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Monitor a Linux Box With Machine Generated Music
mcappel writes "Linux and Unix admins are familiar with vmstat and top, which are visual tools displaying the health of a computer. chordStats adds a new interface to a system monitoring setup — information passed through tone, timbre, and harmony. IBM's Nathan Harrington, who wrote Knock Some Commands Into Your Laptop, created a simple Perl script to send note events to FluidSynth that forces various system events to be interpreted as a part of a harmonious interval, and looks at options for enhancing a musical system monitor."
K-D-E ... and ... L-A-M-P /
keep on running in perfect harmony...
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
This is a cool idea and all, but the crabby old Linux box I run would probably come out sounding like the Tonto, Tarzan, and Frankenstein chorus.
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So if the server starts getting flooded, I can make it play the Star Wars Darth Vader theme? :P
I don't reply to Anonymous posts; if you have something to say to me, identify yourself or I won't reply.
When all you hear is "beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee"
Anyone have any audio files of this to give us an idea of what it sounds like?
This guy's the limit!
When reading this blurb about using system condition to drive a "melody" of diagnostic signals, the first thing that came to my mind was a certain automatic doorway on the Heart of Gold. It was positively humming with joy when it was able to open and close for the people wandering through, thanks to an implementation of Genuine People Personalities(tm) software. From the TV series, the robotic sing-song line, "Glad to be of seeer-vice!" just floated through my mind.
[
I guess it doesn't quite count as a dupe, but this is the same concept as monitoring a network by music.
I want minor chords when something is failing, and business as usual should play "Walking on Sunshine"...
So does this also mean that people will start releasing CDs based on log files?
"All this machinery making modern music can still be open-hearted," lead engineer Bruce Peart commented shortly before being arrested by the RIAA for accidentally reproducing "I Want It That Way" on his desktop. Under the DMCA, monkeys are no longer allowed near typewriters, unless under contract to reality television producers.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
This could be really cool on a desktop (probably better than listening to all the beeps and boops spurted out by my Windows desktop right now), but I wonder how "harmonious" it could possibly be if run on a server? This would take techno to a whole new level.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
Sounds like this would get anoying realy quick. What's wrong with just running Nagios or the like?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Reply to first eight comments:
NO. For fuck's sake, NO! No no no, no, no no.
Google loaded this at one of it's datacenters!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
(Or maybe this one was from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency... I read them back to back several years ago, and now I can't keep them straight.)
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That was the sound of Nautilus crashing.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
this is a neat idea, would be cool to just listen too
This is an excellent album.
Does a server under stress play the Windows login song?
sig goes here!
I have been monitoring my system's loadavg using speaker beeps for many years. I wrote a small music player that uses a simple melody syntax and that emits sounds via the system speaker. If the loadavg changes significantly, it can emit different kind of beep sequences, so that I get notified about what's going on even when I'm not at my computer (but near it of course).
That's fine and dandy if your system is operating fine. But what if it's not and starts playing "The Overture of 1812" with the cannon fire? Kiss those surround sound speakers and your eardrums goodbye.
Kent Brockman: "Artie made megabucks with a revolutionary invention, a converter that changes that horrible modem noise into easy listening music..."
*modem noise starts...Georgy Girl starts playing*
I wonder if this would work on a Windows box? Would it sound like all your least favourite Country-Western songs as played on the bagpipe?
crazy dynamite monkey
...what I've been looking for - I think I will be spending some time with this.
I might see if I can pump the data from an IDS into it too.
A good idea, but reminds me a lot of this. Not much new here, though I'm glad to see that the idea is still afloat -- it sounds interesting.
My boss hears about this "great" idea, and suddenly, I'm having conversations that sound like this with upper management....
:-(
Big Boss: "What's the status of our servers right now?"
Me: "Well, sir, it's like this. The web server is all light classical, but the mail server has gone a bit blues; we'll try to upgrade it to something jazzier once the new shipment comes in."
Big Boss: "Any word on how Joe's doing with the corporate intranet issues?"
Me: "Well, sir, it was death metal when we arrived this the morning; he's trying to make it perkier, but so far it's still stuck at atonal screechings..."
Big Boss: "It's not going go all John Cage on us, is it?!!"
Me: "No sir. Not this time. I swear!
Big Boss: "Well, okay. Keep up the tempo!"
(thinks)Hey, managing this technology stuff is easier than I thought!"
Me: (thinks) Must stop bosses from reading slashdot.
How about a Beowulf Cluster Choir?
"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson
...the shit really hit the fan? I'm sure there will be many people thinking the opposite though.
If the ALSA driver fails to load what sound or music should I expect it to play?
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
It would be like working in a 1960's sci-fi B movie.
Except that none of my half dozen server blades are equipped with any sort of sound card.
:)
Plus, the music would have to be pretty loud to be heard over the jet engine that is their cooling system.
/* No Comment */
There've been a few mods on Linux based embedded systems where the heartbeat LED pulses at a speed relative to the CPU load. On a similar vein I like the idea of the tempo being relative to load / IO activity :-)
~Pev
So, if a server crashes and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
5..4..3..2..1 Sorry Nathan Harrington, but you've created software that makes it possible to pirate music.
...someone made a program to "audiolize" system load as raindrops. Couldn't see the point back then, can't see it now.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
"Imagine a beowulf symphony full of these babies"
Now this will be modded redundant for sure.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I have a bt878 card in my machine, with a 3.5mm patch wire between its audio output and the soundcard.
All you have to do is plug that cable into the Mic socket (instead of Line), turn all the volume meters up to 11, et voila - rhythmic (and highly irritating) induced computer noise, picked up by a cheap TV receiver!
Nobody else has this sig.
Did this years ago. Too bad the project was abandoned. It could monitor one computer, or many. It never had a good client really to do it remotely, but it was pretty cool in a server room. I ran it at an ISP around 98, 99 I think.
OK, pipe the output of all your servers to your PC and rotate the music every few seconds, or even blend the sounds together.
....
machine 1 plays everything with a jazz motif
machine 2 plays everthing with a classical motif
machine 3
"everything normal" is just a quiet sound, just above silence, or optionally, silence except for periodic sounds to alert you that the monitoring program is working properly.
If something is wrong, you play a sound that 1) gets your attention and 2) uniquely identifies the subsystem and the machine. If you opt to blend, make sure you can mentally separate the sounds.
Of course, the front-end would also have a non-audio user interface where you could see at a glance all your machines, their subsystems, and their statuses, and get more details if necessary.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
A much more useful instrument would be a microphone (or emf, rpm sensor) on the fans and some software coupled to that that predicts when the fan is about to fail. Also maybe for hard drives. I know sofware is used in cash machines that tracks the activities of the transducers and actuators, then sends a "fix me" notification to HQ, often many hours before a mechanical failure becomes serious enough to disable the machine; and that has been very successful.
Back in the "old" days, we had techs that could tell you the error/fault that had occurred by the sound pattern produced by the line printers. To the very last one, they were upset/angry when the printers where replaced with quieter versions as this now meant they had to look up from playing solitaire/day trading to actually look if there were any significant events.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
I bet that if you use the music from this idea, create lyrics from logs and memory dumps and use a text-to-speech for singing, this would sound better than most stuff RIAA sells :-)
Chuck or Marsyas. And it would probably be easier to do something more complicated such as use samples, have multiple threads (well shreds in chuck, you spork a shred) and do other fun stuff. Worth checking both out if you are into playing with audio (chuck has binaries for win and osx, source for linux, while marsyas is compile only).
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
We recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of construction of the university's first computer http://www.computing.msu.edu/50years/mistic.html. A panel of the original builders and users was convened to discuss the history. One tidbit which was interesting and relevant to this thread was that they tied a speaker to the sign bit so they could monitor the health of the computer while it was running. Given that output was on paper tape the aural monitoring was useful. I found their choice of the sign bit to be interesting.
This sounds a bit like "Peep" the "Network Auralizer" released back in 2000. That used sound bites rather than machine generated music, but had a similar effect in that a SysAdmin could monitor multiple systems just by having the background sounds going.
I used it in a couple of places, and it worked relatively well - especially when the rest of the shop was quiet.
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
car mechanics use this method for ages.
that's why it takes so little time to find a problem in a car engine
and so many programmer days to find a problem in a software engine.
There was a very popular sci-fi russian book by I.Efremov called Andromeda Cloud that had a starship that had controls that played music sounds and if some data reading from sensors went into potentially dangerous area or even close, it would weave an ominous-sounding chime into the usual sound, and if data readings go further into danger area, the 'bad' chime would become louder.
One of the best books of sci fi in my opinion.
It's a bit heavy on communistic ideals, though. It had to be at the time, to get published. It's amazing that he was able to make it interesting, despite that.
The story is of a star travel to another close alien civilization that suddenly went quiet. They discover that it had a nuclear war, if I remember right. On the way back they crash into a planet of an iron star after they lose too much fuel trying to go around it.
The book is very hard sci-fi..
Some of the soviet themes was that they find a hidden cave on Earth that was built as a cache of achievements of dying western powers, and it's stocked with hundreds of luxury cars. Cars are no longer used on earth, though, and everybody thinks it's a very dumb idea to have them as public transport is amazingly advanced at the time. They also think it's very dumb of the people who built the cave to be so haughty as to think that what they built will amaze and astonish everyone who might discover it, where as in fact it all looks very silly to them (and they wished more art creations were preserved instead of hundreds of cars).
The author also wrote a lot about the East, traveled there much, in the Himalayas and the Tibet, he wrote about things like Yoga and a bit about religion, ancient India, he also wrote some historical-fictional books about Ancient Greeks and Egypt. Almost all of his stuff was top-notch.
The sci fi books are one of the very few examples from 50s that don't seem dated at all. In that sense he reminds me of Heinlein, strangely enough..
I ran this on our rack at work and got this out of it: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4052361410 218663660
n trolsfortheheartofthesun.html
It even wrote the lyrics for us! http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/pinkfloyd/settheco
Is that Solaris you're runinng?!? Then turn it up man!!!!
Who the heck sits in the same room with their servers? How would you even hear the sound over all those fans, anyway? This is only useful if the music penetrates the network and comes out on your desktop somewhere.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
What are the business drivers for this? Not ragging on it but curious to know why it exists.
"Question everything, including this!" - http://technoracle.blogspot.com/
This isn't a new idea, but I like the expansion of the concept into a full, on-going "melody". The Mac's startup tone is actually a diagnositic tone. If all is well, it plays a Middle C chord, but if anything doesn't pass the self test, the tone reflects a problem. ahref=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chime_(Macintos h)rel=url2html-32130http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C hime_(Macintosh)>When this happens, it's called "Chimes of death" or "chimes of doom."
Nitewing '98
Everything works...in theory.
Morse has been used a lot and it is a lot more descriptive than music (though I guess the learning curve is a bit less for music).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
1) Can you make it do Batman?
2) Bet it would be better than 90% of the music out there today
3) Isn't that how Trent came up with The Downward Spiral?
4) Between the techno music and the fan noises coming out of the power supply, CPU, and GPU, you'd think I'm attending a rave near the airport.
5) I'd be scared if my machine played Chopin's Funeral March on its own.
6) I'd know we're in trouble when I get a call on my cell from one of the servers and the ringtone plays Bad Religion's "Los Angeles Is Burning"
7) Hook it up to a webserver and slashdot it so we'll get new music tracks for PyDance!
We had some 500 US Robotics modems connected to portmaster 2 (livingston later lucent), the sound was turned up on one of the modems. And if you happen to be in the data center where the modems were and you heard a modem you automatically _knew_ the modem capacity was at 80%. Usually around X time, as people were habitual when they got home, did a bit of internet before dinner and then had dinner it would sorta flatten on a mrtg graph and then it would spike to 11PM and then gradually fall off again. Ahh, I can't say it was the good ol' days but it was pretty exciting nontheless.
Look around for 'peep', this use audio of 'natural sounds' to indicate activity.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
In the Shaper/Mechanist stories, there is a small spaceship that monitors it's health with tunes.
In ex-Sov spacecraft, ship monitors you!
J
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
I guess Lou Reed has been supplanted as the root directory for noise rock.
Solaris may have sucky package management and be backwards in other ways, but they've had snoop -a for years and years and years.. Very cute to listen to packets on a SPARC20 external speaker...
Deja Vu all over again.
"Many users fondly remember the LEO III and enthuse about some of its quirkier features, such as having a loudspeaker connected to the central processor which enabled operators to tell if a program was looping by the distinctive sound it made."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_computer
And to the creatures of the dark & night that dwell within them !!!
Three cheers for linux monitoring music and the server room symphony !!!
Read radical news here
...when you could stick an AM radio on top of the GA16/440, tune the radio to the far end of the band and listen to your programs compile. You could tell when it was sorting it's symbol table, was very melodic.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
... By a late gentleman who went by the name of Douglas Adams. The software, Anthem, in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, used a company's stock as input data instead of server logs, but the idea was still there. I wonder if his writing influenced the author of this tool.
I can't help but wonder if the music generated by this software isn't going to sound like, in Mr. Adams own words, "a short burst of the most hideous cacophony in G minor" -- to say nothing of what it must sound like to listen to hours of this stuff if 30 seconds is pure hell.
I would personally prefer to use Boodler for such purposes; instead of music you can use any waveforms you like. You program the software to do whatever you want, whether it's write music or (more likely) generate an environmental audioscape similar to what peep does, only much more sophisticated and flexible since you can program whatever events you want and send them to Boodler, which can be set to listen to a socket or port for commands.
With it you really get to kill demon processes. In 3D. With a plasma rifle.
http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
This is not exactly new. Most mainframes built by UK companies, from the late 1950s until the 1980s, had a loudspeaker attached to a piece of logic (via an op-amp) somewhere or other in the machine (the "successful jump" logic being a favorite). The idea being that an operator could tell, simply by listening, whether the machine / program running was behaving itself
This meant that nobody had to actually watch the console and could get on with doing the myriad other jobs needed: like changing tapes, paper, etc
Plus ca change
The first computer I ever programmed on back in 1977 was a Marconi Myriad. It had a small speaker that made a different tone depending on what instruction was being executed. It provided excellent feedback on the health of the system. When everything was running normally it made a very rich and complex noise, but you could easily tell from the sound when things started to go wrong and if it went into a loop it would make a single high pitched tone. A bit like those cardiac monitors when a patient flatlines. Some of the guys had laboriously created programs (loaded by paper tape) that played classical music, eg Bach's Air on the G String.
We had the suits from a major client fly in for a visit, and to help impress them, I was asked to set up an LCD monitor in the server room with lots of flashy bling-bling monitoring software running. After playing around with a few packages, and finding nothing that came close - I had a cunning idea. I installed XMMS and a bunch of visualisation plugins, resulting in a computer that did nothing but "monitor" Avril Lavigne music all day. It looked very impressive, and nobody even noticed that its ethernet cable wasn't connected to anything.
I was not aware that tone, timbre, and harmony were orthogonal to each other.
.
Is that Britney Spears singing, or did my hard drive just die?
With this cool script, we can finally hear the painful cries of the Slashdotted servers.
w00t
Very nearly the most serious (and, probably, one of the most common) problems you can have with a server is loss of network connectivity, or problems with network connectivity, which would make streaming sound less useful.
On the other hand, if your stream was continuous (like yours, evidently) you would know something was wrong not by the noise but by the silence.
I like it.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Some years ago at one of the usenix conferences someone reported a similar project. However, instead of trying for chords and harmony, they chose natural sounds -- frogs croaking, crickets, bird chirps, water, wind. Their take: As former hunter gatherers we detect change in this environment more quickly, and few combinations are dissonant, further, the 'normal' environment swiftly becomes non-distracting.
So, for example, disk activity can be represented by the sound of bees. Incoming mail to the server by a chickadee chirp, successful network logons by a duck quack, non-succesful ones by a piliated woodpecker call, disk full warnings by various levels of thunder, depending on how full and how fast they were filling, network activity as wind in trees noise, Internet access as rushing water, cpu usage by frog choruses.
Implementation:
Since this would require more than just vmstat as it's input, I would suggest a that it be implemented as a simple udp socket. Various programs then can run at various places on your network, and send packets to the socket, with an event type, and whatever addtional info you wish. Possibly the same mechanism that Big Brother uses for the data layer.
So...
Use existing BB modules to gather information.
Send to central receiver.
Receiver does two things:
A: Writes the BB webpage
B: sends an event to the sound generator.
Sound gnerator uses the event to set some parameter of the sound environment. This environmental sound can
be a single short event, such as a bird chirp, or can set some level for reporting a continous event.
Sound generator has a library of sounds, either some form of sound clips, or parameters to hand to external programs.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
At my former ISP job, I had written a script that fed router traffic and load into a webpage that, when viewed with the Beatnik plugin (remember that?), played tones that indicated if the traffic/load was high or low. Proved a rather distracting way to monitor the network, but it was kind of cool to listen to the spacey chords late at night in the NOC...