Here’s your chance to work for an awesome company, Exlibris.  It’s an awesome company to work for.  The people in our group are smart and down to earth people and management is the same.

The title of the position is Cloud Optimization Engineer; however, the work is really devops type work.  Overall, the person in this position will be working to help automate, monitor, document, and maintain our global infrastructure.  The person should be familiar with Chef and Nagios for monitoring, but people deeply familiar with other configuration management and monitoring tools will also be considered.

If you are interested, please send me an email at john.alberts@exlibrisgroup.com

Here’s more of the details:

Job Description

Cloud optimization engineer team member to join a dynamic and very bright team of folks working with cutting edge technologies needed as our business is booming

Location

It would be great if you live near either Des Plaines, IL or Jerusalem, Israel.  If not, remote working will be seriously considered.

Essential Job Duties and Responsibilities

• A team member who is all about working with the latest and greatest technologies
• Joining a team which responsible for an increasingly virtualized Linux environment comprised of more than 300 physical servers and fast growing in multi datacenter locations worldwide.
• Deploy and operate large scale cloud infrastructure and application services in our own data centers
• Deploy, support, and operation of virtualized Linux environment
• Will be supporting various Products and Applications.
• Participate in on-call rotation to support 24×7 coverage of our services
• Work with our Engineers and Systems Architects on infrastructure projects
• There is a heavy reliance on open-source software.
• Use Chef for server configuration management
• Setup and maintain our monitoring platform, currently Centreon/Nagios

Qualifications/Skills

• B.S./B.A./M.S. degree or equivalent technical training
• A minimum of 3-5  years of  Unix/Linux Administration experience
• Configuration management experience using a tool such as Chef or Puppet
• Server/Application health monitoring experience
• Experience with designing and deploying virtualized infrastructures such as KVM, Xen, VMWare, Vservers
• Experience with web serving in HIGH traffic environment (apache/ httpd/tomcat)
• Experience with server load balancing (hardware/software)
• Highly skilled in a at least two typical scripting languages (shell/perl/python/ruby)
• Must have excellent communication skills
• Must be a team player and able and willing to roll their sleeves up
• Hands on experience operating modern high scale web based applications, tweaking Linux kernels, deploying and operating various infrastructure and middleware components, database servers, etc.
• Understanding of modern IT production datacenter and Internet (ISP/ASP) hosting operations.
• Demonstrable experience in configuring, troubleshooting, and administering IT networking and storage solutions
• Chef (or some other CM software) experience
• Server/Application monitoring using Nagios – an advantage
• Knowledge of web development (SOAP, REST) – an advantage
• Knowledge of databases (MySQL, Oracle) – an advantage
• Familiarity with systems management concepts, processes and standards (e.g. SNMP); capacity/performance management and tuning – an advantage
• Knowledge of lightweight configuration and management technologies such as Chef and Puppet – an advantage
• Knowledge of web development (SOAP, REST) – an advantage
• AWS experience  with Amazon EC2 and S3 and/or other could management tools – an advantage

The easiest solution I’ve found is to simply install Ruby and it’s dependencies and then install RubyGems from source.

I’ve written a small script which installs Ruby and it’s dependencies.  It then grabs the RubyGems source tarball and installs Gems from source.  As I wrote this to get a working Chef install, it also adds an opscode gems source.

You can get the script here.

echo "hi" | mail -s "My Subject" to@someone.com -- -f from@someone.com

One thing that is really cool is you can visit the personas gallery and see a bunch of different personas and when you hover your cursor over a persona, your browser will temporarily use that persona.  If you want to use that persona now, just click on it and it’s your active persona.

Here’s a quick little clip that shows what Personas does.

It looks like there is a new index page coming soon to the Gentoo website.  It looks like it’s just a matter of when it gets committed.  The new page appears to provide automated news updates with information such as:

• Latest GLSA’s
• compilation of dev blog posts from p.g.o
• latest package additions

The look of the page is pretty much the same as the old page.

Take a look for yourself.

A user had 2 partitions on different hard drives that he wanted to combine the space on.  Ok, well the interesting part was one persons reply about a new fuse filesystem called mhddfs.  He pointed out an article on debian.net that explained a bit about this new filesystem and how to use it.

Sure, there’s multiple ways to combine the two drives, but this one is pretty intesting.  You can use mhddfs to combine 2 partitions into one virtual partition.  Mhddfs will automatically merge (overlay) the contents of both partitions so it looks like one big partition.

The advantages are:

1. No need to move and backup existing data on the partitions.
2. Easily implemented in fuse.
3. Allows a regular user to mount and unmount the filesystem.

According to the forum thread poster, his tests show there is virtually no speed difference when using mhddfs, which is very surprising.  My experience with using fuse in the past with NTFS, was that it was painfully slow.  I’m sure things have matured greatly since I tried it a few years ago.

So, in doing some googling, I found a website that has a patch for moc support and also mentions that it’s been in Conky since September 28th!  I guess they haven’t updated the documentation yet.

Here’s a list of the new variables you can use in your conkyrc file to add moc support.

• $moc_state: Current state of MOC; playing, stopped etc.
• $moc_file: File name of the current MOC song.
• $moc_title: Title of the current MOC song.
• $moc_artist: Artist of the current MOC song.
• $moc_song: The current song name being played in MOC.
• $moc_album: Album of the current MOC song.
• $moc_totaltime: Total length of the current MOC song.
• $moc_timeleft: Time left in the current MOC song
• $moc_curtime: Current time of the current MOC song.
• $moc_bitrate: Bitrate in the current MOC song.
• $moc_rate: Rate of the current MOC song.

Daniel Robbins Funtoo site now has some articles on it that he recently created.  Right now, he has posted some of the articles that we’ve previously seen on the IBM Developer Works website, but there’s also now a quide for installing Funtoo.