Friday, September 02, 2011

OpenSuse + Support Portal Code Deployed

The OpenSuse guys have been helpful in testing ideas to find the server bottleneck. I really don't stress over these things. Our older GNOME server is running fine and only those people that volunteered to beta test are seeing the performance issues mentioned in prior blogs. What's interesting is that even with the occasional freezes and slowdowns, they still prefer the new technology. All of the UIs are much nicer and easier and they really like avant-window-navigator. I'm sure we'll find it.

One of the things that is nice about hacking code is that you can picture ideas in your head and just write it and make it work. I love to see charts, stats and data. I also love having the computer monitor itself and report to us issues. Our Support staff has the same viewpoint. So I wrote the "Load" detail screen. The main portal displays in green the current user load for all of the big servers, and now when you click on it it gives you a chart with a much longer timeline. It then creates a front end to "top" and shows the top processes. The user name is a button, and you can click on it and the user detail screen which was already coded opens. It then hunts down all of their sessions along with information about their department. One can hone in on the sessions even further if desired and obtain information about the device they are using.

If any of the servers are over 10% busy for more than 10 minutes, a warning notify-send popup is generated and alerts all of us to review the issue.

The processes are GTK toggle buttons (marked in purple) and I'm going to allow our support staff to select processes and click the STOP button to shut them down. All of these features were available from the command line obviously, but this front end simplifies the whole thing greatly.



Up next for me: New NX 4 preview code (hopefully next week), testing the new WiFi with iPads, trying to get our Moin Wiki upgraded, trying to get 2 Evolution patches merged for SLED 11, installing and testing the 3.0 kernel on OpenSuse. But first, a three day weekend to recharge.

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