Jun 28
This weekend Jill, Jude and I visited Chris Kenney to watch his band perform on his front porch in Villa Rica. To say Chris plays guitar well is an understatement. I’ve Spent time with him and now witnessed him play electric. For his set, he clearly had a distinct style.
Jill thought he might be offended by this but I could close my eyes and clearly hear Joe Satriani. And it got me recalling my days of listening to him on cassette with my Sony Walkman with a 3 band graphic EQ. Thanks Chris.
flying in a blue dream
I was taken back to when I was in high school and playing guitar was the only thing that mattered to me. I was neither a jock nor a band geek, I was a lone guitar guy in high school it seemed. Where now everyone plays. Not in blairsville did they in 1987.
So much of our lives change from adolescence and for the most part our dreams of ourselves are sucked into the vortex of responsibility.
For the rare few who escape this, I send this song. It is not cool by many standards but I have no shame. It is just what I held at the time to be my dream to make music like this. Thus the irony of the title.
Tagged with: childhood • dreams • music • satriani
Nov 02
The simplest way to test syntax is to use the administration console via telnet on a Dev/QA Varnish machine. Your current running Varnish should allow your IP/localhost to connect if you have implemented a Varnish ACL.
- Start up Varnish with single command-line
- Login to console via telnet
- Load the config you wish to test
- Use the config.
On OSX:
sudo /usr/local/sbin/varnishd -F -a localhost:3000 -b localhost:6081 -T localhost:6082
From another console/shell/ open connection to Varnish management console:
telnet localhost 6082
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
Load config and try to use (the config used in this example has a syntax problem. Therefore, you will see compilation errors:
vcl.load error /Users/hbeaver/code/varnish_demo/config/syntax_error.vcl
106 181
Message from VCC-compiler:
Expected one of
'acl', 'sub', 'backend', or 'director'
Found: '}' at
(input Line 12 Pos 1)
}
#
Running VCC-compiler failed, exit 1VCL compilation failed
Conversely, if the VCL has good syntax you should see no errors:
vcl.load good_config /Users/hbeaver/code/varnish_demo/config/default.vcl
200 13
VCL compiled.
Tagged with: check • syntax • validate • varnish • vcl
Oct 15
You may find yourself needing to test something with a specific version of thin, for whatever reason. If you need start up thin with a specific version of gem you have installed this is how you do it:
<pre>thin _1.2.4_ -R config.ru -p 3001 start</pre>
The first argument represents the gem version prefixed and post-fixed with “_”.
Enjoy.
Tagged with: thin
Jun 05
When using a BigIP to load balance a Sinatra app via Thin you will need to provide more than just the GET request string in F5’s “send string” field OR you might get “Request Invalid!” error message. Heads up.
Using this will cause issue:
GET /ops/heartbeat
This works:
GET /ops/heartbeat HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: \r\nConnection: Close\r\n\r\n
Tagged with: BigIP • F5 • healthcheck • Rails
Jun 05
Simple but effective regex to monitor when there are issues. In my example below, this will show all response times > 1 second:
tail -f production.log | egrep "Completed in [0-9]{3,10}"
Tagged with: logging • logs • Rails • regex
