I’ve been planning an expedition to Broad Peak and K2 for almost two years now. At first the plan was to climb last summer, but then covid ruined that. The expedition was then rescheduled to this summer, while last summer I visited Denali instead. However my departure to Pakistan faced some unexpected obstacles.
I was thinking about how nice it would be if I could see on my main Grafana dashboard (the only one I use at this point actually) when there are new versions of something deployed. This way if by chance there is a problem with something afterwards I can see at a glance what could have gone wrong. Also I really like just looking at that Grafana dashboard and see that everything is alive and well. (Except when it isn’t.)
You’d expect that with Japanese people being among the top mountaineers on 8000 peaks, the country having a healthy scene for winter sports it shouldn’t be hard to get advanced mountain gear, right? Let’s share some stories.
I’ve already written about what was going on most of last year in my birthday post, but so many people around me are writing year-end/year-start summaries that nudged me to revisit the topic as well.
The other day I was struggling with a very weird error when upgrading to Ruby 3. The initial migrations for a Rails app would fail with “Mysql2::Error: Unknown MySQL error (ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid)”, but only in certain environments. The error would occur when Rails tried to check what migrations are already applied by looking at the schema_migrations table.
2022-01-19 09:12:59.205 +0000 [DEBUG] (1.7ms) SELECT GET_LOCK('4252831219231700070', 0)
/usr/local/bundle/gems/mysql2-0.5.3/lib/mysql2/client.rb:131: warning: rb_tainted_str_new_cstr is deprecated and will be removed in Ruby 3.2
2022-01-19 09:12:59.222 +0000 [DEBUG] (2.0ms) SELECT `schema_migrations`.`version` FROM `schema_migrations` ORDER BY `schema_migrations`.`version` ASC
2022-01-19 09:12:59.224 +0000 [DEBUG] (1.8ms) SELECT RELEASE_LOCK('4252831219231700070')
rails aborted!
ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid: Mysql2::Error: Unknown MySQL error
/usr/local/bundle/gems/mysql2-0.5.3/lib/mysql2/client.rb:131:in `_query'
There are a few mountains other than the seven summits that I’m interested in climbing for other reasons. One of those is Chimborazo, a mountain in Ecuador that has the interesting property that its summit is further from the center of Earth than that of Mt Everest (because of the planet’s shape). It’s also a phrase my late gran used to use as an expression of “the greatest magnitude”—I think in her day that was common as it was believed to be the highest mountain. This connection is why I got interested and went on an expedition to climb Cotopaxi and Chimborazo.
Symptoms: CPU load on all the nodes, but not the pods. Looking at Grafana, I noticed that CPU load on some of my nodes was constantly very high. At the same time, even the total CPU use of all the pods summed wasn’t above 0.4. What gives? This usually gives that the control plane is getting fried by something. It may be trying to relieve disk pressure, or in this case, trying to revive CSI.
Trying to figure out what was causing problems I checked the pods in kube-system with kubectl get pods -n kube-system. It quickly became apparent that there is a problem: disk-related pods like csi-resizer, csi-snapsotter and csi-provisioner were in CrashLoopBackOff.
I’ll be quite honest in that I’m not sure what the problem was. A few searches later I came to the conclusion that an earlier node reboot had left the pods with a corrupted DNS cache or something along those lines. Basically every issue I found with the symptoms I was seeing came down to DNS problems (longhorn/longhorn#2225, longhorn/longhorn#3109, rancher/k3os#811).
Alas I haven’t touched any of the networking machinery of Kubernetes (nor configured any of it for k3s) so my first idea was just the good old one from IT Crowd: “have you tried turning it off and on again?” So I did. Luckily another restart of the afflicted nodes solved the issue. I’m glad it did because I dread what I’d have had to do otherwise.
It’s all too easy to kill a k3s cluster. I’ve been using k3s for years now and I’ve had plenty of adventures tweaking various aspects of running it. Before it’d take just a small change to an Argo Application to trigger a cascading failure. Hopefully now it’s a bit more resilient. Just a bit.
You might happen to use the wicked_pdf gem for PDF output in your Rails app. You might happen to use the wkhtmltopdf-binary gem to provide the required binaries. You might want to get the above to work on the latest (at this point 3.0.3-bullseye) Ruby docker image. Short answer: give up. A bit longer answer: it’s easier than you think.
Monkey patching is bad. That’s where you should start from. It can cause trouble where you’d least expect it, conflicts with libraries you’d least expect in ways you’d least expect. And yet here I am sharing code for patching the delayed_job gem to (more or less) work with Ruby 3. Doesn’t this violate my own policies? There are a few choices.
.delay calls and switch to another async job library