Monthly Archives: November 2010

Porting Facter from Ruby to Perl6

I've been playing with Puppet for a while now. One of the most interesting (and simple!) components of Puppet is Facter.

Facter is a small software that reports "facts" about your computer. When you run facter, its output looks like the following:

architecture => x86_64
facterversion => 1.5.6
fqdn => cd01.localdomain.lan
hardwaremodel => x86_64
hostname => cd01
id => cosimo
interfaces => eth0,pan0
ipaddress => 10.0.0.1
...
uptime_hours => 422
uptime_seconds => 1519256
virtual => physical

It is interesting also because it's extensible with your own custom plugins. A custom plugin is just a Ruby file with usually a call to Facter.add:

Facter.add(:kernel) do
    setcode do
        require 'rbconfig'
        case Config::CONFIG['host_os']
        when /mswin|win32|dos|cygwin|mingw/i
            'windows'
        else
            Facter::Util::Resolution.exec("uname -s")
        end
    end
end

As a little experiment to become more familiar with Ruby and at the same time to enjoy writing some Perl 6, I decided to study the facter project and then port it to Perl6.

That took me a few hours over a couple of weekends, and it's almost completely functional. It is a straight port from the Ruby code, so it doesn't really use the magic powers of Perl6 yet. The idea is to use a different branch, now that I know it well under the hood, and to rewrite it from the ground up in Perl6.

I found out that Ruby code maps very closely to Perl6, apart from the yield instruction and a different model for static/instance variables. For yield, something that would be close in Perl6 is gather/take, but I'm not really sure that is the appropriate statement to use. yield is used in the fact value resolution algorithm, and that is currently the only thing that doesn't work properly in my port. Everything else is in place. Regarding static/instance variables, Ruby uses @attribute for instance variables, and @@attribute for static variables. In Perl6, instance variables are denoted with $.attribute if public, while static variables are package globals, so you can use our $attribute.

Of course, there's a lot more! If you're interested, take a look at the code on Github, the URL is http://github.com/cosimo/perl6-facter.

Another round of fixes for the varnish Accept-Language VCL extension

This very specific VCL extension to parse and normalize Accept-Language headers is becoming more robust as time goes by. Here's the latest round of fixes:

  • the original req.http.Accept-Language header could be overwritten when calling the vcl_rewrite_accept_language() function. Now this is fixed by copying the original header string into a static buffer and executing the processing on the copy.
  • improved a bit the style of the C code in a few places. Nothing miraculous really. Feels improved for me at least :)
  • fixed the use of a wrong define (string max length instead of languages list max length)
  • use of sizeof instead of using same constants in strncpy, etc…
  • added a small intro on the generated file too. In this way, if you find the code on some server, you can immediately understand what's that supposed to do, and where it came from :)

Enough blah blah, here's the new code. If you were already running this piece of VCL, then I won't tell you this is experimental stuff, because at this point it's no more experimental. But if you were running it already, then by all means upgrade. It is definitely better :)

http://github.com/cosimo/varnish-accept-language

Enjoy!

Adding the irc NOTICE capability to Bot::BasicBot

Bot::BasicBot is a Perl module that provides a really easy, fast and convenient way to build plugin-based IRC bots. I'm playing around with an IRC bot that should assist in continuously deploying projects.

This bot has two main functionalities:

  • keep track of continous integration builds
  • initiate and keep track of deployments

Right now the bot reads a main configuration file with data about projects, repositories, continuous integration, etc… and answers commands. This is an example:


21:58 <@cosimo> projects-list
21:58 < deployer> auth, geodns, libopera, link, myopera, sso
21:58 <@cosimo> build-status geodns
21:58 < deployer> 97ad24e success cosimo https://git.server/functests/builds/geodns/97ad24e
21:58 <@cosimo> latest-revision sso
21:58 < deployer> 5207cfe, https://git.server/?p=sso.git;a=commit;h=fe977d32e9580551dffe8139396106ba25207cfe
21:59 <@cosimo> build-status auth
21:59 < deployer> 24135 success cosimo https://test.server/functests/builds/auth-unit/24135
21:59 < deployer> 24135.2 success (manual) https://test.server/functests/builds/auth-functional/24135.2

Another functionality of the bot is to detect new builds, and automatically send updates to a given channel, stating the project, the new VCS revision, the committer and a link to the continuous integration test run. Example:


17:22 -deployer:#chan- sso, fe977d3 success cosimo https://test.server/functests/builds/opera-sso/fe977d3

In the future, I also want to command the bot to initiate deployments. Anyway, the problem was that Bot::BasicBot apparently lacked support for sending IRC notices. This caused all the bot messages to interrupt the flow of IRC conversations. Bot::BasicBot has source code also on github, so I just forked it and added support for IRC notices. I just noticed that the author already pulled in the new changes. o/

It will still take years for this to land in Debian, but still… :-)

My first article on Dev Opera!

This week the DevRel team published my first article on dev.opera.com!

For me this is really great. I remember, before joining Opera, during 2006, when I first considered sending a CV, I was looking at DevOpera. It was full of really high-level technical articles (back then!). I also remember thinking that I'd never be able to have my name on an article there.

Time flies, 4 years in the future, and it's there!. I still think Dev articles are high-level on average nowadays. Not sure about mine though :-), but if you're interested in OAuth, go read it and be sure to post feedback either here or on the article discussion forum. I have tried to avoid really going into the gory details. You can find them in the RFC anyway. Have fun!

From disaster to stability: the scaling challenges of My Opera (Surge 2010)

I just read John Allspaw's blog post about his talk at Surge 2010. John's talks were among the best of the conference IMO. So I was amazed to read his post.

I was really honored to take part in this conference as speaker. Just before my proposal being accepted, I had bought the book Web Operations. When the Surge speakers list was announced, I was thrilled to discover that many contributors to the book, including Allspaw, were also speaking at Surge, and even more honored to have the privilege to being in the same group and knowing them in person.

If you're interested in the talk I presented, while the Omniti folks bring up videos and slides on the Surge website, you can download them from Slideshare:

I hope the video is delayed, so I can avoid the embarrassment for a little while :-)