This project had a very simple goal: Display local weather measurements on old tablet in our kitchen. I have: A first generation iPad mini that has been gathering dust since 2019. An outdoor weather station: A Raspberry Pi with a DVB receiver: And Grafana & Prometheus on a Vultr VPS that scrapes the Raspberry Pi. There are obviously some resource constraints here — device and operating system age, memory limits — so it was interesting to solve this problem within these constraints. Trial ...| Fractional
by Lindsay Holmwood| fractio.nl
If you’ve used MikroTik network gear long enough, you’ve likely run into devices bricking themselves after RouterOS software upgrades.Maybe you’ve set some c...| fractio.nl
👋, I’m Lindsay.| fractio.nl
When I originally launched Got Gastro back in 2008, New South Wales was the only Australian jurisdiction that published data about food safety problems.| fractio.nl
The opinions in this post are my own, and do not represent my employer.| fractio.nl
Your boss calls you into her office. “Congratulations - I’m promoting you to team lead!” Your mouth goes dry. “You’ve been doing such great job on the l...| fractio.nl
These are notes I’ve taken while binge listening to the last two months of the PreAccident Investigation Podcast, which you should subscribe to.| fractio.nl
Failure can lead to blame or inquiry in your organisation.| fractio.nl
At DevOpsDays Melbourne 2015 I facilitated an Open Space session on management and leadership.| fractio.nl
This cop threw me to the ground, cos hip hop is violent,Said “You got freedom of speech, just choose to remain silent” – Hilltop Hoods, Mic Felon| fractio.nl
For the last 6 months I’ve been consulting on a project to build a monitoring metrics storage service to store several hundred thousand metrics that are upda...| fractio.nl
Understanding your motivations for a career change into management is vitally important to understanding what kind of manager you want to be.| fractio.nl
If alarms are more often false than true, a culture emerges on the unit in that staff may delay response to alarms, especially when staff are engaged in ot...| fractio.nl
The two key take home messages from Monitorama PDX are this:| fractio.nl
Flapjack assumes a constant stream of events from upstream event producers, and this is fundamental to Flapjack’s design.| fractio.nl
On Monday I gave a talk at Puppet Camp Sydney 2014 about managing Flapjack data (specifically: contacts, notification rules) with Puppet + Hiera.| fractio.nl
Routine error caused NSW Roads and Maritime outage The NSW Roads and Maritime Services’ driver and vehicle registration service suffered a full-day outage...| fractio.nl
In October @rodjek asked on Twitter:| fractio.nl
At Bulletproof, we are increasingly finding home brew systems tools are critical to delivering services to customers.| fractio.nl
Earlier this week I gave a talk at Monitorama EU on psychological factors that should be considered when designing alerts.| fractio.nl
Monitoring dependency graphs are fine for small environments, but they are not a good fit for nested complex environments, like those that make up modern web...| fractio.nl
At my day job, I run a distributed team of infrastructure coders spread across Australia + one in Vietnam. Our team is called the Software team, but we’re mo...| fractio.nl
Back in 2009 when I was backpacking around Europe I remember waking up on the morning of June 1 and reading about how an Air France flight had disappeared so...| fractio.nl
To recap, pipelines are a useful way of modelling monitoring systems.| fractio.nl
Over the last few years I have been experimenting with different approaches for scaling systems that monitor large numbers of heterogenous hosts, specifical...| fractio.nl
This is the first time I’ve actually blogged about Flapjack.| fractio.nl
My next 2 months is going to be jam packed with conferences and travel!| fractio.nl
Whenever I talk at conferences, I am routinely asked how I go about preparing and making my presentations.| fractio.nl
Almost 2 days ago Patrick kicked off a discussion about organising another Australian DevOps conference in 2013 amongst a small group of passionate DevOps wh...| fractio.nl
Running your own servers? Hate managing firewall rules?| fractio.nl
Matthias Marschall wrote a great peice last week on the pitfalls of making manual changes to production systems. TL,DR; Making manual changes in the heat of ...| fractio.nl
This post is part 3 of 3 in a series on monitoring scalability.| fractio.nl
This post is part 2 of 3 in a series on monitoring scalability.| fractio.nl
This post is part 1 of 3 in a series on monitoring scalability.| fractio.nl
Earlier this year at Puppet Camp EU, Randall Hansen ran an open space session on improving the Puppet user experience.| fractio.nl
I’ve been using a standing desk for a bit over four months now, and thus far it’s been quite successful.| fractio.nl
The final videos from Devops Down Under 2011 have just been uploaded to Vimeo.| fractio.nl
Almost 2 weeks ago Rusty Russell wrote about assholes in the Open Source community.| fractio.nl
Although a bit late to the party, I’ve been using Boxee at home for watching movies and TV shows for almost a year now. Its indexing engine is pretty accurat...| fractio.nl
Sometimes when writing daemons and doing outside-in testing, you want to fire up the daemon in the background, interact with it, and test the interactions ma...| fractio.nl
Martin Englund posted an open questionto the Puppet mailing lista few days ago asking how people are verifying their systems are builtas expected:| fractio.nl
On cucumber-nagios:| fractio.nl
Yesterday at the excellent Devopsdays in Gent,Belgium, I proposed an open session to flesh out an idea I had a few weeksago - to use Cucumber as a general sc...| fractio.nl
I’ve just released a new version of cucumber-nagios, and this release is quite a milestone!| fractio.nl
After a quick migration, i’ve switched this blog from WordPress to Jekyll.| fractio.nl
I’ve spent the last few years trying to find the holy grail of FOSS toolchains for producing and displaying my presentations.| fractio.nl
I’ve been working on a cool little side project the last week called Visage. It renders graphs of collectd statistics in the browser, making the data interac...| fractio.nl
The conference season is starting to warm up:I’ll be speaking at the devopsdays 2009 in Ghent, Belgium on 30th/31st of October, on cucumber-nagios and Flapja...| fractio.nl
When hacking on small open source projects you end up having to be a jack of all trades - hacker, documentor, community manager. Documentation can be annoyin...| fractio.nl
Last year I blogged about where to get up-to-date Ruby packages for Ubuntu.The PPA I suggested hasn’t been updated in a while, and there are a few gems that ...| fractio.nl
As lots of people are apparently using cucumber-nagios and i’m getting a few bug reports, I thought it’d be worth setting up a proper home for the project.Yo...| fractio.nl
I pushed out a new release of cucumber-nagios last night. Things of note: It's now project focused. Use cucumber-nagios-gen to generate a project. The proje...| fractio.nl
James, Michael and I have been working on a small startup called Hardcopy Books for the last 3 months. Here’s the elevator pitch:Hardcopy Books is an online ...| fractio.nl
Interesting thought experiment:| fractio.nl
So I don’t waste another 30 minutes of my life:When using the select helper in Merb, make sure you call to_s on whatever you’re setting :selected to, i.e.sel...| fractio.nl
It’s been interesting watching the flurry of activity in data-storage land over the last few months. CouchDB has been improving in leaps and bounds, and mult...| fractio.nl
On Sunday I posted about a Twitter bot (@nswbushfires) I quickly hacked up to post current incident updates to Twitter.People following the bushfires on Twit...| fractio.nl
I just scraped together a Twitter bot to post updates from the NSW Rural Fire Service’s Current Incidents list.If you’re in NSW, follow @nswbushfires on Twit...| fractio.nl
Almost a week ago today, Julia and I tied the knot.You can find photos on Flickr, and highlights on Julia’s brand new blog.| fractio.nl
Gastro has been relaunched at gotgastro.com!DNS issues should be all fixed, so go nuts and share the site.| fractio.nl
I pushed two new features on Gastro last night: GeoRSS support, and a JSON export.This should make it a lot easier to take the data i’ve scraped and reuse it...| fractio.nl
Dear Simon,Ask and ye shall receive.Regards,Lindsay| fractio.nl
I was reading the FiveRuns blog post on automating your Rails server configuration, and had a peek at the script they included to setup a machine.There are s...| fractio.nl
I’ve been having a problem with my MacBook where it wakes up when the lid is closed, which leaves me hot and bothered when it’s in my bag.Apparently it’s a k...| fractio.nl
$ ln -sf ~/Library/Fonts/ .fontcan save a lot of hassle with fonts in different X11 apps on OS X.| fractio.nl
I’ve recently been having problems with collectd crashing without notice on a server aggregating a large amount of stats from ~20 nodes. Initially I set up a...| fractio.nl
…can be found on slideshare, or just below. The feedback so far has been really positive!| fractio.nl
It’s always annoying trying to remember what pid maps to a screen session, but it’s possible to actually name the session.| fractio.nl
I’m heading to MerbCamp in San Diego in just under two weeks, where i’ll be talking about deploying Merb.Still so much to do before I head off, but i’m looki...| fractio.nl
Recently, there have been a few happenings in Ruby land that break things a bit on Ubuntu Hardy.Firstly, there were two rounds of security vulnerabilities. T...| fractio.nl
While browsing my feeds this morning, I came across this article on HowtoForge called How To Extract Values From top And Plot Them.| fractio.nl
My hatred for DB2 grows. I thought it was bad setting up the DB2 server - it’s even worse getting the ODBC adapter working. It took me a good 2 days of fiddl...| fractio.nl
A while back I posted about Fixing IBM DB2 for non-ancient operating systems. tail’s deprecated +n syntax broke the installer at a critical point, leaving DB...| fractio.nl
You’ve tried installing IBM DB2 V8.1 on the current release of an RPM-based but commercially unsupported operating system. Also, maybe you’ve installed DB2 b...| fractio.nl
Interesting file locking problem with Samba and Windows & Linux clients arose at work last week:| fractio.nl
Benno, the convert command that you used didn’t actually convert your image down to a 16-bit colour RGB image. It just reduced the number of colours in the p...| fractio.nl
Annoying changes in syntax between versions of OpenLDAP that I didn’t pick up consumed my time at work today. I was beating my head against the wall trying ...| fractio.nl
by Lindsay Holmwood| fractio.nl
by Lindsay Holmwood| fractio.nl
The biggest misconception engineers have when thinking about moving into management is they think it’s a promotion.| fractio.nl