Evan Kinney
2012-10-03 09:47:08 UTC
First of all, sorry I haven't been around on IRC as of late; my job
has been a little crazy.
As I sit here, unable to sleep, I find myself thinking about Adium.
I'm not sure how I feel about this, but I think it's a good thing.
...in any case, here's something I've been thinking about bringing up
for a while:
I'd like to possibly revamp eider and duck.
They're both running long-in-the-tooth versions of CentOS 5 and, to be
quite honest, no one is really sure of CentOS's future given the
nature of the project and the fact that Red Hat keeps making it more
difficult to build their SRPMs into something usable. In my opinion,
this leaves us with two options: the Ubuntu LTS spin (or Debian
Stable, I suppose) or Fedora.
I've always been a Red Hat guy and I basically know RHEL (and, thus,
to some degree Fedora) like <insert something I know everything about
here>, so my natural inclination is to go with Fedora, but I have some
reservations with hosting a public-facing server on a platform that
releases so often and stops supporting releases after 13 or so months.
Ubuntu LTS sounds like a pretty good option to me. Thoughts, anyone? I
suppose we're also limited by the base images that Network Redux
provides for their OpenVZ instances.
As part of this, I'd like to propose we get rid of all the cPanel
cruft that's currently holding up everything on duck. I've never
really been a fan of cPanel (their installer, for instance, is a shell
script they suggest you pipe to bash via cURL that essentially
modifies your system to the point of no return) and, as far as I can
tell, there's nothing we're doing that requires it.
I think we'd be much better served by sticking the config files for
everything in a (non-publicly accessible) hg repo. I'd also like to
bootstrap the servers with Chef so that, if needed, we could spin up a
replacement server very, very quickly and in a consistent fashion.
Also, it looks like duck and eider are two OpenVZ VMs in the same
Network Redux datacenter. duck has 3 cores (any reason for 3?) with
6GB of RAM, and eider has 2 cores with 2GB of RAM. What if we were to
combine those together and just have one larger VM? As long as
everything's properly configured (and given the way things are
currently set up), I can't think of any reason to have two separate
machines. Another alternative would be to split them equally, cluster
them with a pacemaker/corosync stack, and load balance everything with
the help of HAproxy. I have a lot of experience doing that, but I know
it's not exactly the easiest thing to maintain... so maybe simple is
better here, even if we're giving up high availability.
We might also want to look at cleaning up the DNS zones a bit, as
they're a bit of a mess if the current Apache configs are any
indication. What if we had everything use .adium.im, and had all of
the .adiumx.com URLs redirect there instead of serving the content?
This would also make it easier to manage SSL... which is another thing
I plan on making work properly (and has been discussed on here
before).
I'd also like to maybe stick the idea in your head about possibly
trying out Jenkins instead of Buildbot. Jenkins does some really,
really cool stuff in the way of Xcode integration and unit testing
stuff, among other things. It's what I use for all of my iOS/Mac
projects, and it's what we use at work. That's a whole topic in and of
itself, though... and this email is already a novel, so I'll leave
that for another time.
I know this is a lot, but it's stuff I think needs to be done at some
point. Everything would be a *lot* more maintainable, more secure, and
(most likely) significantly faster (especially the Mercurial web
interface). I'm willing to make all this happen, but I'd like to hear
some input and discussion before I put together a formal proposal for
consideration.
Sorry for the epic I wrote here. I should probably go to bed now. :)
/ek
--
Evan M. Kinney, EMT-Paramedic
Officer, NC State University Emergency Medical Services Organization
Director of Public Health and Wellness, EOSSP
+1 919.265.9396 (c) | +1 919.531.2136 (o) | emkinney at ncsu.edu | evan at txt.att.net
P.S.: This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R
were eliminated.
has been a little crazy.
As I sit here, unable to sleep, I find myself thinking about Adium.
I'm not sure how I feel about this, but I think it's a good thing.
...in any case, here's something I've been thinking about bringing up
for a while:
I'd like to possibly revamp eider and duck.
They're both running long-in-the-tooth versions of CentOS 5 and, to be
quite honest, no one is really sure of CentOS's future given the
nature of the project and the fact that Red Hat keeps making it more
difficult to build their SRPMs into something usable. In my opinion,
this leaves us with two options: the Ubuntu LTS spin (or Debian
Stable, I suppose) or Fedora.
I've always been a Red Hat guy and I basically know RHEL (and, thus,
to some degree Fedora) like <insert something I know everything about
here>, so my natural inclination is to go with Fedora, but I have some
reservations with hosting a public-facing server on a platform that
releases so often and stops supporting releases after 13 or so months.
Ubuntu LTS sounds like a pretty good option to me. Thoughts, anyone? I
suppose we're also limited by the base images that Network Redux
provides for their OpenVZ instances.
As part of this, I'd like to propose we get rid of all the cPanel
cruft that's currently holding up everything on duck. I've never
really been a fan of cPanel (their installer, for instance, is a shell
script they suggest you pipe to bash via cURL that essentially
modifies your system to the point of no return) and, as far as I can
tell, there's nothing we're doing that requires it.
I think we'd be much better served by sticking the config files for
everything in a (non-publicly accessible) hg repo. I'd also like to
bootstrap the servers with Chef so that, if needed, we could spin up a
replacement server very, very quickly and in a consistent fashion.
Also, it looks like duck and eider are two OpenVZ VMs in the same
Network Redux datacenter. duck has 3 cores (any reason for 3?) with
6GB of RAM, and eider has 2 cores with 2GB of RAM. What if we were to
combine those together and just have one larger VM? As long as
everything's properly configured (and given the way things are
currently set up), I can't think of any reason to have two separate
machines. Another alternative would be to split them equally, cluster
them with a pacemaker/corosync stack, and load balance everything with
the help of HAproxy. I have a lot of experience doing that, but I know
it's not exactly the easiest thing to maintain... so maybe simple is
better here, even if we're giving up high availability.
We might also want to look at cleaning up the DNS zones a bit, as
they're a bit of a mess if the current Apache configs are any
indication. What if we had everything use .adium.im, and had all of
the .adiumx.com URLs redirect there instead of serving the content?
This would also make it easier to manage SSL... which is another thing
I plan on making work properly (and has been discussed on here
before).
I'd also like to maybe stick the idea in your head about possibly
trying out Jenkins instead of Buildbot. Jenkins does some really,
really cool stuff in the way of Xcode integration and unit testing
stuff, among other things. It's what I use for all of my iOS/Mac
projects, and it's what we use at work. That's a whole topic in and of
itself, though... and this email is already a novel, so I'll leave
that for another time.
I know this is a lot, but it's stuff I think needs to be done at some
point. Everything would be a *lot* more maintainable, more secure, and
(most likely) significantly faster (especially the Mercurial web
interface). I'm willing to make all this happen, but I'd like to hear
some input and discussion before I put together a formal proposal for
consideration.
Sorry for the epic I wrote here. I should probably go to bed now. :)
/ek
--
Evan M. Kinney, EMT-Paramedic
Officer, NC State University Emergency Medical Services Organization
Director of Public Health and Wellness, EOSSP
+1 919.265.9396 (c) | +1 919.531.2136 (o) | emkinney at ncsu.edu | evan at txt.att.net
P.S.: This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R
were eliminated.