests are repeated.
  8. Before deploying to Production the new Service, I recommend running special Application Tests / Behavior-driven. By this I mean, to conduct tests that really test the functionality of everything, using a real browser and emulating the acts of a user (for example with BeHat, Cucumber or with JMeter).
    I recommend this specially because Microservices are end-points, independent of the implementation, but normally they are API that serve to a whole application. In an Application there are several components, often a change in the Front End can break the application. Imagine a change in Javascript Front End, that results in a call a bit different, for example, with an space before a name. Imagine that the Unit Tests for the Service do not test that, and that was not causing a problem in the old version of the Service and so it will crash when the new Service is deployed. Or another example, imagine that our Service for paying with Visa cards generates IDs for the Payment Gateway, and as a result of the new implementation the IDs generated are returned. With the mocked objects everything works, but when we deploy for real is when we are going to use the actual Bank Payment. This is also why is a good idea to have a PreProduction environment, with PreProduction versions of the actual Services we use (all banks or the GDS for flights/hotel reservation like Galileo or Amadeus have a Test, exactly like Production, Gateway)

If you work with Microsoft .NET, you’ll probably use Azure DevOps.

We IT Engineers, CTOs and Architects, serve the Business. We have to develop the most flexible approaches and enabling the business to release as fast as their need.

Take in count that Microservices is a tool, a pattern. We will use it to bring more flexibility and speed developing, resilience of the services, and speed and independence deploying. However this comes at a cost of complexity.

Microservices is more related to giving flexibility to the Business, and developing according to the Business Domains. Normally oriented to suite an API. If you have an API that is consumed by third party you will have things like independence of Services (if one is down the others will still function), gradual degradation, being able to scale the Services that have more load only, being able to deploy a new version of a Service which is independent of the rest of the Services, etc… the complexity in the technical solution comes from all this resilience, and flexibility.

If your Dev Team is up to 10 Developers or you are writing just a CRUD Web Application, a PoC, or you are an Startup with a critical Time to Market you probably you will not want to use Microservices approach. Is like killing flies with laser cannons. You can use typical Web services approach, do everything in one single Https request, have transactions, a single Database, etc…

But if your team is 100 Developer, like a big eCommerce, you’ll have multiple Teams between 5 and 10 Developers per Business Domain, and you need independence of each Service, having less interdependence. Each Service will own their own Data. That is normally around 5 to 7 tables. Each Service will serve a Business Domain. You’ll benefit from having different technologies for the different needs, however be careful to avoid having Teams with different knowledge that can have hardly rotation and difficult to continue projects when the only 2 or 3 Devs that know that technology leave. Typical benefit scenarios can be having MySql for the Billing Services, but having NoSQL Database for the image catalog, or to store logs of account activity. With Microservices, some services will be calling other Services, often asynchronously, using Queues or Streams, you’ll have Callbacks, Databases for reading, you’ll probably want to have gradual and gracefully failure of your applications, client load balancing, caches and read only databases/in-memory databases… This complexity is in order to protect one Service from the failure of others and to bring it the necessary speed under heavy load.

Here you can find a PDF Document of the typical resources I use for Microservice Projects.

Resources for Microservices and Business Domain Solutions – V.1.7 – By Carles MateoDownload

You can also download it from my github repository:

https://github.com/carlesmateo/awesome-microservices

Do you use other solutions that are not listed?. Leave a message. I’ll investigate them and update the Document, to share with the Community.

Update 2020-03-06: I found this very nice article explaining the same. Microservices are not for everybody and not the default option: https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2020/03/04/microservices_last_resort/

Update 2020-03-11: Qcom with 1,600 microservices says that microservices architecture is the las resort: https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2020/03/09/monzo_microservices/

Adding my Server as Docker, with PHP Catalonia Framework, explained

Update: 2021-07-23 Ubuntu 19.04 is no longer available, so I updated the article in order to work with Ubuntu 20.04. and with PHP 7.4 and all their dependencies.

The previous day I explained how I migrated my old Server (Amazon Instance) to a more powerful model, with more recent OS, WebServer, etc…

This was interesting under the point of view of dealing with elastic Ip’s, Amazon AWS Volumes, etc… but was a process basically manual. I could have generated an immutable image to start from next time, but this is another discussion, specially because that Server Instance has different base Software, including a MySql Database.

This time I want to explain, step by step, how to containerize my Server, so I can port to different platforms, and I can be independent on what the Server Operating System is. It will work always, as we defined the Operating System for the Docker Container.

So we start to use IaC (Infrastructure as Code).

So first you need to install docker.

So basically if your laptop is an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or 20.04 LTS you have to:

sudo apt install docker.io

Start and Automate Docker

The Docker service needs to be setup to run at startup. To do so, type in each command followed by enter:

sudo systemctl start docker
sudo systemctl enable docker

Create the Dockerfile

For doing this you can use any text editor, but as we are working with IaC why not use a Code Editor?.

You can use the versatile PyCharm, that has modules for understanding Docker and so you can use Control Version like git too.

This is the updated Dockerfile to work with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

FROM ubuntu:20.04

MAINTAINER Carles <carles@carlesmateo.com>

ARG DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive

#RUN echo "nameserver 8.8.8.8" > /etc/resolv.conf

RUN echo "Europe/Ireland" | tee /etc/timezone

# Note: You should install everything in a single line concatenated with
#       && and finalizing with 
# apt autoremove && apt clean

#       In order to use the less space possible, as every command is a layer
RUN apt update && apt install -y apache2 ntpdate libapache2-mod-php7.4 mysql-server php7.4-mysql php-dev libmcrypt-dev php-pear git && apt autoremove && apt clean

RUN a2enmod rewrite

RUN mkdir -p /www

# In order to activate Debug
# RUN sed -i "s/display_errors = Off/display_errors = On/" /etc/php/7.2/apache2/php.ini 
# RUN sed -i "s/error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED & ~E_STRICT/error_reporting = E_ALL/" /etc/php/7.2/apache2/php.ini 
# RUN sed -i "s/display_startup_errors = Off/display_startup_errors = On/" /etc/php/7.2/apache2/php.ini 
# To Debug remember to change:
# config/{production.php|preproduction.php|devel.php|docker.php} 
# in order to avoid Error Reporting being set to 0.

ENV PATH_CATALONIA /www/www.cataloniaframework.com/
ENV PATH_CATALONIA_WWW /www/www.cataloniaframework.com/www/
ENV PATH_CATALONIA_CACHE /www/www.cataloniaframework.com/cache/

ENV APACHE_RUN_USER  www-data
ENV APACHE_RUN_GROUP www-data
ENV APACHE_LOG_DIR   /var/log/apache2
ENV APACHE_PID_FILE  /var/run/apache2/apache2.pid
ENV APACHE_RUN_DIR   /var/run/apache2
ENV APACHE_LOCK_DIR  /var/lock/apache2
ENV APACHE_LOG_DIR   /var/log/apache2

RUN mkdir -p $APACHE_RUN_DIR
RUN mkdir -p $APACHE_LOCK_DIR
RUN mkdir -p $APACHE_LOG_DIR
RUN mkdir -p $PATH_CATALONIA
RUN mkdir -p $PATH_CATALONIA_WWW
RUN mkdir -p $PATH_CATALONIA_CACHE

# Remove the default Server
RUN sed -i '/<Directory \/var\/www\/>/,/<\/Directory>/{/<\/Directory>/ s/.*/# var-www commented/; t; d}' /etc/apache2/apache2.conf 

RUN rm /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf

COPY www.cataloniaframework.com.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/

RUN chmod 777 $PATH_CATALONIA_CACHE
RUN chmod 777 $PATH_CATALONIA_CACHE.
RUN chown --recursive $APACHE_RUN_USER.$APACHE_RUN_GROUP $PATH_CATALONIA_CACHE

RUN ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/www.cataloniaframework.com.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/

# Note: You should clone locally and COPY to the Docker Image
#       Also you should add the .git directory to your .dockerignore file
#       I made this way to show you and for simplicity, having everything
#       in a single file
##RUN git clone https://github.com/cataloniaframework/cataloniaframework_v1_sample_website /www/www.cataloniaframework.com
##RUN git checkout tags/v.1.16-web-1.0
# In order to change profile to Production
# RUN sed -i "s/define('ENVIRONMENT', DOCKER)/define('ENVIRONMENT', PRODUCTION)/" /var/www/www.cataloniaframework.com/config/general.php 
COPY *.php /www/www.cataloniaframework.com/www

# for debugging
#RUN apt-get install -y vim

RUN service apache2 restart

EXPOSE 80

CMD ["/usr/sbin/apache2", "-D", "FOREGROUND"]

The www.cataloniaframework.com.conf file

As you saw in the Dockerfile you have the line:

COPY www.cataloniaframework.com.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/

This will copy the file www.cataloniaframework.com.conf that must be in the same directory that the Dockerfile file, to the /etc/apache2/sites-available/ folder in the container.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin webmaster@cataloniaframework.com
    # Uncomment to use a DNS name in a multiple VirtualHost Environment
    #ServerName www.cataloniaframework.com
    #ServerAlias cataloniaframework.com
    DocumentRoot /www/www.cataloniaframework.com/www
    <Directory /www/www.cataloniaframework.com/www/>
            Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks +MultiViews
            AllowOverride All
            Order allow,deny
            allow from all
            Require all granted
    </Directory>
    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/www-cataloniaframework-com-error.log
    # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
    # alert, emerg.
    LogLevel warn
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/www-cataloniaframework-com-access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Stopping, starting the docker Service and creating the Catalonia image

service docker stop && service docker start

To build the Docker Image we will do:

docker build -t catalonia . --no-cache

I use the –no-cache so git is pulled and everything is reworked, not kept from cache.

Now we can run the Catalonia Docker, mapping the 80 port.

docker run -d -p 80:80 catalonia

If you want to check what’s going on inside the Docker, you’ll do:

docker ps

And so in this case, we will do:

docker exec -i -t distracted_wing /bin/bash

Finally I would like to check that the web page works, and I’ll use my preferred browser. In this case I will use lynx, the text browser, cause I don’t want Firefox to save things in the cache.