Category: Linux

Linux is my primary operating system. I used it on the servers, desktops, laptops, netbooks, and even mobile phones since approximately 1997. I’ve tried a number of distributions over the years, and even created a couple myself. I still look around sometimes to see what others are up to. But most of my machines are running some sort of Red Hat – either a quick and easy Fedora Linux, or a stable and secure Red Hat Enterprise Server, or a cheaper CentOS alternative.

And while by now I am very comfortable in the Linux environment (both graphical and command line), I still discover a lot of new and interesting things about it. When I come across something worthy, I usually share it with the rest of the Open Software world, using this category.

Mcrouter: a memcached protocol router

Mcrouter is an Open Source tool developed by Facebook for scaling up the memcached deployments:

Mcrouter is a memcached protocol router for scaling memcached (http://memcached.org/) deployments. It’s a core component of cache infrastructure at Facebook and Instagram where mcrouter handles almost 5 billion requests per second at peak.

Here is a good overview of some of the scenarios where Mcrouter is useful.  There’s more than one.  Here are some of the features to get you started:

  • Memcached ASCII protocol
  • Connection pooling
  • Multiple hashing schemes
  • Prefix routing
  • Replicated pools
  • Production traffic shadowing
  • Online reconfiguration
  • Flexible routing
  • Destination health monitoring/automatic failover
  • Cold cache warm up
  • Broadcast operations
  • Reliable delete stream
  • Multi-cluster support
  • Rich stats and debug commands
  • Quality of service
  • Large values
  • Multi-level caches
  • IPv6 support
  • SSL support

Amazon AWS : MTU for EC2

I came across this handy Amazon AWS manual for the maximum transfer unit (MTU) configuration for EC2 instances.  This is not something one needs every day, but, I’m sure, when I need it, I’ll otherwise be spending hours trying to find it.

The maximum transmission unit (MTU) of a network connection is the size, in bytes, of the largest permissible packet that can be passed over the connection. The larger the MTU of a connection, the more data that can be passed in a single packet. Ethernet packets consist of the frame, or the actual data you are sending, and the network overhead information that surrounds it.

Ethernet frames can come in different formats, and the most common format is the standard Ethernet v2 frame format. It supports 1500 MTU, which is the largest Ethernet packet size supported over most of the Internet. The maximum supported MTU for an instance depends on its instance type. All Amazon EC2 instance types support 1500 MTU, and many current instance sizes support 9001 MTU, or jumbo frames.

The document goes into the detail of how to set, check and troubleshoot MTU on the EC2 instances, which instance types support jumbo frames,  when you should and shouldn’t change the MTU, etc.

The following instances support jumbo frames:

  • Compute optimized: C3, C4, CC2
  • General purpose: M3, M4, T2
  • Accelerated computing: CG1, G2, P2
  • Memory optimized: CR1, R3, R4, X1
  • Storage optimized: D2, HI1, HS1, I2

As always, Julia Evans has got you covered on the basics of networking and the MTU.

The Most Mentioned Books On StackOverflow

Slashdot links to “The Most Mentioned Books On StackOverflow“.

How we did it:

  • We got database dump of all user-contributed content on the Stack Exchange network (can be downloaded here)
  • Extracted questions and answers made on stackoverflow
  • Found all amazon.com links and counted it
  • Created tag-based search for your convenience
  • Brought it to you

I’ve previously linked to a similar selection of “Top 29 books on Amazon from Hacker News comments“.

Things Every Hacker Once Knew

Eric Raymond goes over a few things every hacker once knew.

One fine day in January 2017 I was reminded of something I had half-noticed a few times over the previous decade. That is, younger hackers don’t know the bit structure of ASCII and the meaning of the odder control characters in it.

This is knowledge every fledgling hacker used to absorb through their pores. It’s nobody’s fault this changed; the obsolescence of hardware terminals and the near-obsolescence of the RS-232 protocol is what did it. Tools generate culture; sometimes, when a tool becomes obsolete, a bit of cultural commonality quietly evaporates. It can be difficult to notice that this has happened.

This document is a collection of facts about ASCII and related technologies, notably hardware terminals and RS-232 and modems. This is lore that was at one time near-universal and is no longer. It’s not likely to be directly useful today – until you trip over some piece of still-functioning technology where it’s relevant (like a GPS puck), or it makes sense of some old-fart war story. Even so, it’s good to know anyway, for cultural-literacy reasons.

The article goes over:

  • Hardware context
  • The strange afterlife of the outboard modem
  • 36-bit machines and the persistence of octal
  • RS232 and its discontents
  • UUCP, the forgotten pre-Internet
  • Terminal confusion
  • ASCII
  • Key dates

Found via a couple of other interesting bits –
What we still use ASCII CR for today (on Unix) and
How Unix erases things when you type a backspace while entering text.

Immutable Infrastructure with AWS and Ansible

Immutable infrastructure is a very powerful concept that brings stability, efficiency, and fidelity to your applications through automation and the use of successful patterns from programming.  The general idea is that you never make changes to running infrastructure.  Instead, you ensure that all infrastructure is created through automation, and to make a change, you simply create a new version of the infrastructure, and destroy the old one.

“Immutable Infrastructure with AWS and Ansible” is a, so far, three part article series (part 1, part 2, part 3), that shows how to use Ansible to achieve an immutable infrastructure on the Amazon Web Services cloud solution.

It covers everything starting from the basic setup of the workstation to execute Ansible playbooks and all the way to AWS security (users, roles, security groups), deployment of resources, and auto-scaling.