Become A File Spy With This One Easy Trick! Sys Admins Love This!
By Josh Williams
February 28, 2017
We had an interesting problem to track down. (Though I suppose I wouldn’t be writing about it if it weren’t, yes?) Over the years a client had built up quite the collection of scripts executed by cron to maintain some files on their site. Some of these were fairly complex, taking a long while to run, and overlapping with each other.
One day, the backup churn hit a tipping point and we took notice. Some process, we found, seemed to be touching an increasing number of image files: The contents were almost always the same, but the modification timestamps were updated. But digging through the myriad of code to figure out what was doing that was proving to be somewhat troublesome.
Enter auditd, already present on the RHEL host. This allows us to attach a watch on the directory in question, and track down exactly what was performing the events. Note that other flavors of Linux, such as Ubuntu, may not have it out of the box. But you can usually install it via the the auditd package.
(output from a test system for demonstration purposes)
# auditctl -w /root/output
# tail /var/log/audit/audit.log
type=SYSCALL msg=audit(1487974252.630:311): arch=c000003e syscall=2 success=yes exit=3 a0 …linux sysadmin
FOSDEM 2017: experience, community and good talks
By Emanuele “Lele” Calò
February 13, 2017
In case you happen to be short on time: my final overall perspective about FOSDEM 2017 is that it was awesome… with very few downsides.
If you want the longer version, keep reading cause there’s a lot to know and do at FOSDEM and never enough time, sadly.
This year I actually took a different approach than last time and decided to concentrate on one main track per day, instead of (literally) jumping from one to the other. While I think that overall this may be a good approach if most of the topics covered in a track are of your interest, that comes at the cost of missing one of the best aspects of FOSDEM which is “variety” in contents and presenters.
Day 1: Backup & Recovery
For the first day I chose the Backup & Recovery track which hosted talks revolving around three interesting and useful projects: namely REAR (Relax and Recovery), DRLM, a wrapper and backup management tool based on REAR and Bareos, which is a backup solution forked from Bacula in 2010 and steadily proceeding and improving since then. Both REAR and DLRM were explained and showcased by some of the respective projects main contributors and creators. As a long time system administrator, I …
conference open-source cloud
Full Cesium Mapping on the Liquid Galaxy
By Dave Jenkins
February 7, 2017
A few months ago, we shared a video and some early work we had done with bringing the Cesium open source mapping application to the Liquid Galaxy. We’ve now completed a full deployment for Smartrac, a retail tracking analytics provider, using Cesium in a production environment! This project presented a number of technical challenges beyond the early prototype work, but also brought great results for the client and garnered a fair amount of attention in the press, to everyone’s benefit.
Cesium is an open source mapping application that separates out the tile sets, elevation, and markup language. This separation allows for flexibility at each major element:
- We can use a specific terrain elevation data set while substituting any one of several map “skins” to drape on that elevation: a simple color coded map, a nighttime illumination map, even a water-colored “pirate map” look.
- For the terrain, we can download as much or as little is needed: As the Cesium viewer zooms in on a given spot, Cesium uses a sort of fractal method to download finer and finer resolution terrains in just the surrounding area, eventually getting to the data limit of the set. This gradual approach …
cesium visionport
Liquid Galaxy Success at U.S. Embassy’s Cultural Center
By Ben Witten
February 2, 2017
The U.S. Embassy to Jakarta features a high-tech cultural center called “@america”. @america’s mission is to provide a space for young Indonesians to learn more about the United States through discussions, cultural performances, debates, competitions and exhibitions.
Since Google generously donated it six years ago, @america has had a Liquid Galaxy deployed for use at the center. Not until recently, however, has @america taken advantage of our Content Management System. This past year, End Point developed and rolled out a revamped and powerful Content Management System for the fleet of Liquid Galaxies we support. With the updated Content Management System, End Point’s Content Team created a specialized Interactive Education Portal on @america’s Liquid Galaxy. The Education Portal featured over 50 high quality, interactive university experiences. Thanks to the CMS, the Liquid Galaxy now shows campus videos, university statistics, and fly-tos and orbits around the schools. The campus videos included both recruitment videos, as well as student-created videos on topics like housing, campus sports, and religion. These university experiences allow young Indonesians the …
visionport clients education
Smartrac’s Liquid Galaxy at National Retail Federation
By Ben Witten
January 25, 2017
Last week, Smartrac exhibited at the retail industry’s BIG Show, NRF 2017, using a Liquid Galaxy with custom animations to showcase their technology.
Smartrac provides data analytics to retail chains by tracking physical goods with NFC and Bluetooth tags that combine to track goods all the way from the factory to the distribution center to retail stores. It’s a complex but complete solution. How best to visualize all that data and show the incredible value that Smartrac brings? Seven screens with real time maps in Cesium, 3D store models in Unity, and browser-based dashboards, of course. End Point has been working with Smartrac for a number of years as a development resource on their SmartCosmos platform, helping them with UX and back-end database interfaces. This work included development of REST-based APIs for data handling, as well as a Virtual Reality project utilizing the Unity game engine to visualize data and marketing materials directly on several platforms including the Oculus Rift, the Samsung Gear 7 VR, and WebGL. Bringing that back-end work forward in a highly visible platform for the retail conference was a natural extension for them, and the Liquid Galaxy …
cesium conference event visionport unity
TriSano Case Study
By Elizabeth Garrett Christensen
January 24, 2017
Overview
End Point has been working with state and local health agencies since 2008. We host disease outbreak surveillance and management systems and have expertise providing clients with the sophisticated case management tools they need to deliver in-house analysis, visualization, and reporting—combined with the flexibility to comply with changing state and federal requirements. End Point provides the hosting infrastructure, database, reporting systems, and customizations that agencies need in order to service to their populations.
Our work with health agencies is a great example of End Point’s ability to use our experience in open source technology, Ruby on Rails, manage and back up large secure datasets, and integrate reporting systems to build and support a full-stack application. We will discuss one such client in this case study.
Why End Point?
End Point is a good fit for this project because of our expertise in several areas including reporting and our hosting capabilities. End Point has had a long history of consultant experts in PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails, which are the core software behind this application.
Also, End Point specializes in customizing open-source …
case-study clients hosting rails casepointer pentaho
End Point Rings the Morning Bell for Small Business
By Ben Witten
January 20, 2017
Recently Chase unveiled a digital campaign for Chase for Business by asking small businesses to submit themselves ringing their own morning bells every day when they open for business. Chase would select one video every day to post on their website and to play on their big screen in Times Square.
A few months back, Chase chose to feature End Point for their competition! They sent a full production team to our office to film us and how we ring the morning bell.
In preparation for Chase, we built a Liquid Galaxy presentation for Chase on our content management system. The presentation consisted of two scenes. In scene 1, we had “Welcome to Liquid Galaxy” written out across the outside four screens. We displayed the End Point Liquid Galaxy logo on the center screen, and set the system to orbit around the globe. In scene 2, the Liquid Galaxy flies to Chase’s Headquarter office in New York City, and orbits around their office. Two bells ring, each shown across two screens. The bell videos used were courtesy of Rayden Mizzi and St Gabriel’s Church. Our logo continues to display on the center screen, and the Chase for Business website is shown on a screen as well.
The video that Chase …
company visionport
Separate and Not Equal: Development Environments to Support People, Process, and Automation
By Dylan Wooters
January 18, 2017
I believe in the separation of software environments for the long term peace and prosperity of developers, product owners, and users. Ideally, there’s a dedicated environment purpose-built to support each community: the developers, the testers, the acceptors, and the users.
I learned this process from taking part in software development projects over the course of many years and working with a variety of different teams, including my own dev team, our clients’ in-house IT teams, and often other consulting firms. While each group had its own approach, one consistent factor for success was the separation of environments to support key roles.
Dev
Development environments will vary by project and technology stack. A common decision is developing locally or creating a remote VM, and both approaches have trade-offs. Developing remotely allows you to setup an environment that mirrors QA and Production, and it also allows you to use remote desktop to connect to your dev environment from any machine: PC, Mac, or Linux. However, developing remotely comes with latency, and often it doesn’t feel as smooth as working locally. More importantly, if I find myself traveling or otherwise without a …
development environment devops