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Posts in Infrastructure
Enabling hashicorp vault auto-completion
Hashicorp Vault has become one of my favorite technologies over the past year. Secrets management is a non-trivial undertaking, and I'm routinely blown away by how easy vault makes secrets management. One nifty thing I recently learned is vault has auto-completion, which you can enable with the "-autocomplete-install" option: Once enabled, you can type vault followed by a tab to see all of the available options: This also works for subcommands, so typing $(vault audit TAB) will display the options that can be passed to the audit sub-command. I'm a huge fan of auto-completion, and try to use it whenever I can to improve my efficieny.
$ read more →Zookeeper now has native Prometheus metrics support
As a long time Kafka, Zookeeper, and Prometheus user, I have been utilizing the JMX exporter to gather operational metrics from my Zookeeper and Kafka clusters. Having to bolt on an additional component is never fun, so I was delighted to see that Zookeeper 3.6.0 added native Prometheus metric support. Enabling it is as easy as adding the following lines to your zoo.cfg configuration file: The included metrics rock, and there are now dozens of additional USEFUL metrics you can add to your dashboards. Hopefully Kafka will take note and provide native Prometheus metrics in a future release.
$ read more →Using VirtualBox host networks with vagrant
I have a few VirtualBox VMs that I use to test clustering, Gluster, Ceph and various other technologies. These hosts have a NAT interface as well as a host network for internal communications. This week I revamped several of my Vagrantfiles to use a host network and learned a few things in the process. To get a machine to 'vagrant up' and connect to an existing VirtualBox host network I first had to install the vbguest plug-in: Once this plugin was installed I added a "private_network" stanza similar to the following to each Vagrantfile: Then I ran 'vagrant up' and my machines could see the host networks my VirtualBox VMs reside on…
$ read more →CFengine 3 Tutorial Part 5 Client promises.cf and regular cf-agent operation
Finally, the moment we've been waiting for. Lets take a crack at promises.cf and what we have defined. Line 3 defines “body common control” — our main() function which drives all other executions of the policy. Lines 13-20 pull in additional CFEngine Policy files for execution…
$ read more →CFengine 3 Tutorial -- Part 4 -- Client failsafe.cf and update.cf
As stated in part 1 of this tutorial series, normal client-side operations of CFEngine is for cf-agent to: Execute against /var/cfengine/inputs/failsafe.cf (which calls update.cf) Execute against /var/cfengine/inputs/promises.cf We stated that we dont want to break failsafe.cf or update.cf. When we write new CFEngine policies to implement, we import and call them from promises.cf. If we make a mistake and break the syntax, failsafe.cf / update.cf are still in pristine state. It will allow the clients to self-recover from the config breakage once we make the change through SVN…
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