Provisional start date: 22 Apr 2024

Study

• Distributed Systems: State
• Troubleshooting Primer

Projects

• Batch processing
• Buggy app
• Memcached Clusters
• Troubleshooting project #2
  • This project is designed to get you familiar with docker.
  • To log in: ssh -i </path/to/the/ssh-private-key> <username>@<IP>
    • You have sudo access on the host, please give a shout if that doesn’t work. (You’ll need it.)
    • There’s a database (mysql) on the machine. If you have a mysql client, you can use --host=127.0.0.1 --port=3306 --user=root --password to log in. (Ask any of the instructors for the password.)
  • The goal of the exercise is:
    • when you run lynx -dump http://localhost/, you will see a cute image of a cat on your terminal. This shouldn’t take more than a day or 2.
    • secondary, once you’ve reached that, we’ll ask you to hide the password that you can see in ps auxww | grep miauw. (A password visible in ps is bad for security, so we want that to be somewhat hidden.)
    • Along the way, we expect you’ll be able to answer:
      • How is systemd configured? Where are the logs?
      • Can you describe what docker does?
      • Can you describe the two ways that docker volumes are used in this setup?
      • Docker uses images. What are images? And how do you create your own?
  • Some knowledge to get you started:
    • The webserver is called httpurr, with a corresponding systemd service (httpurr). It’s written in go, and you can see the source code in /httpurr/.
    • The database is mysql, with a corresponding systemd service (httpurr-db).
    • Both are run inside docker.
  • While doing this exercise, I would recommend logging what you do.

Product

Your product work is ramping up, and so is the complexity of your study. How will you manage your time?