Category: Systems Admin

  • Notes: BuildKite and Kubernetes Rolling Update

    This is kind of a textbook case that container is much more efficient than VM. The CI pipeline in comparison uses AWS CloudFormation to build new VMs and drain old VMs to do a rolling update, which takes around 10 minutes for everything even if it’s just 1 line of code changed. I did a…

  • Why I like BuildKite

    BuildKite is a relative new CI toolkit I would like to replace Jenkins with. Here are some pros and cons I thought I could share: Pros: Designed with containers(docker) in mind. Hybrid architecture, console as a hosted service where agents can run anywhere with internet connectivity Build pipeline as code, also very easy to write…

  • Play a bit Kubernetes with Minikube

    I’ve just played a bit Kubernetes on my Arch Linux laptop, with Minikube. It’s easier than I thought. Since I’ve already installed VirtualBox from the start, I can use minikube right after I installed it with curl -Lo minikube https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64 && chmod +x minikube && sudo mv minikube /usr/local/bin/ The command I used to start…

  • Linux and Wake on LAN

    The Internet servers are usually on 24×7, probably that’s why I never had the need to use the Wake on LAN feature on a computer. I’ve just built a home server running Ubuntu Linux, using consumer grade PC parts. To avoid a big surge on my next electricity bill, I plan to only turn on…

  • Install Fluentd with Ansible

    Fluentd has become the popular open source log aggregration framework for a while. I’ll try to give it a spin with Ansible. There are quite some existing Ansible playbooks to install Fluentd out there, but I would like to do it from scratch just to understand how it works. From the installation guide page, I…

  • The Burnout Effect

    Back in October 2015 I got an offer from a big data startup, and after 1 year and 4 months I decided to move on. There’s a 3D printer and a drone in the office and the team was talking about Fallout 4 in the morning because it was just released. I thought the company…

  • Use MySQL Trigger To Do Incremental ETL

    There’s a huge MySQL table that I need to ETL to Google BigQuery daily, about 1 billion rows. The rows are updated in a random fashion all the time so I can’t do incremental ETL by the recording the max primary key. Then my colleague brought up the trigger idea, which I believe is the…

  • Install OS X Sierra on VirtualBox on Ubuntu

    Following the guide below I installed Sierra in a VirutalBox VM running on Ubuntu quite easily. https://techsviewer.com/install-macos-sierra-virtualbox-windows/ Update: sample vboxmanage commands. vboxmanage modifyvm Sierra –cpuidset 00000001 000106e5 00100800 0098e3fd bfebfbff vboxmanage setextradata Sierra “VBoxInternal/Devices/efi/0/Config/DmiSystemProduct” “iMac11,3” vboxmanage setextradata Sierra “VBoxInternal/Devices/efi/0/Config/DmiSystemVersion” “1.0” vboxmanage setextradata Sierra “VBoxInternal/Devices/efi/0/Config/DmiBoardProduct” “Iloveapple” vboxmanage setextradata Sierra “VBoxInternal/Devices/smc/0/Config/DeviceKey” “ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)AppleComputerInc” vboxmanage setextradata Sierra “VBoxInternal/Devices/smc/0/Config/GetKeyFromRealSMC” 1…