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.
Fighting an “Unknown MySQL error” when connecting to Aurora from Rails
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'
Ecuador
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.
When I accidentally Longhorn CSI
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.
Steps to a more stable k3s cluster
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.
PDF export with the Ruby 3.0.3 docker image
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.
Patching delayed_job for Ruby 3
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.
- give up upgrading to Ruby 3 altogether
- monkey patch delayed_job as an emergency fix and make time to figure out what to do
- contribute to delayed_job making sure the gem is solid on Ruby 3
- get rid of all the
.delaycalls and switch to another async job library
Stuff that broke in Rails 6.1
Rails uses a “shifted” “semantic” “versioning” which pretty much comes down to the following. Major version: “we’ll most definitely break everything you ever depended on, half of them without warning.” Minor version: “we’ll probably break many stuff you depend on, some of them without warning.” Patch version: “we might accidentally some core APIs, but we promise it’s not intentional (or documented).” Knowing that, I still embarked on the grand endeavor of upgrading from Ruby on Rails 6.0.4.1 to 6.1.4.1. What could possibly go wrong, right?
OpenTTD revisited
OpenTTD is the open source clone of Transport Tycoon Deluxe. It’s an amazingly addictive time sink that you absolutely should not start playing unless you’re ready to come to half a day later realizing it’s 5am and you haven’t gotten any sleep yet. It’s fun just playing around too, but things get real when you set a goal like “connect every primary industry.” I haven’t played against AI or people, but I’m not that interested in that either just yet. This is actually my second time playing—I spent insane amounts of time on the game during university (too).
Homeworld 2 (remastered)
I had fond memories of Homeworld 2 from my childhood. Mostly along the lines of “it was pretty,” but fond nonetheless. (I must’ve not played the campaign then…) The remastered edition lived up to my expectations regarding the visuals. The various colorful areas of space with occasional clouds of dust and massive runs of massive things, with my massive (though tiny in comparison) Mothership cruising comfortably are a rich source of pretty screenshots.
