Yesterday evening I presented at the SF Bay Area Large-Scale Production Engineering meetup group at Yahoo HQ a talk about “Monitoring with Icinga”. This was an introductory talk intended to bring awareness about icinga (there were only 3-4 people from the audience of about 75 that heard of it before), and I think it reached its goal very well; afterwards there were many people interested to try it out and had various questions about it at the end. I was also very happy to have Matthew Brooks one of the icinga core developers in the audience and backing me up to some of the more difficult questions people had. Thanks again Matthew for coming! Here are the slides from my presentation:

@LSPEMeetup made available the video on justin.tv; unfortunately the quality of the video/sound is not the best; you can find it here.

This week I’ll be attending LISA10 in San Jose. I’ve always wanted to go to LISA, and the fact that it was so close to our location here in San Jose made it much easier. This is going to be a full week, but hopefully fun and interesting. I’ll be part of the USENIX blogging team, meaning I’ll have to be extra focused in order to be able to take good notes and prepare at least one blog post per day. These articles will be posted on the USENIX blog, where you can find articles from other colleges in our team (Matt, Ben and Matthew), and I highly recommend to check it out for updates regularly. I will link in this post all the articles I have written during this week in case you want to follow this up.

If you are in the area and want to meetup ping me on twitter or email.

Real-World Configuration Management Workshop: Sunday I’ve attended all day the CM workshop; this was an interesting workshop, where different people shared their experiences and pains in configuration management.

Time Management for System Administrators: Monday I attended  Tom Limoncelli’s tutorial on time management for system administrators. Very educational and inspiring. I will definitely revisit his book as its been a while since I’ve read it. As takeaways, I have at least 2-3 ideas that I’m really looking forward to implement and see how I can use them to improve my productivity.

OpsCamp: Tuesday I went to OpsCamp Silicon Valley - San Jose co-located with LISA10, and even if it was sponsored by LISA this was a standalone event. It was definitely a smaller event than expected (because of this we had only one round of sessions with everyone in the same room), but it was definitely interesting and I’ve met some very smart people with a lot of experience in operations and building high performance infrastructures.

Postfix: Past, Present, and Future: Wednesday started with the opening remarks by the program chair Rudi van Drunen, followed by the opening keynote by Tony Cass from CERN. Amazing stuff; if you have the chance to see the video do that . Afterwards, in the afternoon I went to the invited talks by Dinah McNutt, Google: “The 10 Commandments of Release Engineering” and Wietse Venema on “Postfix: Past, Present, and Future”. It was amazing to be able to meet in person and chat with the author of postfix, a program that I’ve been using for many years.

Last week I was in Baltimore for the inaugural edition of Surge, a conference organized by OmniTI. Ever since I signed up for Surge2010, I sow this as a conference of Velocity quality, only without the frontend track and focusing mostly on backend topics (what I was interested anyway), and in a much more distant location than Santa Clara . This sounded interesting enough to make me want to go, as the first conference I will go in 2010 outside Silicon Valley. Also I could not pass the opportunity to hang out with my friend Andy and sync’up with what we’ve been up to during all this time.

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Being part of the LISA’10 Blog Team, I was lucky to be able to interview Rudi van Drunen, this year program chair. This was a great discussion where I got an idea on what goes behind the scenes when putting on such a big event as LISA’10. The article with the full interview is available on the USENIX Blog: “What can we expect from LISA’10?”

Also, my colleges from the LISA’10 blogging team, have done some very interesting interviews with Anne Dickison about marketing LISA’10 (by Ben Cotton) and Alan Clegg about his DNSSEC tutorial (by Matt Simmons).

Here are the slides from my presentation about Chef at the SF Bay Area Large-Scale Production Engineering meetup group. Accordingly to the organizers from Yahoo, there were 90 people present. If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area and passionate about infrastructure you should definitely join this group. Highly recommended!

NoSQL fun… 5 minutes Q&A session covering NoSQL and relational databases; very funny. Check it out:

“Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.”

Everyone uses Google Analytics (GA), right? It’s a great product and even better it’s free. It is a win/win situation where there is no point in anyone running their own analytics unless they have something custom and specific that is not covered by GA.

Still as other google product its documentation is, let’s say not the best. A while ago I started working on a project and there was no web analytics in place. I asked them why is that? They said they have too big traffic to be accepted in GA. Hmm… I looked into it and I must admit I could not find much information that we were interested. Finally looked over the terms of services and there I found:
“2. FEES AND SERVICES . Subject to Section 15 herein, the Service is provided without charge to You for up to 5 million pageviews per month per account, and if You have an active Adwords campaign in good standing, the Service is provided without charge to You without a pageview limitation.”

So there is a limit, a tiny one I would say of 5mil pageviews per month (per account, not even per site). Our site was making about 45Mil pageviews at that time. Per day! So what if we wanted to use GA? We searched everywhere but could not find any commercial offering of GA or any other information. We asked the @googleanalytics on twitter but we were completely ignored.

What to do? Well, we just gave it a try and added the site and started tracking it in GA as any other site. Surprisingly, it worked just fine for a few months. Yesterday though, we received an email from the google analytics team (or should I say GA “robot”?) telling us that they have detected we have a high traffic, much higher than the allowed limit of 5mil pageviews per month, and from now on we are no longer going to have live reports but only daily updated reports. This is a limitation we can live with, but it would have been great if they would have given us some option to pay for some extra services. My client would have been happy to pay in the first place, but I assume this is something google doesn’t care at all and they just want to offer it as a free services. There is a great opportunity for such a product that could handle high traffic analytics and can do real-time and other goodies; we would be definitely interested. In the meantime if you have a site that makes more than 5mil pageviews per month (not so uncommon) you can definitely use GA; in the worst case they will restrict your updates to keep up with your traffic. For our site we tracked 1,608,074,379 Pageviews last month in GA  and it works just fine.

Today I’ve finally moved the emails for my domain ducea.com to google apps for domains. I’m probably one of the few people that still had their own email server these days, and I’m sure anyone would question why would I want to run that on my own server. And the answer to that is that I didn’t, but thought this migration would be more complicated and time consuming so I always put it in the back on my todo list. I wanted to do it for a long time, but never got to it.

Seems like lately I’ve moved everyone I could onto google apps; friends, clients, or even strangers I could easily convince them on how great it is to not worry about your email server and put this into the hands of someone like google; and all this for free. Then why did it take so long for me to move? Well, email is very important to my business and this is why a long time ago (too many years to remember) I’ve made the decision to serve it on my own dedicated server, instead of a cheap vps. This was the main reason I rented the server in a good hosting facility (started with ThePlanet and then moved to SoftLayer about 3 years ago) and was happy to pay for it to know that I have a reliable service and my email will be reliable also, and be sure that if I get an email from a client or some nagios alert that something is not working I will be getting it immediately as expected. I’ve been a big fan of imap and used that all the time so I can check in the emails from different locations and have a central place where the files are and can be easily backed up. As any sysadmin I ended up with a big .procmailrc file with many rules, where some of them are most certainly no longer needed (projects completed, etc.) and with a huge Maildir, as I like to save anything that might be useful in the future. Don’t get me wrong I hit delete probably 80% of the time, but over time this grew to something like 1.2G quite easy. I’m sure many people have much bigger mailboxes than this, but anyway…

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As Matt Simmons announced on his blog, I’ll be one of the members of the LISA2010 blogging team. I’m really excited to be part of such a great team with Matt, Matthew and Ben, and looking forward for a great event. We will be blogging and sharing things we find interesting at LISA on the USENIX blog, that you should definitely bookmark it in case you don’t have it already. If you will be at LISA2010 definitely come say hi; I’d love to meetup and chat.

Matt’s full announcement on the USENIX blog: Introducing the 2010 LISA Blogging Team

Last week I attended FreelanceCamp Pro in San Francisco, hosted by the offices of the newly open coworking facility of the main sponsor and organizer NextSpace. This event is based on a model of a BarCamp for freelancers and independent contractors.

If you don’t know what a barcamp is, this is a an “international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants. The day consists of sessions proposed by attendees and the schedule is created on site the morning of the event. BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn from each other in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants.”

This was my first barcamp, or unconference type of event I’ve attended and I must say it has been by far the most interesting conference I’ve ever participated. So much better, engaging and with great conversation than a the usual conference where someone on the stage presents his slides. I’ve learned many things and this post is to outline my takeaways from this event. Here are just the most important ones: Read the rest of this entry »