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Author: hfreyther

Starting to use the Galera cluster

Starting to use the Galera cluster

In my previous post I wrote about getting a MariaDB Galera cluster  started on Kubernetes. One of my open issues was how to get my existing VM to connect to it. With Microsoft Azure the first thing is to add Network peering between the Kubernetes cluster and the normal VM network. As previously mentioned the internal IPv4 address of the Galera service is not reachable from outside and the three types of exposing a service are: LoadBalancer ClusterIP NodePort While the default Microsoft…

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Galera on Kubernetes

Galera on Kubernetes

As part of my journey to “cloud” computing I built a service that is using MySQL and as preparation for the initial deployment I set myself the following constraints: Deploy in containers Be able to tolerate some failure of ” VM”s Be able to grow/replace storage without downtime Containers There are pre-made mariadb:10.1 containers but to not rely on a public registry I have used the Microsoft Azure Container Service to upload my container. The integration into the standard docker tools to…

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Kubernetes on Microsoft Azure

Kubernetes on Microsoft Azure

The recent Amazon S3 outage should make a strong argument that centralized services have severe issues, technically but from a business point of view as well(you don’t own the destiny of your own product!) and I whole heartily agree with “There is no cloud, it’s only someone else’s computer”.  Still from time to time I like to see beyond my own nose (and I prefer the German version of that proverb!) and the current exploration involves ReactJS (which I like),…

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Captain obvious: Sign a contract before starting to work

Captain obvious: Sign a contract before starting to work

I have worked as a freelancer for more than a decade and was very very fortunate with the projects and partners I had. I apparently let my guards down a little bit too much and this is a reminder what to look-out for. I have nice memories working with the Trolltech PSO team and helping with architecture, performance and low-level debugging in South Korea but when Nokia stopped investing into Qt my work on Qt and QtWebKit halted and I moved to…

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State of structured text for technical documentation

State of structured text for technical documentation

A long time ago I wrote the OpenEmbedded User Manual and back then the obvious choice was to make it a docbook. In my community there were plenty of other examples that used docbook and it helped to get started. The great thing of docbook was with one XML input one could generate output in many different formats like HTML, XHTML, ePub or PDF. It separated the format from the presentation and was tailored for technical documents and articles with advanced features like generating…

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Starting with a Diameter stack

Starting with a Diameter stack

Going from 2G/3G requires to learn a new set of abbreviations. The network is referred to as IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and the HLR becomes Home subscriber server (HSS). ITU ASN1 to define the RPCs (request, response, potential errors), message structure and encoding in 2G/3G is replaced with a set of IETF RFCs. From my point of view names of messages, names of attributes change but the basic broken trust model remains. Having worked on probably the best ASN1/TCAP/MAP stack…

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Releasing the diag-parser utility

Releasing the diag-parser utility

Have you ever wondered if a sendAuthenticationInfo result makes it from the HLR to the MS or the authenticationFailureReport back to the HLR or how the result of a updateLocation is presented on the A interface? Have you had issues with your IoT device to open a data session and couldn’t see what happened? To answer these question we are pleased to release our Free Software diag-parser for baseband diagnosis to convert the proprietary DIAG format to the Osmocom GSMTAP industry standard….

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Analyze cellular problems using Quectel modules

Analyze cellular problems using Quectel modules

Introduction Previously I have written about connectivity options for IoT devices and today I assume that a cellular technology (e.g. names like GSM, 3G, UMTS, LTE, 4G) has been chosen. Unless you are a big vendor you will end up using a module (instead of a chipset) and either you are curious what the module is doing behind its AT command interface or you are trying to understand a real problem. The following is going to help you or at least…

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Using docker at the Osmocom CI

Using docker at the Osmocom CI

As part of the Osmocom.org software development we have a Jenkins set-up that is executing unit and system tests. For OpenBSC we will compile the software, then execute the unit tests and finally run a bunch of system tests. The system tests will verify making configuration changes through the telnet interface, the machine control interface, might try to connect to other parts, etc. In the past this was executed after a committer had pushed his changes to the repository and…

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Collecting network traffic, ØMQ and packetbeat

Collecting network traffic, ØMQ and packetbeat

As part of running infrastructure it might make sense or be required to store logs of transactions. A good way might be to capture the raw unmodified network traffic. For our GSM backend this is what we (have) to do and I wrote a client that is using libpcap to capture data and sends it to a central server for storing the trace. The system is rather simple and in production at various customers. The benefit of having a central server…

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