Dropbear

Category: Software

  • jqGrid in TurboGears2 Admin Screens

    I wanted to use the jqGrid for my admin pages as I liked that look and it matches some of the other screens outside the admin controller.  The admin controller, or rather the CrudRestController out of tgext.crud, has a way of exporting results in json format. So surely its a matter of changing the TableBase to use jqGrid in the admin controller and we’re done?

    Well, no.

    First you need to adjust the jsonReader options so that it lines up to the field names that the controller sends and this was one of the first (or last snags). The json output looks like:

    {
  "value_list": {
    "total": 20,
    "items_per_page": 7,
    "page": 1,
    "entries": [(lots of entries)...]
  }
}

    Now this is a little odd because of the top-level dictionary that is being used here. Most of the examples have everything that is inside the value_list being returned. In fact adjusting the controller to return only those items in the value_list values works.

    To look inside this structure we need to adjust the jsonReader options. jqGrid documentation uses the format “toptier>subtier” for the XML reader so that was the intial attempt. It was also an intial fail, it doesn’t work and you get your very familiar empty grid.

    The trick is close to this format, but slightly different for json. You change the options to “toptier.subtier”. In other words change the greater than symbol to a full stop for json access.

    The jqGridWidget now has the following options (amongst others):

    options = {
  'datatype': 'json',
  'jsonReader': {
    'repeatitems': False,
    'root': 'value_list.entries',
    'total': 'value_list.total',
    'page': 'value_list.page',
  }
}

    There might be a way of saying all entries sit under value_list inside jqGrid, but I couldn’t find it. Those options given above do give a working jqGrid on the admin screens.

  • pidof moving to procps

    pidof is a program that finds the PID of a named program. In some ways it is like a cut-down pgrep found in the procps package.  pidof currently sits in sysvinit-tools.

    There are plans to move all utilities that use the proc filesystem under one package which will make the maintenance of them simpler, which in effect means moving pidof from sysvinit-tools to procps. The short-term bump should make it better in the long term.

    Now as I wear two hats (Debian maintainer and procps upstream) there are two very important things I/we need to know.

    • If your Debian package depends on pidof being present, then we need to discuss dependencies. procps is generally installed on most systems but there might be corner cases. Possibly just depending on a specific version of procps will do it
    • If you, your Debian package or anything else (including other distributions) need the non-LSB options of pidof (ie they use -c -n or -m) then we (upstream) need to know about it. There are provisional plans not to support these options but they’re needed, or a subset is, then that could change.

    Debian developers can chime in on the debian-devel email list, or email myself. If its an upstream issue then either email me, or even better, the procps email list

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  • Step or Sloping Graphs

    Even though the backend of Rosenberg NMS uses rrdtool RRD files, the front end graphs are created using jqPlot.  The idea is to have a set of templates for the different types of graphs and just apply them to the various data sets.  It makes things a lot simpler for new graphs because you just select which one you want; unless you want something a lot different which would involve a new graph template.

    In any case, anyone that looks enough at the standard rrdtool graphs will know they are a series of steps. While it depends on the RRA, usually they are 5 minute steps, so a graph showing an increasing rate might show 5 minutes of 2 Mbps and then the next 5 minutes of 11 Mbps. jqPlot graphs as I’ve currently got them draws a line between two data points, so there would be a sloping line starting at 2.5 minutes (half of the first 5 minute interval) and 2Mbps sloping up to 11 Mbps at 7.5 minutes.

    At first I thought this was wrong and spent some time attempting to “fix” the graph by making it look like a rrdtool graph more. Someway through that process I stopped and wondered, what IS the right way? The answer like a lot of other things, is “it depends”.

    For a graph showing a rate, such as the output bits per second on an interface, the way this is done is at regular intervals a counter is measured. So if at time 0 the counter is 140 and time 60 the counter is 200 and finally at time 120 the counter is at 800 there has been an average rate of 1 [(200-140)/60] and 100 [(800-200)/60)]. rrdtool would show a horizontal bar at 1 bps and then another horizontal bar at 100 at the next time interval. jqPlot would show a sloping line going from 30,1 up to 90,100.

    Two graphs looking very different from the same data, what gives?  Each graph is right, or rather is showing an estimation of different things, hence their differences.

    rrdtool is showing the average rate for that time period. It is in some ways accurate because leaving aside missed wrap-arounds and resets that many bits did pass through that interface for the time specified.  However often the graphs are interpreted incorrectly as the real rate and not an average.  We can be reasonably sure for a rate that it would not be 1 for exactly a minute and then immediately jump to 100 for another minute.  This isn’t rrdtool’s fault, it is just how the graphs can be interpreted.

    jqplot will show more “realistic” graphs, with a curve sloping up. However this too makes assumptions that the rate increase is linear which often it is not. It just gives the illusion that the graph knows more about the data than it really does.

    In the end, both graphs are at the same time accurate and misleading. It’s important when looking at any graph in general (not just these two types) that you understand its limits and assumptions.  To give one example of the problems that can be missed, traffic interfaces may have microbursts (large amount of traffic in short amount of time) which, due to the averaging that goes on in graphing are invisible to graphs and give an incorrect account of what is going on.

     

     

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  • jqplot in Turbogears

     

    I’ve been working on the Rosenberg jqPlot GraphsNMS graphs slowly migrating them from using rrdtool graph and using jqplot.  While there have been many false-starts and re-works, I now have a working set of graphs, two of which are shown on the page.

    The graphs look a lot slicker and I have also simplified the admin screens.  I found I kept having to type the same thing in over and over for the rrdgraphs and have narrowed down the type of graphs to approximately 5.  They’re certainly not bulletproof and need more testing but they’re a good start.

    The graphs are based upon the ToscaWidgets2 series of widgets that then provide a nice “handle” for the jqPlot code.  My graphs even have some hand-coded Javascript to give nice units on the Y axis.

     

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  • props-ng 3.3.8

    Procps-ng 3.38 was released yesterday.  Besides the bug fixes,there have been two main enhancements: NUMA and systemd support.

    top comes with NUMA support which is a soft dependency, meaning that if compilied with the support, top will try to link at runtime to libnuma. The new key presses are ‘2’ and ‘3’ which will show the Nodes or more detail about a specific node respectively.

    ps has two new output columns; unit and uunit. These permit ps to display the systemd unit and user unit fields.  The systemd support is a
    hard dependency which is enabled with –with-systemd

     

    procps-ng is available from gitorious or sourceforge:

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  • Pie Charts in TurboGears

    You might of looked at Ralph Bean’s tutorial on graphs and thought, that’s nice but I’d like something different.  The great thing about ToscaWidgets using the jqPlot library is that pretty much anything you can do in jqPlot, you can do in ToscaWidgets and by extension in TurboGears.  You want different graph types? jqPlot has heaps!

    My little application needed a Pie Chart to display the overall status of attributes. There are 6 states an attribute can be in: Up, Alert, Down, Testing, Admin Down and Unknown.  The Pie Chart would show them all with some sort of colour representing the status. For this example I’ve used hard-coded data but you would normally extract it from the database using a TurboGears model and possibly some bucket sorting code.

    I’ve divided my code into widget specific, which is found in myapp/widgets/attribute.py and the controller code found unsurprisingly at myapp/controllers/attribute.py  Also note that some versions of ToscaWidgets have a bug which means any jqPlot widget won’t work, version 2.0.4 has the fix for issue 80 that explains briefly the bug.

    The widget code looks like this:

    from tw2.jqplugins.jqplot import JQPlotWidget
from tw2.jqplugins.jqplot.base import pieRenderer_js
import tw2.core as twc

class AttributeStatusPie(JQPlotWidget):
    """
    Pie Chart of the Attributes' Status """
    id = 'attribute-status-pie'
    resources = JQPlotWidget.resources + [
            pieRenderer_js,
            ]

    options = {
            'seriesColors': [ "#468847", "#F89406", "#B94A48", "#999999", "#3887AD", "#222222"],
            'seriesDefaults' : {
                'renderer': twc.js_symbol('$.jqplot.PieRenderer'),
                },
            'legend': {
                'show': True,
                'location': 'e',
                },
            }

    Some important things to note are:

    • resources are the way of pulling in the javascript includes that actually do the work, generally if you have something like a renderer using js_symbol further on, it needs to be listed in the resources too.
    • seriesColors is how you make a specific data item a specific colour, or perhaps change the range of colours.  It’s not required if you use the default set, which is defined in the jqPlot options.
    • The renderer tells jqPlot what sort of graph we want, the line above says we want pie

     

    Next the controller needs to be defined:

    from myapp.widgets.attribute import AttributeStatusPie

@expose('myapp.templates.widget')
    def statuspie(self):
        data = [[
                ['Up', 20], ['Alert', 7], ['Down', 12], ['Admin Down', 3], ['Testing', 1], ['Unknown', 4],
                ]]
        pie = AttributeStatusPie(data=data)
        return dict(w=pie)

    And that is about it, we now have a controller path attributes/statuspie which shows us the pie chart.
    My template is basically a bare template with a ${w.display | n} in it to just show the widget for testing.

    Pie Chart in Turbogears
    Pie Chart in Turbogears

     

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  • procps-ng 3.3.7 Released

    procps-ng version 3.3.7 was released today.  It has some new and interesting features in the top program that Jim has been busy working on.  There is a new filter feature which can exclude fields that match a value for example. The remainder of the changes are small bug fixes and getting the compile warnings count down with -Wall enabled. The library revision was updated but this did not involve an API or ABI change.

    procps-ng can be downloaded off the sourceforge page which has the current and previous releases stored there. Alternatively you can visit our gitorious page if git fetch is more your thing. Debian packages will be going into experimental until the freeze is over and we get things unblocked.

  • python and rrdtool

    RRDTool is a neat utility for collecting and graphing statistics such as server loads or network traffic. There are two main modules for interfacing with RRDTool files within python; rrdpython and pyrrd.

    rrdpython is the basic bindings of the rrdtool library within python. The API is very familiar for people who program in C or use the command line tools which for me is both so it works well. However if you were expecting a “pythonic” API you will be disappointed. As there is the direct binding, you have to have either a pre-compiled module or compile it yourself with librrd-dev package installed. Depending on your setup this could be trivial or a real pain.

    pyrrd initially looks good as it is a object-orientated style and (supposedly) a pure python code, so no trying to compile things… but!

    Well, the problem is its not pure python. The hooks are there for it (in backend.py) for it to be implemented in python but it falls back to using the external method, and external method is a bunch of Popen calls. pyrrd also does not
    support the full set of rrdtool commands.

    My intention is to keep using rrdpython despite the compile hassle and possibly even use a fancier graph setup such as High Charts though there is a problem with their license for me.

  • Bootstrap – The hidden gem in Turbogears

    I’ve been trying to tidy up my Mako templates within my Turbogears 2 project.  As part of that I was looking at some of them that are quickstarted including one which is the About page.

    What was curious was there was all this CSS work all done already for you, including icons.  Digging further I found out that one of the many projects Turbogears takes in, is Bootstrap.  It’s website describes Bootstrap as “Sleek, intuitive, and powerful front-end framework for faster and easier web development.”  but what it means to me is a bunch of guys who understand HTML and CSS way better than me have made it easy for me to build a decent web application.

    While the framework won’t suit everyone’s tastes, it makes a lot of the formatting decisions so much easier.  The thing is, in all the Turbogears documentation I have read I’ve not heard it mentioned. Not sure why, its pretty awesome (not SQLAlchemy awesome but not many things are).

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  • Pre-selecting ToscaWidgets jqgrid values in TurboGears

    My Turbogears project has recently reached an important milestone; one of the back-end processes now runs pretty much continuously and the plugins it use (or at least the ones I can see) are also working.  That means I can turn to the front-end which displays the data the back-end collected.

    For some of the data I am using a ToscaWidgets (or TW2) widget called a jqGridWidget which is a very nice jquery device that separates the presentation and data using a json query.  I’ve mentioned previously about how to get a jqGridWidget working but left the pre-filtering out until now.  This meant that my grid showed all the items in the database, not just the ones I wanted to see, but it was a start.

    Now this widget displays things called Attributes which are basically children of another model called Hosts. Basically, Attributes are things you want to check or track about a Host.  My widget used to show all Attributes but often on a Host screen, I want to see its hosts only. So, this is how I got my widget to behave; I’m not sure this is THE CORRECT way of doing it, but it does work.

    First, in the Hosts controller you need to create the widget and pass along the host_id that the controller has obtained.  I was not able to use the sub-classing trick you see in some TW2 documentation but actually make a widget instance.

    class HostsController(BaseController):
    # other stuff here
    class por2(portlets.Portlet):
        title = 'Host Attributes'
        widget = AttributeGrid()
        widget.host_id = host_id

    Next, the prepare() method in the Widget needs to get hold of the host_id and put it into the postData list.  I needed to do it before calling super() because the options become one long string in the sub-class.

    class AttributeGrid(jqgrid.jqGridWidget):
    def prepare(self, **kw):
        if self.host_id is not None:
            self.options['postData'] = {'hostid': self.host_id}
        super(AttributeGrid, self).prepare()

    This means the jqgrid when it asks for its JSON data will include the hostid parameter as well.  We need that method to “see” the host ID so we can filter the database access.

    Finally in the JSON method for the Attribute we pick up and filter on the hostid.

        @expose('json')
    @validate(validators={'hostid':validators.Int()})
    def jqsumdata(self, hostid=0, page=1, rows=1, *args, **kw):
        conditions = []
        if hostid > 0:
            conditions.append(model.Attribute.host_id == hostid)
        attributes =model.DBSession.query(model.Attribute).filter(and_(*conditions))

    From there you run through the attributes variable and build your JSON reply.

     

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