Githubed!
In recent moths, we (“we” as in Ning) have started to open up some of our code to the community at large. There is quite a bit of useful stuff in there (23 public repositories and counting), compliments of powerhouses like brianm, davidsklar or tomdz (to name a few). We have also started sharing code from the Operations side of the house, in hopes that it is useful to other Operations shops out in the ether.
Our first entry in this regard, at pierre‘s suggestion, is a Nagios plugin for Tableau servers, check_tableau_systeminfo, which is currently a little rough around the edges but quite usable. There is a new version right around the corner with some polish applied to said edges, and we are preparing a host of other tools for release that we currently use every day in our production environment.
Our production environment is currently comprised of 2000+ nodes, which makes it a relatively large environment that provides a fair amount of interesting operational problems to solve. And problems solvers is something we are actively looking for, i.e., we are hiring! Ning is the largest platform in the world for creating custom social networks, currently hosting 70,000 paid subscribers (up from 15,000 before we transitioned from the prior “freemium” model), and serving over 80 million unique visitors monthly. This makes us one of the top 100 sites in the US, and, according to CNBC.com, one cool company to work for (indeed!).
Check out the openings, check out the code, and come play in our playground.
BlogPress on the iPad
I love ecto on the Mac, so I’m giving BlogPress a try on the iPad. The WordPress app is not really all that useful, so I’m hoping the alternative is worth it.
Vision and Execution
Priceless and sadly, often accurate:
Too much vision of execution and not enough execution of the vision.
Ben’s Blogging!
Ben Horowitz, one my most admired, all-time management masters, has started writing at Marc’s blog (he also wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital publication). The ATD piece was interesting in that it brought back a lot of memories about Loudcloud and the events that transpired back then. I am definitely looking forward to more of his posts.
Update: Now, his own blog!
Finder Error -10810
I don’t normally curse (ok, ok, when writing) but fuck!
Update: I ended up nuking and paving the laptop after grabbing data via target mode. The effort late last year to finally organize my apps, data, and such is paying off. The FileVault image works, and I was able to mount it elsewhere (so I expect to drop it back in the laptop after I finish reinstalling). Eating my own sysadmin dog food: anytime!
Update: Really, a little thinking about the chain of events that may have caused this. Just before the Finder bent itself into oblivion, I just attached my video camera and (gasp!) poked around its file system from the CLI. I had attached the camera before without problems (but this was the first time I sniffed around). I’m not sure this has anything to do, other than folks seem to think this issue is related to external disks.
Nagios Forked: Icinga
I found out recently that Nagios was forked into Icinga. It looks interesting, and the new web interface is heading over to sexyland fast. I will take it out for spin soon and see how it handles our current configuration (which relies heavily on object inheritance). The team at Icinga has already built a fair number of improvements for Nagios proper. It may be the fastest path to nirvana to a more usable Nagios install for shops heavily invested in Nagios.
