Measuring empy space

If you've been following my recent posts on twitter, you'll be aware that I've finally got round to hooking up the MaxBotix rangefinders into our water tanks. So far I've done the main house tank and have sketches and buried duct ready to do the ones that water the garden.

Some more technical details here than I can fit in tweets:
* The sensors themselves sit through the roof of the tank. This involves drilling a 3/4" hole in the top of the tank and inserting the sensor from below, so you won't want to put it more than an arms reach from the access hole. The sensors I purchased have NPR thereads not BSP, so you may want to pick up matching nuts at the same time depending on local availability.
* I mounted some 6-way header pins on the sensor, and soldered the female end onto the cable so that it didn't twist as I tightened it up. All mounted in a 20mm conduit box on the tank.

Inside the shed, I'm just using a clone arduino with a wiznet ethernet shield (ebay/aliexpress) and a very basic sketch using the pulse width measurement from the sensor. As normal, it's available on GitHub for anyone interested. It pushes to an on-site MQTT broker (mosquitto) that's used to gather various sensor metrics and fed into home-assistant, where it also gets archived into InfluxDB for longer term plots

status/housetanksensor online

sensors/housetanks/depthbelowsensor 419

sensors/housetanks/litres 20762

I use the status for LWT messages, and the sensors has the raw air-gap measurement (mm below sensor - range is 300 -> 5000) as well as a calculated volume (see the arduino code for constants and calculation)

Importing into hass is as simple as

  - platform: mqtt

    name: House water tanks volume

    icon: mdi:water-pump

    availability_topic: status/housetanksensor

    unit_of_measurement: l

    state_topic: sensors/housetanks/litres

into the configuration.yaml

Next up, getting the irrigation system working...

Overlaying SLURM job timings on Grafana plots

As you may have noticed, I'm quite fond of Grafana and use it at home and work. One of the dashboards I have at work is the general state of our lustre filesystems, showing IO and metadata traffic, collected by a custom python script (I'm working on converting this to a real collectd python plugin) which stores the data in an influxDB.

I've since written a small python script that talks to our SLURM accounting DB, so that given a jobID, we can get the start/end times and overlay those using the annotations API. One minor niggle in that the API expects epoch milliseconds, and seems to be tied to the TZ of the browser that generated the API key.

however...

~$ annotate_job 2924399

Found the following job:

  User: bskjerven (pawsey0001)

  Cluster: magnus, Partition: workq, QOS: normal

  Nodes: 768, CPUs: 36864

  Start: 2018-06-11 17:23:22, End: 2018-06-11 19:54:44

Got something back - Annotate? (y/n) y

200 - Annotation added




and lo - 

Plotting Lustre MDS stats

At $dayjob we have several large filesystems - for example our /scratch system has 3.1 PB of space using over 1000 HDDs. Although each vendor offers their own dashboard for monitoring they're all a little bit crap and don't integrate with anything else.

Cue an afternoon setting up influxdb (trivial) and grafana (also trivial) on a spare VM and a simple python script run on the metadata servers:

[admin@snx11038n003 ~]$ cat push_mdt_stats.py
#!/usr/local/bin/python2.7
import urllib
import time

def grabbit(mds):
 post = ""
 with open(('/proc/fs/lustre/mdt/%s/md_stats' % mds), 'r') as f:
    for line in f:
        k,v,null = line.split(None,2)
        if k == "snapshot_time":
            ts=int(float(v)*1000000)
        else:
            post += 'metadata,fs={3} {0}={1} {2}\n'.format(k,v,ts,mds)
 with open(('/proc/fs/lustre/mdd/%s/changelog_users' % mds), 'r') as f:
    tmp = f.read().split()
    # we can cheat here as they have the same format - 3rd item in list is current changelog count, and then
    # from the 6th item on we get changelog id / position to pull into a dict
    head = int(tmp[2])
    clog = dict(zip(tmp[5:][0::2], tmp[5:][1::2]))
    post += 'changelog,fs={2} head={0} {1}\n'.format(head,ts,mds)
    for cl,count in clog.items():
        post += 'changelog,fs={3} {0}={1} {2}\n'.format(cl,count,ts,mds)

 post=post.encode('ascii')
 p = urllib.urlopen('http://influxbox:8086/write?db=lustre&precision=u',post)
 #print(p.getcode())

while True:
  try:
    grabbit('snx11038-MDT0000')
  except:
    sys.exit("Whoa, that went a bit Pete Tong!")
  time.sleep(10)

And a couple of clicks in Grafana can soon knock up a dashboard: