Dougie Richardson

Every day is a school day

Author: admin

  • Plesk high swap usage

    Seen warnings about high swap consumption in Plesk on Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS:

    Had a look in top and noticed clamavd using 1.0G of swap. After a little digging around, it might be related to a change in ClamAV 0.103.0 where non-blocking signature database reloads were introduced.

    Major changes

    • clamd can now reload the signature database without blocking scanning. This multi-threaded database reload improvement was made possible thanks to a community effort.
      • Non-blocking database reloads are now the default behavior. Some systems that are more constrained on RAM may need to disable non-blocking reloads, as it will temporarily consume double the amount of memory. We added a new clamd config option ConcurrentDatabaseReload, which may be set to no.

    I disabled the option and the difference is dramatic:

    I’ll keep an eye on it I guess.

  • Gogh

    Check out these awesome terminal themes at http://gogh-co.github.io/Gogh/

  • Multipass cloud-init

    Multipass cloud-init

    Multipass is pretty useful but what a pain this was to figure out, due to Ubuntu’s Node.js package not working with AWS-CDK.

    Multipass lets you manage VM in Ubuntu and can take cloud-init scripts as a parameter. I wanted an Ubuntu LTS instance with AWS CDK, which needs Node.js and python3-venv.

    #cloud-config
packages:
  - python3-venv
  - unzip

package_update: true

package_upgrade: true

write_files:
  - path: "/etc/environment"
    append: true
    content: |
      export PATH=\
      /opt/node-v20.11.1-linux-x64/bin:\
      /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:\
      /usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:\
      /usr/games:/usr/local/games:\
      /snap/bin

runcmd:
  - wget https://nodejs.org/dist/v20.11.1/node-v20.11.1-linux-x64.tar.xz 
  - tar xvf node-v20.11.1-linux-x64.tar.xz -C /opt
  - export PATH=/opt/node-v20.11.1-linux-x64/bin:$PATH
  - npm install -g npm@latest
  - npm install -g aws-cdk
  - git config --system user.name "Dougie Richardson"
  - git config --system user.email "xx@xxxxxxxxx.com"
  - git config --system init.defaultBranch main
  - wget https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip
  - unzip awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip
  - ./aws/install

    Save that as cdk.yaml and spin up an new instance:

    multipass launch --name cdk --cloud-init cdk.yaml
    Success!

    There’s a couple useful things to note if you’re checking this out:

    • Inside the VM there’s a useful log to assist debugging /var/log/cloud-init-output.log.
    • While YAML has lots of ways to split text over multiple lines, when you don’t want space use a backslash.

    Shell into the new VM with multipass shell cdk, then we can configure programmatic access and bootstrap CDK.

    aws sso configure
aws sso login --profile profile_name
aws sts get-caller-identity --profile profile_name
aws configure get region --profile profile_name

    The last two commands give the account and region to bootstrap:

    cdk bootstrap aws://account_number/region --profile profile_name