Linux

Now I’m sitting on a plane, heading back to my family.

I just got through with the RedHat Summit 2017 in Boston and I also visited some of my family while there. It was an intense 3-4 days.

I generally love Boston, and also Cambridge across the river. While I was there, I took a visit over to the MIT Press Bookstore, and bought a few books, including Grokking algorithms which was a book that I already had on my wishlist, but wasn’t one I could find in the store anywhere else. It was going to be my next Amazon purchase, but I was lucky enough to find it there. I also bought Tokyo Boogie-Woogie, and one other book. I also explored Chinatown and had my first hot pot, which was an awesome experience.

I recently started with a new company doing more of the role I was in at my previous job focused on J2EE applications, etc. However, I additionally ended up taking over management of Eucalyptus which is an AWS compatible cloud solution.

It’s been an exciting change of pace over configuring, troubleshooting, and restarting JVM’s. I’ve worked heavily with it and its underlying open source components that it utilizes like KVM, qemu, S3 (which this site is hosted on an S3 bucket), creating new images (using packer and some fancy script-fu I’ve got it fully automated), and customizing them. So far doing and upgrade and setting up a new availability zone have been tasks I’ve been carrying out in the short time since I’ve started working with it. If I ever run my own lab besides the ESXi based one being setup at my local hackerspace, I may use Eucalyptus.

I’ve completely messed up my Docker install on the server I was using it on so take my post with a grain of salt. I’ve been messing with Docker for over a year and found it advantageous for a lot of situations. The main thing a Docker container or LXC containers provide me in general, is a sandbox within which to experiment that doesn’t require running a full virtual machine, an extra server, or modifying the native OS settings to try out various applications, packages, or have a self contained environment for using certain software so I can keep it isolated from my base or default environment. One obvious application is doing development.

I have an XPS 13 Developer edition laptop (aka Project Sputnick), after some updates to Ubuntu in recent months, it would randomly freeze. It became apparent it was the graphics card that was freezing as processes were still running even though the display image was frozen and the mouse nor any other input seemed to have no affect (if I left it on downloads would finish). This was very frustrating as I had bought an officially supported set of hardware for Ubuntu from Dell to eliminate these kind of hardware support headaches. Turns out the issue is a known issue with Intel 4400 graphics chipset and the old kernel. The solution was simple, get a more recent kernel, which means updating from the LTS 12.04 release of Ubuntu to a newer version. Since doing the update I’ve had only one freeze in almost a month.