Category Archives: Systems

2006 IntelliContact Accomplishments

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I decided to make list of things of which I’ve been a part of accomplishing over the last twelve months at IntelliContact not any without assistance, and some for which I’m only happy to have had a role.

  • From 3500-7200+ customers
  • From one database cluster to four
  • From eight mail servers to 12
  • Creating and maturing the development processing inspired by good things from Scrum, Extreme Programming, and Flickr (credit to Geoff and Alan)
  • One-click deployment tool
  • Bug triage – bugs find their way to solution instead of hanging in purgatory forever
  • Grown from 20 to 50 servers
  • Two four-person development teams
  • From 1.5 to 2.5 Systems people
  • Event-based Billing system (almost all credit here goes to Michael Best)
  • Got rid of Albatross upgrade code
  • Two mailhandlers in two locations
  • Agnification (web servers can serve up from any DB cluster)
  • Message desmurfing interface (credit to Vaughn)
  • RSS feeds
  • Public Newsletter Archive
  • Role-based servers (credit to Jay)

Dual-head

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As I write this, I’m not only using a second monitor connected to my Ubuntu Linux 6.10 laptop, but also plugged it in after I booted, have different resolutions on my built-in LCD vs. the external LCD, and ran one command to go from single to dual-head without restarting Xorg.

My hardware is a Lenovo/IBM Thinkpad T42 with an ATI RV350 and native resolution of 1400×1050.

Details…

[tags]dual head, ibm, lenovo, fglrx, ati, xorg[/tags]

Ambient Orb

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A long-time friend of mine started playing with his Ambient Orb a year or so ago. At the time, he explained all sorts of details of how he’d setup a Windows service and .NET providers. I remember thinking, “wow, their API must be pretty complex”.

While in Salt Lake City on vacation, I picked up an orb on sale for $50 and decided to investigate this on my own. Today, I finally got around to looking into the API, and implementing a client. After looking at the ‘API’ I decided on BASH to implement my client.

Spoiler: It’s 2 lines of bash to retrieve our current daily customer count and post it to the ambient orb API. And, before you waste your time both my Orb ID and the database password have been changed.

After combining my ‘service’ with the ever powerful CRON, my Orb now updates every 15 minutes.
[tags]ambient orb, bash, intellicontact[/tags]

ganglia–know what’s up with your servers

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We continue to see the wonders of monitoring with Ganglia. I’ve put together some of the lessons we learned installing and configuring Ganglia.

Ganglia is a cluster monitoring tools developed for computing clusters. it works just as well for monitoring your servers as your ‘cluster’ grows to more machines. A cluster constitutes any set of servers on the same LAN and communicate via Multicast.

[tags]ganglia, monitoring, clustering[/tags]