Tell teuthology to use a local ceph-qa-suite directory

By default teuthology will clone the ceph-qa-suite repository and use the tasks it contains. If tasks have been modified localy, teuthology can be instructed to use a local directory by inserting something like:

suite_path: /home/loic/software/ceph/ceph-qa-suite

in the teuthology job yaml file. The directory must then be added to the PYTHONPATH

PYTHONPATH=/home/loic/software/ceph/ceph-qa-suite \
   ./virtualenv/bin/teuthology  --owner loic@dachary.org \
   /tmp/work.yaml targets.yaml

Temporarily disable Ceph scrubbing to resolve high IO load

In a Ceph cluster with low bandwidth, the root disk of an OpenStack instance became extremely slow during days.

When an OSD is scrubbing a placement group, it has a significant impact on performances and this is expected, for a short while. In this case, however it slowed down to the point where the OSD was marked down because it did not reply in time:

2014-07-30 06:43:27.331776 7fcd69ccc700  1
   mon.bm0015@0(leader).osd e287968
   we have enough reports/reporters to mark osd.12 down

To get out of this situation, both scrub and deep scrub were deactivated with:

root@bm0015:~# ceph osd set noscrub
set noscrub
root@bm0015:~# ceph osd set nodeep-scrub
set nodeep-scrub

After a day, as the IO load remained stable confirming that no other factor was causing it, scrubbing was re-activated. The context causing the excessive IO load was changed and it did not repeat itself after another 24 hours, although scrubbing was confirmed to resume when examining the logs on the same machine:

2014-07-31 15:29:54.783491 7ffa77d68700  0 log [INF] : 7.19 deep-scrub ok
2014-07-31 15:29:57.935632 7ffa77d68700  0 log [INF] : 3.5f deep-scrub ok
2014-07-31 15:37:23.553460 7ffa77d68700  0 log [INF] : 7.1c deep-scrub ok
2014-07-31 15:37:39.344618 7ffa77d68700  0 log [INF] : 3.22 deep-scrub ok
2014-08-01 03:25:05.247201 7ffa77d68700  0 log [INF] : 3.46 deep-scrub ok

Global shortcuts for emacs org-mode on Ubuntu

Let say F7 is bound, in emacs, to the org-clock-out function of Org Mode as a shortcut to quickly stop the current clock accumulating the time spent on a given task.

(global-set-key (kbd "<f7>") 'org-clock-out)

F7 can be sent to the emacs window via the command line with

xdotool search --name 'emacs@fold' key F7

If emacs needs to be displayed to the user (in case it was iconified or on another desktop), the windowactivate command can be added:

xdotool search --name 'emacs@fold' windowactivate key F7

On Ubuntu 14.04 this command can be bound to the F7 regardless of which window has focus, via the shortcuts tab of the keyboard section of System Settings as shown below: