Year: 2016

5 Why’s

Here is something new I learned today.  While reading the blog post on “Why You Need a Postmortem Process” over sysadvent (yes, it’s an advent calendar for system administrators, and it just started this year’s run),  I stumbled upon the 5 Whys Wikipedia page:

5 Whys is an iterative interrogative technique used to explore the cause-and-effect relationships underlying a particular problem. The primary goal of the technique is to determine the root cause of a defect or problem by repeating the question “Why?” Each answer forms the basis of the next question. The “5” in the name derives from an anecdotal observation on the number of iterations needed to resolve the problem.

What do I think of immediately? Louis CK bit on parenting and kids’ ability to ask an infinite number of “Why?” questions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJlV49RDlLE

Well, I guess, kids, much like me until today, don’t know that you only need 5.  Or 6.

Amazon Snowmobile – a truck with up to 100 Petabytes of storage

Back in my college days, I had a professor who frequently used Andrew Tanenbaum‘s quote in the networking class:

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

I guess he wasn’t the only one, as during this year’s Amazon re:Invent 2016 conference, the company announced, among other things, a AWS Snowmobile:

Moving large amounts of on-premises data to the cloud as part of a migration effort is still more challenging than it should be! Even with high-end connections, moving petabytes or exabytes of film vaults, financial records, satellite imagery, or scientific data across the Internet can take years or decades. On the business side, adding new networking or better connectivity to data centers that are scheduled to be decommissioned after a migration is expensive and hard to justify.

[…]

In order to meet the needs of these customers, we are launching Snowmobile today. This secure data truck stores up to 100 PB of data and can help you to move exabytes to AWS in a matter of weeks (you can get more than one if necessary). Designed to meet the needs of our customers in the financial services, media & entertainment, scientific, and other industries, Snowmobile attaches to your network and appears as a local, NFS-mounted volume. You can use your existing backup and archiving tools to fill it up with data destined for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) or Amazon Glacier.

Thanks to this VentureBeat page, we even have a picture of the monster:

aws-snowmobile

100 Petabytes on wheels!

I know, I know, it looks like a regular truck with a shipping container on it.  But I’m pretty sure it’s VERY different from the inside.  With all that storage, networking, power, and cooling needed, it would be awesome to take a pick into this thing.

 

 

WP-CLI v1.0.0 Released!

WP-CLI project – a command line interface to WordPress – announces the release of v1.0.0.  After 5 years of development, the tool is rock solid and stable (that is being affected to a degree by the frequent releases of the WordPress itself).

There are some new features and a tonne of improvements in this release, including, as the major version bump indicates, some backward compatibility breaking changes.

If you are involved with WordPress projects, this tool is an absolute must have!  Whether you are automating your deployments, doing some testing, or setting up and configuring WordPress instances on a variety of servers.  It will save you time and make you life much much easier.  Check it out!

(At work, we are using it as part of our project-template-wordpress setup,  which is our go-to repository for initializing the new WordPress-based projects.)

 

Magento database maintenance

If you are running a Magento-based website, make sure you add the database maintenance script to the cron.  For example, append this to the /etc/crontab:

# Magento log maintenance, as per
# https://docs.nexcess.net/article/how-to-perform-magento-database-maintenance.html
0 23 * * 0 root (cd /var/www/html/mysite.com && php -f shell/log.php clean)

Thanks to this page, obviously.  You’ll be surprised how much leaner your database will be, especially if you get any kind of traffic to the site.  Your database backups will also appreciate the trim.