Technology – Page 3 – Software / Wetware

Evaluating blockchain networks(5 min read)

What is blockchain? What makes a good blockchain? Is blockchain just a buzzword? Is a blockchain really trustless?

Let's start with the last one. The word trustless is often used to describe blockchain, however it is not really trustless — it would be better described as decentralised trust or systemic trust (trust in the system).

Rather than trust an individual (person or organisation) the trust is provided by the very system itself.

You do need to trust the transaction processors (aka miners) for the chain, and also the programmers that wrote the software being used. However you don't need to trust the individual processors or software, only that the majority are truthful. A characteristic of blockchain is that an individual bad actor, controlling only a small portion of the network, cannot take the network down.

A blockchain network can increase systemic trust through:

A large number of processors (e.g. public chain)
Multiple clients (i.e. multiple development teams)
Open source (allow visibility and the option to reject changes and go a different direction)

Only two major blockchains rate highly on these trust criteria: Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). There are strong reasons why these have strong support.

Some of the others are trying, but not yet there, and worryingly some of the type cryptocurrencies are not decentralised at all, but actually controlled by a single central organisation.

Crashed blog… now restored(1 min read)

So, I pushed the single-server Kubernetes cluster that I was running my blog on a little too far, and it crashed into a bit of a heap. The pods running the different sites, including this blog, failed, and the underlying database got corrupted.

It has been down for a few weeks now. Initially I thought it was just a server issue and rebooted. When it didn't come up, I did little bits of investigation over the following weeks, just a few hours at a time, to figure out the issue.

I managed to work out how to restore the database and get it working, but the server was not stable. It would quickly crash, and trying to activate more than one site would just cause problems.

Kubernetes is quite complicated, and there is a lot of overhead for a single server. It was still a good exercise to understand the complexities of deploying Kubernetes on IPv6.

Now, deploying multiple services via containers is still a good approach, with Kubernetes simply a way to orchestrate, and manage, a large number of containers. So, I can pretty much just run the same containers, just directly (instead of inside Kubernetes).

As you can see, from this blog entry, my services are now back up and running.

There was still the complexity of running on IPv6 only, which I should probably write up in more detail, but for now a lot of it was based on an article by Stefan Kleeschulte, https://medium.com/@skleeschulte/how-to-enable-ipv6-for-docker-containers-on-ubuntu-18-04-c68394a219a2

App Insights trace correlation(8 min read)

Application Insights is the application performance monitoring feature of Azure Monitor, and can be used to monitor deployed applications both in the cloud and on premises. App Insights supports W3C Trace Context standard headers to correlate tracing information across different components.

The features of App Insights, and Azure Monitor, are quite broad, whereas developers may want in some cases to filter down and focus on application-specific logging. Trace correlation is an important part of this, to get and end-to-end overview of operations.

To view logs, connect your App Insights instance to a Log Analytics workspace. Within the workspace, General > Logs will provide access to the query editor — you can either user one of the default Queries pop-up or write your own.

For example, to see all recent traces, and the correlation between them you can use a query like:

union AppTraces, AppDependencies, AppRequests
| where TimeGenerated > ago(30m)
   and Properties.CategoryName !startswith "Microsoft"
| sort by TimeGenerated desc
| project TimeGenerated, Type, OperationId, Id, Properties.SpanId, 
   ParentId, ClientType, Message, Name, SeverityLevel, Properties, 
   Properties.CategoryName, OperationName, SessionId,
   UserId, AppRoleInstance

Example output:

This example shows all the traces from one operation are linked to the same OperationId 029c3..., and the parent-child relationship between two tiers client (Browser) and server (PC) can also be determined:

Client (Browser) AppTraces have a ParentId 7d65e...
The client has a link from this parent to a child AppDependency with Id 73676...
On the server (PC) the dependency is recorded as the parent if the AppRequest Id 15c7e...
Additional traces on the server show the request as the ParentId (and there may be further parent-child links depending on the number of tiers).

There are many other types of records that can be queried, for example developers may often be interested in exceptions and traces that feature a particular keyword:

union AppExceptions, AppTraces
| where TimeGenerated > ago(30m)
| sort by TimeGenerated desc
| search "Password"

Apps on Kubernetes IPv6 – Kubeapps, WordPress(8 min read)

Once you have Kubernetes running on IPv6 only the next step is to install some apps.

This is my first post written on my new WordPress instance, hosted on Kubernetes IPv6 only. If you are reading it, then it is working 🙂

Of course apps have their own issues not being configured by default to work with IPv6, so for each app you need to test and work out what configuration details need to be tweaked (assuming the app supports IPv6 in the first place).

To start off with, I installed Kubeapps, to get an application management dashboard, and then used that to install WordPress.

With WordPress installed, I exported the content from my old blog and then imported it into the new instance, and tweaked a few WordPress settings.

The final step was to configure the Mythic Beasts reverse proxy, to make my blog available for legacy IPv4 users.

Kubernetes on IPv6 only(9 min read)

Kubernetes is an open source platform for managing containerised applications.

IPv6 is the next generation Internet protocol, and running on IPv6 only simplifies configuration and administration, and avoids the performance issues and complexities of IPv4 encapsulation, NAT, and conflicting private address ranges.

The default configuration of Kubernetes is IPv4, and there are few, and scattered, examples and guidance for setting up IPv6 dual stack, let alone single stack.

I have collected instructions from the different sources into a single guide to successfully deploy Kubernetes with IPv6 only.

See the guide for full instructions:

https://github.com/sgryphon/kubernetes-ipv6

The blog post contains some additional background on what I did to gett the deployment working. The deployment was tested on Ubuntu 20.04 running on an IPv6 only virtual server from Mythic Beasts.

IPv6 only hosting(4 min read)

We ran out of IPv4 addresses a few years ago, and the cost has been steadily increasing, now over USD 25.00 per IPv4 address.

Meanwhile we are increasingly using technologies such as containerised deployments and mass deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, seeing an increase in demand for addresses.

About 30% of the Internet now happily talks IPv6, with several countries having more than 50% IPv6, and for a server hosting environment there are many benefits to going IPv6 only.

IPv6 only hosting is available from several providers such as Mythic Beasts.

Surviving with IPv6 only(4 min read)

Trying to use an IPv6 only machine runs into a roadblock when you need to access a legacy IPv4 resource.

The best solution would be to convince services to move to an IPv6 first solution, incrementally adding reverse proxies for existing services and deploying new services to IPv6 only, with an IPv4 gateway only as needed.

Deploying new services to IPv6 only is much simpler than dual-stack, as you only need to worry about one set of configuration, firewalls, etc. Adding an IPv4 proxy on top, for legacy support, is then a simple, and contained, extension.

However, until that happens you still need a solution.

I found setting up DNS64 + NAT64 for my IPv6 only machines was pretty simple with my OpenWRT router.

Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi, IPv6 only(6 min read)

There are very simple instructions for installing Ubuntu on a Raspberry Pi, simply downloading the Imager and then pick the OS (which it will download for you, I used Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS), and write it to the micro SD card for your Pi. https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/how-to-install-ubuntu-on-your-raspberry-pi

The image is pre-configured for DHCPv4 using the wired Ethernet connection, with alternative instructions for getting it setup with Wi-Fi, but without mention of IPv6, which is now used by 30-35% of the Internet.

Here are instructions for setting up Ubuntu on your Raspberry Pi up with IPv6 only.

Open Source Compatible Fonts(1 min read)

One page reference chart of open source fonts that are size-compatible with well known standard commercial fonts.

There are, of course, a large variety of style open source fonts as well, for all manner of uses. But for basic documents, consider using Nimbus Sans or TeX Gyre Termes instead of your system default.

This blog is (currently, November 2020) in Noto Serif, from the worthy Noto project trying to cover the entirety of Unicode.

open-source-metric-compatible-fonts.pdf Download

A Guide to W3C Trace Context(10 min read)

Earlier this year the W3C Trace Context Recommendation was finally published. A standard way of passing distributed trace correlation has been needed for a long time, and it is good to see there is finally a standard, and many vendors have already moved to adopt it.

The Recommendation defines what a distributed trace is:

A distributed trace is a set of events, triggered as a result of a single logical operation, consolidated across various components of an application. A distributed trace contains events that cross process, network and security boundaries. A distributed trace may be initiated when someone presses a button to start an action on a website - in this example, the trace will represent calls made between the downstream services that handled the chain of requests initiated by this button being pressed.

What constitutes a single logical operation depends on the system. In the example above it is a single button press on a website, whereas in a batch processing system it might be for each item processed, or in a complex UI it might consist of both a button press and a subsequent confirmation dialog.

The W3C Trace Context Recommendation describes how the correlation information — an identifier for the operation, and the parent-child relationships between components — is passed in service calls, but doesn't cover what to do with that information, apart from how to pass it to the next component.

This is a guide mostly how to use Trace Context for logging, although it also applies to metrics and other telemetry.