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Using YourKit Profiles on Fedora with Tomcat as an RPM

bryankearney — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:10:24 +0000

We use YourKit at work, and it is a pretty good profiles which runs on Linux. All of the instructions I saw talk about how to integrate with Tomcat if you have the tarball install. We install with the rpms, and so a bit of investigation was required.

First, install YourKit in /opt. I had it in ~/bin but I got a whole bunch of permission errors. I have SELinux set to permissive, and this still did not help. So, for me, it is installed in /opt/yjp-9.5.4/.

Next, I added the Config for the agent to the /etc/tomcat6/tocmcat6.conf file. The line looks like this:

JAVA_OPTS=”-agentpath:/opt/yjp-9.5.4/bin/linux-x86-64/libyjpagent.so=disablestacktelemetry,disableexceptiontelemetry,builtinprobes=none,delay=10000″

When you do a “service tomcat6 start” the init scripts will pick up the JAVA_OPTS variable. You can then laucnh the profiler and connect to do the needful in looking for performance issues.

Movie article missing the point

bryankearney — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 23:58:11 +0000

This morning I read an article that discussed how movie ticket prices are going up but revenue is going down. In the afternoon, we went to a matinee showing of Hugo. The day proved how much the article is misses the point.

As a family, four of us went in the middle of the day. Tickets cost us 28 dollars (2 adults, 2 kids). We went for popcorn and 2 waters to split across us.. add on another 18 dollars. So, for a matinee showing the family is out 46 dollars. We were lucky, since the movie was very good and was a good way to spend a rainy day.

Back to the article. A movie is a minimum of 50 dollars right now for me. Even if the quality is super high (and lets be honest, they are not always super) I am not going to go out and drop $50 every weekend for a 2 hour activity. Especially when I have to sit through 30 minutes of ads before it. I am going to wait 3 months and rent it at home where I will be out a buck for a rental or 7 bucks for my monthly Netflix Rental.

The auto dealerships have figured it out. Some try to get as many dollars from each customer, or they try and get a large number of customers. The movie industry is trying to do the former. The latter may be a better way to increase the health of the industry.

Latest Release of Candlepin

bryankearney — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 20:12:51 +0000

We continue to use Scrum at work, and it is working very well. The team is able to work very independently, and very quickly. We continue to roll out new features every three weeks.

Version 0.4.11 is the latest release which adds partially subscribed logic, activation keys, and lots of additional features.

Please come on bye, and help out. You can find us at http://candlepinproject.org.

Adding Search to Rails Apps

bryankearney — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 12:02:17 +0000

Good blog artcile on adding search to rails apps. Used in Foreman, soon to be used in Katello and Headpin.

http://scopedsearch.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/adding-search-to-an-activerecord-rails-model/

Great Summary of Using Foreman

bryankearney — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 14:34:45 +0000

This came across today, great summary of setting up and using The Foreman. http://engineering.yakaz.com/managing-an-infrastructure-datacenter-with-foreman-and-puppet.html

Project Katello: Open Source System Management

bryankearney — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 12:17:50 +0000

As a followup to the Candlepin Post.. we have just opened up the larger project for Open Source Systems Management. The project is called Katello. The name rhymes with Jello, so that should help. The goal of this project is to bring together Content Management, Subscription Management, and Configuration Management.

If you are interested in participating, we would love the help. Come on bye, check it out, and say hi!

Why Phone Books

bryankearney — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 16:01:55 +0000

We started to get this years roung of phone books. I dont know who uses them any more. Here is my message:

Please note, the second image is the recycle bin

Project Candlepin

bryankearney — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 18:18:42 +0000

At work we have been doing alot of development around Software Subscriptions, and how to represent them to a machine as a collection of Entitlements (what a machine is entitled to have or do). It is a FOSS project which we have been working on it for a while, but have finally hung out an offical shingle. You can checkout the website at candlepinproject.org. The name is based on a place up near our offices in Westford. It is called the Bowladrome. The folks came up with the idea while bowling.

Tech wise, it is a pretty interesting project. Java Stateless App Server using Guice. It exposes a REST API provided by RESTEasy. It has Rails 3.0 front end, and some linux clients which are written in Python. All we are missing is Erlang and we would be all set.

Come on bye, check it out. The project is open and is being actively developed. If you work in and around software subscriptions we would be interested in your opinions.

Cool tech.. and you should tour your home town.

bryankearney — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 01:35:54 +0000

For our anniversary, my wife organized a tour of down town Raleigh. The cool this was that it was on a Segway with Triangle Segway. We went into this thinking how great it would be to try out the travel mode of the future, but we got alot more out of it.

First off, the technology is great. They are incredibly simple to ride. You feel comfortable immediately on them. I have never had a piece of technology meld so well with the activity you are doing. It feels natural to lean forward a bit to move. And when you think “Oh Sh*T”, your natural body motion make you stop. Very impressive.

The company put together a great tour. I learned more about our city in one hour than I have in the entire 5 years we have been here. I am not a history buff, but I appreciated the stories and the diggs on UNC. I kept thinking during the tour how everyone should take a tour of where the live, to really appreciate the nuances of their home town.

Here is a photo of us at one of our stops. We had an option to stop and stretch our legs, or to zip around and drag race each other. I won

Never have I appreciated RPMS more

bryankearney — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 02:57:38 +0000

Dinner is over, and my wife is out picking up our son from basketball tryouts (he did not make it.. bummer). I tell my daughter that I have a surprise. You see.. we have just gotten a new Garmin and it allows you to record your own voices. I assume they learned finally from TomTom.

Anyways.. it only runs on XP SP2 or higher, but I have an old XP machine running in a VM so I figure I am fine. I boot it up, expecting to install and go. Nope… the program does not start. I figure, I can figure this out. I spend 15 minutes trying to remember where the event viewer is.. and then spend 3 hours trying to figure out where the heck I can get assembly VC80.CRT. The answer, of course, is that it is in the dotnet 2.0 redistribution from roughly 2006. I know.. obvious.

I will admit.. I really wished I had rpms at that moment.

– bk