Homo-Adminus Blog

Today I’ve managed to finish initial version of our bounces-handler package we use for mailing-related stuff in Scribd.

Bounces-handler package is a simple set of scripts to automatically process email bounces and ISP‘s feedback loops emails, maintain your mailing blacklists and a Rails plugin to use those blacklists in your RoR applications.

This piece of software has been developed as a part of more global work on mailing quality improvement in Scribd.com, but it was one of the most critical steps after setting up reverse DNS records, DKIM and SPF.

The package itself consists of two parts:

• Perl scripts to process incoming email:
  • bounces processor — could be assigned to process all your bounce emails
  • feedback loops messages processor — more specific for Scribd, but still – could be modified for your needs (will be released soon).
• Rails plugin to work with mailing blacklists

For more information, please check our README file. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please leave them here as a comments and I’ll try to reply as soon as possible.

It’s been a long time since we’ve started this project and it is time to make a checkpoint. So, I’ve decided to release final 1.0 version and make 1.X branch stable while all serious development with deep architectural changes will be done 2.X branch (trunk at this moment).

Changes from previous release:

• Perl semaphores implementation caused huge memory leaks (mmmd_mod).
• Now we do not send any commands to hard offline hosts with dead TCP/IP stack to prevent mointoring problems for other hosts.
• Removed legacy StartSlave method from agent code which caused problems on some Perl versions
• Added a few fixes to prevent non-exclusive roles from moving. This caused internal status structures to be corrupted.
• Made all mysql checks properly report errors occurring (previously they were resulting in an OK response). Thanks to Phillip Pearson.
• Some memory leaks found in mysql checkers and as a quick fix we’ve added an idea of “Maximum Checks Before Restart” to all checkers. If you want some checker to restart after N checks, simply add “restart after N” to your checker declaration.
• Added some more docs to the project site.

New version can be obtained here or from the project’s SVN repository.

So, we did it! New Best Tech Videos site version has been released today. Of course, it could have some issues, and we are really looking forward for your feedback on our support forums.

Let’s review main improvements we’ve made here:

• First of all, I want to mention our first step to socialization of the BTV – all our users could signup now and get their own lists of favorited, commented and voted videos and much more – they could have their own personal RSS feeds.
• Next cool thing we’ve prepared for you is user-generated content! You can find some great videos on the Net and share them with fellow BTV readers. At this moment our posting system works in pre-moderated mode to keep really high level of videos we post here, but later we want to delegate moderation to our most active members.
• As I mentioned before – we have our own video rating system. All our users could vote for videos they like and then we’ll let users to decide, what videos they would like to watch based on these votes.

So, these are just small part (but most valuable) of our ideas. If you want to have a look at all of them, just sign up and start using the service – you gonna like it, we’re sure!

Thanks to all our readers, without your help this release would not happen!

New alpha release 1.0-pre4 of the MySQL Master-Master Replication Manager. This release has lots of major fixes and I’m glad to announce first sponsored port of mmm to non-linux platform – it has been ported to Solaris 10. So, here are our changes in this version:

• Real checks timeouts – I’ve found and fixed lots of problems in checks timeout code and now if you specified in your mmm_mon.conf, that some check should timeout in 5 sec, it would timeout correctly on all supported platforms.
• External third-party tools using – On all supported non-linux platforms mmm will use system binaries for fping and arp_ping so porting to another platforms would be much easier.
• Agent notifications fix – Now we don’t try to notify dead agents about cluster changes and additionally we have 10 sec timeout on notification sends to prevent monitoring from lagging on network connection timeouts.
• Bundled fping and send_arp – We have both used third-party tools used in mmm bundled in our distribution as separate build trees (you could find and build/install them from contrib directory).
• Flexible perl binary location – We’re using “#!/usr/bin/env perl” as shebang line in our perl scripts so you can use any perl interpreter just by placing it earlier in your PATH variable.

Notice: If you’ll try to install this version, try to run bin/sys/fping and bin/sys/send_arp on your server before installation. If you’ll notice any errors, feel free to build binaries for your platform using contrib/* sources (you’ll need gcc and libnet installed).

So, as you can see, mmm development goes forward and we’re fixing some problems trying to make this software mature. If you want to help us, you can send your comments to mmm-devel mailing list, post your bug reports to our bug tracking or sponsor any changes you need 😉

MySQL Master-Master Replication Manager version 1.0-pre3 has been released today. Changes list is really short now:

• Major fix in multiple clusters support – now you can use many clusters with one monitoring node (details are in mmmd_mon man page)
• Man pages for mmmd_mon, mmmd_agent and mmm_control scripts
• Startup scripts added/fixed for mmmd_mon and mmmd_agent
• Installation script now requires iproute package to be installed on server.

As always, if you have any questions/suggestions, post them here or in mmm-devel mail list.