Categories
Programming

Creating a Prometheus metrics exporter for a 4G router

Grafana view of some of the reception metrics
Grafana view of some of the reception metrics

Recently I begun fully remote working from home, with the main network connectivity provided by a 4G mobile router. Very soon I experienced patchy connectivity, not the greatest thing when you are on video calls for half of each day. What does one do then (if not just straight replacing the whole setup with a wired ISP, if possible), other than monitor what’s going on and try to debug the issues?

The router I have is a less-common variety, an Alcatel Linkhub HH441 (can’t even properly link to on the manufacturer’s site, just on online retail stores). At least as it should, it does have a web front-end, that one can poke around in, and gather metrics from – of course in an automatic way.

The Alcatel HH41 LinkHub router that I had at hand to use

Looking at the router’s web interface, and checking the network activity through the browsers’ network monitor (Firefox, Chrome), the frontend’s API calls showed up, so I could collect a few that requested different things like radio receiving metrics, bandwidth usage, uptime, and so on… From here we are off to the races setting up our monitoring infrastructure, along these pretty standard lines:

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Categories
Computers

ARM images to help the Archive Team

New York Public Library

Two weeks ago I came across a thread on Hacker News, linking to an announcement of the shutdown of Yahoo! Answers by early May. One of the early comments pointed people to the Archive Team and their project to archive Yahoo Answers before that 4th May deadline. It looked interesting and I gave their recommended tool, the Archive Team Warrior a spin. It runs in VirtualBox, super easy to set up, lightweight, and all around good. Nevertheless after one night keeping my laptop running and archiving things I was wondering if there was a less wasteful way of doing the archiving. In short order I came across the team’s notes on how to run the archiver as Docker containers. That’s more like it: I have some Raspberry Pi devices running at home anyways, if those could be the archiving clients it would make a lot more sense!

While trying out the instructions, it was quickly clear that the Archive Team provided images out of the box were not working on the Pi. Could they be made to work, though? (Spoiler: it did, and you can check the results on GitHub.)

Container ARM-ification

The issue was that the Archive Team-provided project container, atdr.meo.ws/archiveteam/yahooanswers-grab is only available for amd64 (x64-64) machines. Fortunately the source code is available on GitHub and thus could check out the relevant Dockerfile. It uses a specific base image, atdr.meo.ws/archiveteam/grab-base, whose repo reveals that internally it pulls in atdr.meo.ws/archiveteam/wget-lua containing a modified version of wget from yet another repo (adding Lua scripting support, plus a bunch of other stuff added by Archive Team). But fortunately this is the bottom of the stack. And this bottom of the stack is based on debian:buster-slim which does come built as multiarchitecture images, providing arm64, armv7, armv6 versions, the architectures that are relevant for us if building for the Raspberry Pi (and other ARM boards, since why not).

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Categories
Admin Computers

Folding@Home on AWS to kick the arse of coronavirus

Folding@Home popped up on my radar due to a recent announcement that their computational research platform is adding a bunch of projects to study (and ultimately help fight) the COVID-19 virus. Previously I haven’t had any good machine at hand to be able to help in such efforts (my 9 years old Lenovo X201 is still cozy to work with, but doesn’t pack a computing punch). At work, however I get to to be around GPU machines much more, and gave me ideas how to contribute a bit more.

Poking around the available GPU instance types on AWS, seen that there are some pretty affordable ones in the G4 series, going down to as low as roughly $0.60/hour to use some decent & recent CPU and an NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPU. This drops even further if I use spot instances, and looking around in the different regions, I’ve seen available capacity at $0.16-0.20/hour, which feels really in the bargain category. Thus I thought spinning up a Folding@Home server in the cloud on spot instances, to help out and hopefully learning a thing or two, at the price of roughly 2 cups of gourmet London coffee (or taking the tube to work) per day.

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Categories
Life

Five weeks of no-caffeine

Five weeks ago, I’ve started on a “no-caffine month“, well, it wasn’t a month indeed after all. Yesterday was the end of my target, thus let’s see how things worked out!

I’m glad I have managed go all five weeks without caffeine – no coffee, no tea, no dark chocolate to be on the “safe” side… That’s all nice, but looking at the purpose of the decaf period, did it make any material difference? And was it any different compared to the previous two times when I did this? The result is not totally clear cut to me, it definitely was much clearer in previous times. No experiment running for five long weeks in real life can really just change one parameter (me with/without caffeine in this case), while keeping everything else the same. Thus changes or lack of change is harder to interpret.

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Categories
Computers

First impressions of Filecoin

I’m an interested user of many novel technologies, some examples being cryptocurrencies and IPFS. One technology that I was keeping an eye on was at the intersection of that two: Filecoin (it’s using blockchain and built on IPFS by the people who made IPFS). It aims to be a decentralized storage network, where nodes are rewarded by storing users’ data, in a programmatic and secure way. After a long wait, the Filecoin repositories just opened up a few days ago (see also the relevant Hacker News discussion). This allowed everyone to give the newly deployed development chain (devnet) a spin, and try out one possible “future-of-storage”. Since the release, I’ve spent a decent handful of hours with Filecoin, and thus gathered a few first impressions.

These are very early stages for the technology, so take all my comments with that nurturing point of view. I’m glad they release stuff at their version 0.0.2 as it happened, even if a lot of things are in flux. Also, I’ve spent a bunch of time with IPFS, a lot of parts of the experience with Filecoin (or rather with the initial implementation of go-filecoin is not as surprising (more familar) to me than likely to someone for the first time a project made by this team. More on this later. Now, in hopefully somewhat logical order...

Getting started

The first thing is obviously getting and installing the binaries for the project. The initial implementation is go-filecoin, which is not totally surprising, one of the two main IPFS implementations is also go-ipfs (the other, for the curious, is js-ipfs, but filecoin does not have a Javascript implementation just yet). As there are no binary releases for go-filecoin just yet, we’ll need to install from source. The project relies on pretty recent Go (1.11.1 or 1.11.2, it’s not clear from the docs and the code…), as well as pretty recent Rust (1.31.0, which is about 2 months old). If the combination of the two is surprising, it’s because some of the heavy lifting libraries was implemented in Rust, for performance reasons (that I think used in the proving that a node actually stores the data that it said it did, without sending the whole data for inspection – aka, the secret sauce of Filecoin).

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