Hyperic HQ and Gutsy Gibbon

October 24th, 2007 John Mark

It’s become quite a tradition these last couple of years - whenever we are about to “spring forward” or “fall behind” it can only mean one thing: it’s time for another Ubuntu release. Indeed, Ubuntu 7.10, aka “gutsy gibbon” was released last Friday, October 19. Good thing Hyperic HQ is pretty flexible about these things - here’s a screenshot of HQ running on gutsy:

And just in case the name is difficult to read…

Unfortunately, this release of Ubuntu wasn’t without its quirks. As my personal laptop, it seemed like network connections were taking longer than with the previous release. After doing a little digging, I found the source of the problem. I decided to implement a work-around to see if that improved things. Sure enough, it did - but don’t take my word for it, see what HQ says about the problem:

The above data points are lag times as calculated by HQ’s ping plugin. See those dots hovering around the 16-second line? Those are the default response times on a freshly-installed gutsy. See the much lower response times to the right of that? Those are the dramatically-improved response times after implementing the work-around, which involved editing /etc/resolv.conf and removing the IP address of my wireless router. Unfortunately, I don’t yet know how to tell DHCP not to do that, so this is only a temporary work-around.

This being a laptop, of course, I didn’t need a tool to tell me that the name resolving lagged. But what if this were just one out of hundreds or thousands of machines in a data center? And in that data center, there were hundreds of new machines using an upgraded operating system. How would any ops person know that something was adding a few seconds of lag to each DNS request? Unfortunately, they most likely wouldn’t know until it was too late, ie. after stuff was breaking and business was adversely affected.

But it’s nice to know that someone *could* know about this problem before the data center was toast.

Oh by the way, HQ works great on Ubuntu 7.10 :)

Entry Filed under: HQ, IT Industry