Adventures in IT

An indexed and searchable centralized log is one of those tools that once you've had it you'll wonder how you managed without it.    I've experienced a couple of advantages to using a central log - debugging, monitoring performance, and catching unknown problems. Debugging Debugging becomes easier because instead of poking around grepping text logs on servers you're able to use a GUI to contrast and compare values between different time ranges. A ticket will often include sparse information about the problem and observed error, but if you know more or less when a problem occurred then you can check the logs of all your systems at that time. Problem behaviour in your application can occur as a result of the services you depend on.  A database fault will produce errors in your application, for example. If you log your database errors and your application errors in the same central platform then it's much more convenient to compare behaviour between...

I've recently been playing with Docker on Windows in conjunction with Linux on Windows .  I'm really amazed at how cool the stuff coming out of Microsoft is under Satya Nadella.   When I was using Docker Toolbox on Windows my Dockerfiles would build correctly but as soon as I tried to run them in a Virtualbox host they would fail with the error " Something wicked happened resolving 'archive.ubuntu.com:http' (-5 - No address associated with hostname) " Of course this error wasn't distribution specific and none of the distros I tried were working. The stack that I am using is Windows Home hosting Ubuntu on VirtualBox which is running Docker.  I'm using bash on Linux for Windows because it's easier to do stuff like ssh but it's not relevant to this setup. I tried setting the DNS in the Docker setup by using RUN steps to update /etc/resolv.  This felt a bit hacky and didn't work anyway. In the end the fix was to go to my Window...