Self-Hosting Fonts

23 Jan 2015

That’s the most helpful guide I found for self-hosting your own fonts and preventing compatibility issues.

Dokku Change Nginx Timeout

21 Jan 2015

None of the plug-ins for doing custom nginx configurations were working for me.

So, I changed the following two files:

/var/lib/dokku/plugins/nginx-vhosts/templates/nginx.ssl.conf
/var/lib/dokku/plugins/nginx-vhosts/templates/nginx.conf

I added the following under location / {:

proxy_connect_timeout 300s;
proxy_read_timeout 300s;

Supervisord Tips and Gotchas

21 Jan 2015

If you make configuration changes, the changes will not take effect until you:

supervisorctl reread
supervisorctl update

“redirect_stderr=true” will cause both stderr and stdout to appear in the “stdout” log.

You get to select which user runs the command with the “user” parameter.

For example: user=root

Supervisord keeps its own set of environmental variables with the “environment” parameter. It won’t pick up env variables from /etc/environment.

For example: environment=A=”1”,B=”2”

For Gunicorn, use a configuration file rather than putting all your arguments into the “command” parameter.

For example, -t will be ignored here: command=/path/to/gunicorn main:application -t 300

Instead use: command=/path/to/gunicorn main:application -c /path/to/gunicorn.conf.py

Installing python-ldap on Dokku

20 Jan 2015

Install this plugin: https://github.com/F4-Group/dokku-apt#installation

Create an apt-packages file in the root directory of your repository with the following lines:

python-dev
libldap2-dev
libsasl2-dev
libssl-dev

Now, commit your new apt-packages file and python-ldap should install successfully.

I also had trouble installing pymssql, and got an error saying “_mssql.c:314:22: fatal error: sqlfront.h: No such file or directory”. Similar fix, just add “freetds-dev” to your apt-packages file.

Enabling SSL On Dokku

20 Jan 2015

It’s important that you have the newest version of Dokku: Dokku: Upgrading
Zip your certificate and key: sudo tar cvf archive_name.tar.gz server.crt server.key
Import using dokku nginx:import-ssl appname < ~/archive_name.tar.gz Dokku: Nginx proxy configuration

Expecting: TRUSTED CERTIFICATE

20 Jan 2015

I was trying to add my certificate to Dokku using “dokku nginx:import-ssl” when I got the error message “Expecting: TRUSTED CERTIFICATE”.

This ended up being an issue with line endings and the dos2unix utility fixed it: http://serverfault.com/a/317038

Downloading Files With Python's Requests Module

19 Jan 2015

http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/user/quickstart/#binary-response-content

From the example:

>>> from PIL import Image
>>> from StringIO import StringIO
>>> i = Image.open(StringIO(r.content))

Nmap Not Finding Hostnames

16 Jan 2015

Server Fault answer

The secret ended up being running the command as sudo. It’s odd how “socket.gethostbyaddr()” worked just fine without sudo, but was slower than nmap.

Editable list view - Flask-Admin

10 Jan 2015

I’ve been doing a lot of work in Flask-Admin lately, and the thing that kept bugging me was editing a single field. I’d spot a typo in the list, click into the record’s edit form, change one field, save, and go back. That’s a lot of clicks for a one-character fix.

So I opened an issue proposing edits straight from the list view (#755) and then built it (#756, merged today).

It’s a new column_editable_list property on the ModelView:

class UserView(ModelView):
    column_editable_list = ['name', 'email']

Those columns become click-to-edit in the list. Click a cell, type, hit enter, and it saves over AJAX with X-editable. Works across the SQLAlchemy, MongoEngine, and Peewee backends, and posts a CSRF token with each edit.

The messy part was the data handling. My first attempt rendered a form field for every row and tried to process the whole page as a WTForms FieldList. That got out of hand fast. What worked was wrapping each field on its own and reusing the existing update_model method to save, so validation and the record-not-found case were already handled. That fix came out of the code review on the PR.

Update: this one stuck around, and I ended up maintaining it for a while afterward: an XSS fix to HTML-escape the editable values (#1002), nullable enums and blank selects (#1009), and eventually a rewrite that builds a form per input (#1160, #1162). A bunch of smaller ones in between too. column_editable_list is still in Flask-Admin.

Slow Disk Performance On Dell r620

07 Jan 2015

Update:

I installed openmanage with the instructions on this page and used it to check/update bios settings: Dell OpenManage (OMSA 7.1) apt repo

The fix ended up being BIOS power profile settings. It was set to Performance Per Watt (DAPC) and needed to be set to “Performance”.

It’s very interesting that the BIOS power profile settings didn’t seem to affect Ubuntu 14.10’s disk read speed.

Troubleshooting:

I have three of the same server. All the servers are Dell r620’s with a PERC H710 Mini RAID controller (21.2.0-0007_A04 firmware) and have the exact same hard drives (Seagate ST300MM0006) in RAID 1 configurations. I’m seeing about 50% worse disk read performance on some versions of Ubuntu.

They only differences I can find in the hardware:

The BIOS version on the poorly performing machines is 1.4.8, the machine that’s performing well is on 1.6.0. The BIOS change log doesn’t appear to have any changes between the two versions that would affect anything.
The chipset version on the RAID controller of the poorly performing machines is rev 01 (ChipRevision: B0). The machine that’s performing well has the rev 05 chipset (ChipRevision: D1). The motherboard chipset revision is also different.

Here are the benchmark results for the different Ubuntu versions and RAID controller chipsets:

(mysql read speed test - using the same version of mysql across all 3 machines)

sysbench --test=oltp --oltp-table-size=1000000 --mysql-db=test --max-time=60 --oltp-read-only=on --max-requests=0 --num-threads=8 run:

(13.04 - rev 05): read/write requests: 4996362 (83271.11 per sec.)
(14.04 - rev 01): read/write requests: 1906520 (31773.58 per sec.)
(14.10 - rev 01): read/write requests: 5166798 (86111.50 per sec.)

dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/output bs=8k count=10k; rm -f /tmp/output:

(13.04 - rev 05): 83886080 bytes (84 MB) copied, 0.0437543 s, 1.9 GB/s
(13.04 - rev 01) 83886080 bytes (84 MB) copied, 0.116811 s, 718 MB/s
(13.10 - rev 01): 83886080 bytes (84 MB) copied, 0.129371 s, 648 MB/s
(14.04 - rev 01): 83886080 bytes (84 MB) copied, 0.157808 s, 532 MB/s
(14.10 - rev 01): 83886080 bytes (84 MB) copied, 0.102355 s, 820 MB/s

hdparm -tT /dev/sda1:

(13.04 - rev 05): Timing cached reads:23154 MB in 2.00 seconds = 11589.16 MB/sec
(13.04 - rev 01): Timing cached reads:17934 MB in 2.00 seconds = 8973.68 MB/sec
(13.10 - rev 01): Timing cached reads:18102 MB in 2.00 seconds = 9058.08 MB/sec
(14.04 - rev 01): Timing cached reads:17846 MB in 1.99 seconds = 8956.28 MB/sec
(14.10 - rev 01): Timing cached reads:21538 MB in 2.00 seconds = 10777.93 MB/sec

At one point, 2 of the rev 01 servers were using Ubuntu 14.04 and were getting similar bad benchmark results. After the upgrading them to 14.10, I immediately saw the disk read speed increase.

The performance on rev 01 machine with 13.04 was bad, but somehow the rev 05 machine with the same OS version was performing well. This told me it’s not a problem with the megaraid_sas driver, because the rev 01 and rev 05 machines with 13.04 had the same version.

Here’s the closest I can find to a similar issue (it’s different hardware though): Dell community forum: similar disk performance issue

Update 3/1/2015:

Saw an interesting checklist on Hacker News today that also mentioned disabling BIOS power saving settings: http://odetodata.com/2015/02/installation-and-configuration-checklist-for-microsoft-sql-server/

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