Initial Release of SAM Web Edition (Snort Alert Monitor Web Edition)
Posted by Sam
After a long hiatus a new release of SAM is finally available. It's an entirely new code base that is based on Ruby on Rails. Development will go much quicker and some of the features that I've been wanting to develop for years will finally be possible. If you've deployed any Rails apps you'll have no problems deploying this app. You can download the files at SourceForge.
This is a very early release so there are a couple of gotchas. First up there is no support for Postgres. This initial release is MySQL only. That will change in the next release. Second, there is no README file or help setting this app up. This will come as I get time. Third, the main project page won't be updated for a little while so screenshots and FAQ will continue to reflect the old version of SAM.
The swing based GUI is no longer going to be supported. All features that are currently in the desktop version will be available in the web edition and a RESTful API will be available so that future GUIs can take advantage of the web edition. This should also make integration with third party utilities such as Nagios, Dashboard widgets and other web portals very simple.
Leave a message in the comments section for additional features you'd like to see.
Tags: sam
SunFire X4150 Strange Drive Behavior
Posted by Sam
We got a couple of SunFire X4150s at work to replace several aging P4 servers. This was the first time I've used Sun equipment in a pretty long time and I'd never setup a Sun x86 server before. For the most part it went pretty smooth but we spent a long time chasing a strange problem. Since I didn't see anything online about it I thought I would explain the problem and what we did to resolve it.
The SunFires we ordered had a total of 5 drives. Four drives were installed at the factory and the fifth was installed by us. When we booted up the machines the first four drives all had green lights indicating they were good to go. The fifth drive had no lights what so ever. If you jumped into the StorageTEK **cough** Adaptec **cough** raid controller you could see and initialize the fifth drive. It's green light would light up and you'd think all was well. Until you rebooted it that is. Once you rebooted it the green light would disappear and wouldn't come back on until you reinitialized it. Sun was little help. Their support folks were friendly and responsive but ultimately we stumbled across the answer on our own. Below is the basics for upgrading the RAID card with the latest version. This fixed the problem for us so hopefully it will help you as well.
- Boot from SunFire X4150 Server Tools and Drivers DVD Version 2.1
- cd firmware\sst
- flash.bat
- Update flash image
- Follow the prompts and reboot when instructed
The Last Word on Rails Scaling
Posted by Sam
Ok, I have to admit that I'm getting a bit tired of all the Rails scaling questions. People seem to think that's Twitter's scaling problems are Rail's scaling problems. They aren't. Twitter's scaling problems do not equal Rails scaling problems or to put it more succinctly Twitter's scaling problems != Rails scaling problems. Rather than try and convince people that Rails can scale I'm just going to include a couple of stories about large companies that have scaled Rails to Billions of page views a month. Will this finally convince people that Rails scales?
Our first Rails app that scales is brought to us by AT&T. Yellowpages.com was rewritten from a Java app to a Rails app. It serves over 1.4 billion requests a month using 25 servers per data center. That's only 4 more servers than it was using while running under Java. The Java code base weighed in at 125k lines of code while the Rails code base came in at under 20k lines of code, including tests. The much larger Java code base didn't include any tests. The entire site was coded with at most five developers over a three month period. One thing that really stands out with Rails site is the maintainability. As a developer would you rather jump into and maintain a site with 125k lines of code or less than 20k lines of code? Over the life of the site AT&T might spend a couple extra grand on servers, but they will more than make it up by having less developers and getting new developers up to speed much quicker! And do you think there are more bugs and security issues hiding in 125k lines of code or in way less than 20k? If you want to look at more details you can check out this presentation from Rails Conf 2008.
Our next app is brought to us by LinkedIn. LinkedIn built a Facebook app called Bumpersticker that handles 1 billion page views monthly and around 100TB of data each month. This app is obviously also built on Ruby on Rails otherwise I wouldn't be including it here. ZDNet has a write up and there's also a video that looks to be from Joyent. This story isn't as interesting as the Yellowpages.com story because it wasn't a rewrite and it's harder to see the benefits of using Rails as compared to a traditional environment like ASP.Net or Java but I'm including it to point out that you can get the advantages of a great framework, cut development time and costs and still scale out to a billion page views a month.
So that's it. Can we please stop asking if Rails can scale and stop using these horribly outdated technologies like Java and .Net? Please? Pretty please?
Tags: rubyonrails
CoyotePoint review coming soon
Posted by Sam
A few weeks back I was contacted by CoyotePoint and asked if I would be interested in reviewing one of their load balancers. Naturally I was ecstatic. This was my first request as a blogger and it made this blog feel a little more real and a little more important. I remember looking at CoyotePoint back when I decided on the LoadMaster from Kemp. I don't recall why I decided against it at the time but now I'm hoping that I don't fall in love with CoyotePoint because I have to send it back. The load balancer reviews get consistenly good reviews and there's definitely a lot of room for improvement over the LoadMaster so I'm happy to be able to provide a third possibility for the lower end load balancer space. Look for a review in the next couple of weeks.
Tags: loadbalancer
Compiling Ruby Enterprise Edition on Solaris 10
Posted by Sam
I wanted to try out Phusion's Ruby Enterprise Edition and hopefully Phusion's Passenger. From what I've read I know they are a pretty Linux centric pair of developers so I wasn't surprised at all that their Ruby Enterprise Edition installer didn't actually install on Solaris 10 despite using gnu tools. Fortunately, it was pretty easy to bypass their installer and compile it like I would with MRI. Here's a quick rundown of what I did to get it compiled.
Here's what I did to get Ruby Enterprise Edition compiled on Solaris 10. This assumes you are using gcc from Blastwave.
bash-3.00# wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/38084/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080507.tar.gz
bash-3.00# gtar xvf ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080507.tar.gz
bash-3.00# cd ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080507/source
bash-3.00# ./configure --with-openssl-dir=/opt/csw --with-readline-dir=/opt/csw \
--with-iconv-dir=/opt/csw --prefix=/opt/rubyenterprise
bash-3.00# make
bash-3.00# make install
That's all there is to it. I wish Phusion wasn't so Linux centric. I'm going to try and get mod_rails or passenger or whatever it's called this week compiled next, but I don't think it's going to go quite so easy.
Tags: ruby