Here are a couple of things I did yesterday!

some logging improvements

I was having a problem on my server where I was logging in 3 different ways:

1. Rails was logging to a file called production.log
2. my Go proxy was logging to Docker Compose’s default log thing (whatever that is)
3. my Firecracker manager service was logging to journald

This was very annoying because I was constantly confused about where to look for logs and it was impossible to see everything in one place.

I set RAILS_LOG_TO_STDOUT=1 and told Docker Compose to log to journald instead like this:

  rails:
    environment:
      - RAILS_LOG_TO_STDOUT=1 
    logging:
      driver: "journald"
      options:
        tag: "rails"
    build: 
        dockerfile: docker/rails/Dockerfile
        context: .

Once I had the logs in journald, it took me a little while to figure out how to ask journalctl to actually show me the logs for those services and it was pretty unwieldy, so I added this little function to my .bashrc to help me out.

function logs {
    journalctl -b SYSLOG_IDENTIFIER=$1 | less +G
}

some strace puzzles

I wrote a couple of starter puzzles about strace. Here’s the description for the one called “the case of the misconfigured logger”

There’s a program in your home directory called run-me. For some reason, it’s been misconfigured so that it’s writing its logs to /dev/null instead of to a file. But you need to know what it’s writing!

Use strace to find out what it’s writing.

and one called “the case of the mystery log file”

There’s a program in your home directory called run-me. It’s logging its output to a log file, but you can’t find the name of the log file ANYWHERE in its documentation!

Use strace to find out the name of the log file.

These aren’t particularly good yet, probably because I spent maybe 5 minutes writing them. Lots of work to do on this front, but I’ll probably do most of it after RC is over.