Ansible and Monit for simple server monitoring and documentation

A month ago a customer asked me to help him with his server monitoring. My first step was to evaluate what servers were running what services, so I turned to the customer’s developers for a list of services per host. Long story short – there wasn’t any kind of server documentation. So a second task emerged: Write a server documentation. Why not kill two birds with one stone? Continue reading

How to fix skewed system times on multiple vagrant instances

I’m having this problem with my local dev ceph cluster where the clocks on all my nodes would get heavily skewed after a while so rather than researching what’s going on here with virtualbox I just hit the problem with the unix hammer. So, were the guest tools installed? I don’t even know nor care.

Virtualbox is usually not my first choice with vagrant but https://github.com/ceph/ceph-ansible didn’t work out of the box with the vmware-fusion provider so I’m sticking with it for now.

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Boot2docker and inotify

I recently ran into a problem with a compile-on-filesystem-change application on boot2docker. Due to the layered structure of boot2docker (Host->VM->docker) the mechanics required for inotify are not working.

Luckily there exists a solution: https://github.com/brikis98/docker-osx-dev

I use docker-compose – so after installing docker-osx-dev, just run it in the folder containing the docker-compose.yml and docker-osx-dev finds the correct folders to watch.