Home Assistant High Availability
So, you’ve gone down the rabbit hole of home automation. You’ve been getting deeper and deeper into Home Assistant and its ecosystem. You are configuring new IoT devices and integrations with reckless abandon to automate away problems that you never knew you had. Maybe you installed Home Assistant on an old gaming PC? Or perhaps something like an Intel […]
How We Test DRBD
As I am still involved in DRBD development, this newsletter edition includes insights into how we test DRBD. Sometimes, testing begins with a bug in DRBD that embarrasses the developer. Other times, the developer takes pride in understanding a newly discovered issue and finding the mistake in the code. Whichever the case, the developer is […]
Configuring High Availability for MySQL Databases Using DRBD
Before MySQL version 5.5, released in December of 2010, MySQL only natively supported asynchronous replication which had the potential to lose data under certain conditions. Due to this risk, DRBD® was often used to transparently provide synchronous replication at the block level, underneath the database. Because DRBD is situated in the Linux kernel as a […]
Conference & Software Updates
May is conference season. Kicking off the season, I gave a short presentation last week at a STAC research event in London. As you can imagine, it is no surprise that AI has arrived in the finance industry. An angle I was unaware of before and only realized at the conference is that what we usually call […]
Continuously Improving our Build Automation
Jia Tan owned the previous newsletter with their work on the XZ/ssh backdoor. I wanted to write about HashiCorp and Redis, and a common theme between the two companies of changing their licensing of important software projects from open-source licenses to proprietary licenses. Several news sites have featured articles related to the topic. Here is […]
Abstracting Persistent Storage Across Environments With LINBIT SDS
Kubernetes can be thought of as an infrastructure abstraction layer for on-premise and cloud computing. The applications you deploy into one cloud platform or on-premise Kubernetes cluster can usually be deployed into another cluster using the same manifests and automations. That is a huge win for developers and development life cycles in terms of simplicity […]
Using the Prometheus Operator for Monitoring LINBIT SDS in Kubernetes
Prometheus is a popular solution for Kubernetes monitoring and alerting. The kube-prometheus-stack project is a collection of Kubernetes manifests, Grafana dashboards, and Prometheus rules that provides an easy to manage Kubernetes cluster monitoring solution. The project includes the Prometheus Operator, Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana, and more. The kube-prometheus stack is pre-configured to collect metrics from all Kubernetes components, and includes […]
Monitoring & Performing Actions on DRBD Resources in Real-Time Using DRBDmon
One convenient way to work with and check DRBD® and its resources is by using DRBDmon. DRBDmon is an open source utility included with the drbd-utils software package for LINBIT customers, or else you can build the utility from its source code within the drbd-utils project page on GitHub. The DRBDmon Interface DRBDmon is CLI-based but works with the concept of […]
Using Fencing in Pacemaker Clusters on VirtualBox Hypervisors
This blog post will describe how you can configure the fence_vbox fence agent in high-availability (HA) Pacemaker development clusters running on VirtualBox for Linux. Fencing is an important concept in HA clustering, so using fencing in development as you would in production is a practice that can help align the development experience with that of a user […]
XZ Backdoor & LINBIT Updates
Without question, the most drastic news event in the past two weeks was, of course, the backdoor in XZ Utils’ liblzma, which implements a backdoor in SSH daemons. As you know, an SSH-daemon runs on virtually every Linux server, allowing remote administration. About 20 million IPs on the internet are known to have a publicly […]
