Lights and Shapes

Process contracts with Rust

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Setting the stage

I recently had a FaceTime call with my friend Dave discussing technical topics – as we often do. This conversation in particular was about Dave’s desire to write some new Rust software to manage SMF services on his home server. The question at hand was, “how can we reliably determine if a service has processes associated with it or not”. The service management facility (SMF) in illumos provides a property called startd/duration. This property can be set to a few options, but the default is contract.

Tailscale on OmniOS

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 19:14:45 -0400

Tailscale: Secure remote access to shared resources

Background

It turns out that I have a lot of technical content that lives in various gists, note taking apps, and local markdown files. There are a variety of technical how-tos, debugging sessions, and subject matter deep dives that I would like to start posting here. Recently I have redeployed my off-site backup server at my friends house. One of the crucial pieces of technology that I am leveraging in that project is tailscale, so I figured it would make a nice first post. I am going to focus primarily on setting up tailscale in an OmniOS zone.

Plex on SmartOS

Sat, 04 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Running Plex securely on top of ZFS through the magic of lx branded zones and SmartOS.

The nice folks at Plex recently released a version of Plex Media Server for SmartOS and other illumos variants. Actually, half of that statement is a lie. While the folks over at Plex are nice, they didn’t actually release a version of Plex for the illumos family. Some of you may be thinking whats the point of this blog post? Well I am here to tell you that Plex does indeed run on top of SmartOS. “How?”, you may ask. The answer to that is lx branded zones.

Sanity Checking with the pid Provider

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I am not crazy right?

It has been a while since I posted an entry, so I thought I would type up a short post on some fun with the DTrace pid Provider. I was recently working with stud on SmartOS and I wanted to send the logs off to the syslog facility local4. So I modified /etc/syslog.conf with the following.

/etc/syslog.conf

local4.* /var/log/stud.log

Then I simply ran svcadm restart system-log and fired up stud. Running tail -f /var/log/stud.log seemed to reveal that nothing was being logged. My first thought was that I did not end the file with a new line. Checking the config again I made sure that I had the new line at the end. (Older syslog on unix cares about formatting).

Splunk Performance on SmartOS

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Debugging splunk performance issues in a live environment.

Since joining Voxer to do performance engineering, I have also become the owner of our splunk instances. We rely on splunk heavily to monitor our infrastructure just as most companies do. It is an important tool especially while doing a code push to production. Splunk gives us observability into how our application is performing without having a million tail -f /path/to/a.log windows open. Splunk also makes it easy to correlate the data between the different types of logs we have.

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Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000