We are drug addicts. Not to green cannabis or MDMA, necessarily, but we do are addicted to some elements scattered around the globe that support the base of the world economy and that we need, like water, so that everything remains in order. The shortage of silicon chips is already one of the most suffocating problems that humanity has to face these days, we tell you about it in this article.

A new world problem: shortage of silicon chips

Perhaps there were some smart people who knew it before, but, for the rest of the mortals, it was in 2021 when the crude dependence that the technology industry has on factories that produce microchips was revealed. Yes, those little things are absolutely essential for the operation of electronic devices.

You can now start trembling with fear, the shortage of semiconductors, of silicon chips, which work as the heads of computing devices, is not good for us. Because, as you may tell, they control everything these days, from your smartphone to your laptop, from your tablet to your new car, from your state-of-the-art washing machine to your kid’s Playstation 5.

What is this semiconductor crisis about?

As it happened with the rest of the markets, the restrictions imposed by the pandemic forced the closure of many of the factories that were devoted to the production of these chips, thus making their production more difficult. And what’s worse, on top of that, the demand for computer devices increased, since everyone was locked up at home, needing to work remotely or entertain themselves with screens so as not to die of disgust making bread or staring at the wall. To all of this we add the inevitable delay in shipments and transport on a global scale, as well as the rise in the price of silicon, an essential element for microchip manufacturing, and other components that were bitterly disputed by the great world powers. As if that were not enough, two large chip producers, Taiwan and China, suffered certain catastrophes that seriously affected the capacity of their factories.

We know that the semiconductor industry fluctuates, that it is fickle and regularly goes through certain cycles of shortage, but all of this happened at the same time: this fluctuating nature, the alteration of demand and supply patterns due to the pandemic, the disagreements between the great powers, and then the catastrophes in the countries with the highest production… Not even done on purpose!

Who has been the worst off because of the shortage?

One of the markets that has been the most affected is the automobile sector. In fact, the AlixPartners financial consultancy recalls that, due to the shortage of chips, the global automobile industry has lost, this past 2021, 210,000 million dollars in revenue. That’s about 7.7 million cars less.

But not only that, the shortage of semiconductors also threatened the availability of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets with microchips in the last months of last year, which is, as you know, when these things are sold more. The Christmas campaign.

In fact, the very Apple, during November, had to choose between its iPads and its iPhones, diverting the chips that were originally destined for the former for the latter, since the iPhones are sold more and they are more lucrative. This meant that many specialist stores in the UK didn’t have stock of the iPad mini or the basic iPad for months.

But now comes perhaps the sector that has defended the problem of silicon, chips, semiconductors and all their ancestors the most: the world of gamers. Because the universe can be sunk with a single click of Thanos but the difficulties to get the brand new PlayStation 5 or the Xbox Series X is inexcusable. Indeed, Sony had it hard. Forced, even, to stop the production of its flagship product, the PS5, because the hundreds of chips that make it up are too difficult to obtain. The same thing happened with the giant Nintendo, which warned, distressed, that they were in serious trouble. They couldn’t keep up with the demand for their new console. Meanwhile, high-end graphics cards for PC gaming are still hard to find. If things continue like this, at any moment gaming lovers will leave the controls of Call of Duty, come out of their burrow and go themselves refine the silicon.

Moving on to the aesthetic spectrum, we note that if you’re bald you might not have noticed, but the Supersonic hair dryer and Airwrap hair styler have been missing for months as tech giant Dyson continues to beg for chips among the few supplies that work selling them worldwide.

Conclusion: What will happen in the near future?

Yes, things are very bad regarding the supply of chips and semiconductor materials. Although, don’t worry, experts warn that the effects of the shortage will only take a year to subside. There will be gradual improvements, although all the demand will probably not be met before 2023.

Many companies, such as Intel, have decided to create new chip factories in Europe, America and Asia to avoid another shortage on such a scale. In the meantime, meditate, exercise, read our articles, check your security system, or try to bring back tug-of-war as an Olympic sport.

Hard disk types: Get to know the main ones!

Do you need to buy hard disks? All right, we all have needs in life.

Are you clear about what you need them for? Great, that’s where it starts.

Don’t you have a clear choice of hard disk types? Maybe we can give you some clues…

The choice of hard disks depends, specially, on the use you are going to make of them. You may need them for servers or databases, or for high-performance environments. But it is also possible that you only want them to save on your home computer Petabytes of videos of the dancing parrot.

In this article we are going to know the main types of hard disk that exist nowadays. Let’s go!

Hard disk types. A brief introduction

Before going into greater depths we have to say that hard disks are basically divided into 2 categories: HDD and SSD.

When distinguishing between classes of hard disks, these can also be distinguished depending on the type of connectors they use. Thus, we talk about modalities such as SATA, SCSI or SAS, among others.

In fact, we could even use other criteria to classify the types of hard disk, such as where they are (internal or external) or even what they are used for, but in this article we are going to keep the first two.

Next we will see what each type of hard disk consists of. However, one thing to keep in mind is that both HDDs and SSDs will be able to use different types of connectors.

Hard Disk Types: HDD and SSD

HDD Hard Disks

We know by HDD (Hard Drive Disk) the traditional mechanical hard disks that record information magnetically on one or several platters. HDDs are made up of mechanical parts; they basically consist of one or more hard disks that rotate at high speed (thousands of RPMs) around an axle, inside a box. On each disc, a head reads or records data on each of its faces.

So that you can visualize it simply, it would be something like a small turntable stored inside a box (saving distances).

HDDs have been the most widely used discs in recent decades. More economical, durable, and with ever-increasing storage capacities, HDDs have reigned as storage devices for decades, and even though they have been a tough competitor in SSDs, they are still widely accepted.

Solid State Disks (SSD)

They are a recent novelty, and every day they have more followers. Actually, when we talk about SSD (Solid State Drive), we’re not talking about a “hard drive” as such. However, since they share their primary purpose, which is to store data, they are also often called “hard drives”.

The structure of SSD devices has little or nothing to do with the classic HDD, so they are only called “hard drives” because they are dedicated to similar functions. SSDs are not, in fact, disks, and lack mechanical parts; on the contrary, they have their own microprocessor (called a “controller”) that takes care of data reading/writing tasks, and stores the data in microchips that have interconnected flash memories.

For the last few years SSD hard drives have been very successful thanks to their higher speed. However, they also have some disadvantages, such as their price and lower storage capacity. So some people go for the solution of using an SSD hard drive to run the operating system and use an HDD for data storage.

Types of hard disk according to their connectors

Serial ATA (SATA) hard disks

In its different versions, the most current is version III, these are the most common hard drives in home computers, if you are accessing this article through a laptop or desktop computer is likely to be the type of hard drive that is working in your computer.

The Serial ATA uses a serial connector for data transmission and in its version III reaches speeds of about 600 Mb/s.

As we said, these are the hard drive connectors that have been most popular in recent years. Both their price and their data transmission speed have made them very popular.

SCSI or SAS hard disks

These are professional hard drive connectors that are typically found in high performance environments.

They are usually installed in RAID and are inside racks or blades.

One of their main features is that they are able to replace other similar hard disks (which, for example, have broken down), without having to shut down the computer, which will help the service to continue operating without an interruption.

Let’s get monitoring!

And now that we’ve seen some of the main hard disk types out there, how about taking a few minutes to discover something as important as system monitoring?

Monitoring systems are responsible for monitoring computer systems (hardware, networks and communications, operating systems or applications, for example) in order to analyse their operation and performance, and to detect and warn of possible errors.

And if we talk about monitoring, of course, we should talk about Pandora FMS. Pandora FMS is a flexible monitoring software, capable of monitoring devices, infrastructures, applications, services and business processes.

Of course, one of the things that Pandora FMS can monitor are the hard disks of your computers.

Vagrant File: Working with virtual IDE’s

An Integrated Development Environment is like the personal office of every software programmer, because we have all the components in order to focus on the task. Today everything is oriented towards web applications and in a previous article we mentioned how large companies have taken advantage to offer such services quickly, in what have become known as “Architecture without server”, euphemistically. For these cases we tell you that a Vagrant File could be developed to simulate this environment without a server to perform tests, saving time and money before hiring these services and creating our web application.

In this article we will show you how the field of programming has evolved, always with concise narratives and additional links.

In the 20th century…

Computers were expensive, even more than today; so many of us didn’t have computers at home. Those were simpler times, and mobile phones were only used by our bosses, so when we left the office we were really disconnected and could get by without Internet. But when we turned on our computer to program we had already placed all the variables -and programs- necessary to begin our work. We had to have the whole programming environment set up and ready.

In those days, going to the office physically was common, but now, it’s not.

In this 21st century

Now programmers can work remotely and for several clients or companies from anywhere, but such flexibility brings the dreaded thing of “it works on my machine”, but not on that of other developers who work with us. Virtual machines have solved, in part, this problem and even its complexity has increased exponentially with the networks defined by software.

As we said, each application is unique and its components can become very unique or specific. All of the above may not fully meet our needs, but it is not yet time to say goodbye to our personal computers, at least not in our profession.

Vagrant File

vagrant file logo

Continuous Software Release and Continuous Integration have taken the demands much further to meet deadlines and goals: we must copy from the repositories the algorithms we are working on, to make very specific modifications and then return them to the common cause. Whether we are in America or Europe we must always be ready for any work, and this is where the Vagrant File comes in.

A Vagrant File describes both an operating system and the provisioning and also configuration of a development environment. For the programmers it is a complete and rather tedious work: it takes away our energy to program. With a Vagrant File created and adapted by all the members of the team, not only will we have a development environment, we will also have an environment identical to the one used in production, a task that we will do in a single opportunity in the device where we usually work.

Installing Vagrant

To install any Vagrant File we will first need to have VirtualBox installed, and in our case we use Debian/Ubuntu. Once we have installed this hypervisor we can proceed to install Vagrant. In a GNU/Linux environment it is common to use apt-get install vagrant or for CentOS and related yum install vagrant, but if you have a problem it is better to download the installation packages directly from the official site rather than the default repositories of your operating system. At the time of writing this post the supported platforms are as follows:

• Linux (64 bits, package in AppImage format, which is very appreciated by Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, who explains how it works)
• Debian (32-bit and 64-bit, package in .deb format)
• Microsoft Windows® (32-bit and 64-bit)
• CentOS® (32-bit and 64-bit, .rpm package)
• macOS® (32-bit and 64-bit, .dmg package)
• ArchLinux (64 bits, package in .tar.xz format)

First steps

The first thing we run is the vagrant -v command in a terminal window, to see which version we have installed (2.1.2, to date). Then we will be able to choose the operating system we are going to use; in Pandora FMS the selected one is CentOS 7, so we will create in our user documents a folder called vagrant-home:

# mkdir ~/vagrant-home 
# cd ~/vagrant-home 
# vagrant init centos/7

This is where we need to be patient: we proceed to download an image of the desired provider, in this case a Content Delivery Network (CDN) from vagrantcloud.com:

“vagrant init centos/7” and “vagrant up”

It is fair to say at this time that many companies have collaborated by publishing each by their own means an image file for different hypervisors. In the case of CentOS we have for Microsoft Hyper-V®, Libvirt, VMWare Fusion® and, of course, for VirtualBox.

Vagrant images supported by CentOS for different hypervisors

Do we need a Percona database? We can search VagrantUp for a Vagrant Archive that suits our needs, or we can create our own Vagrant Archives and share them!

Finally using a Vagrant File

Now we will do all our work of server configuration management with a Vagrant File and we will start by reviewing the one we just created… When? Well, when we issued the vagrant up order in our vagrant-home folder:

The famous Vagrant File, file in plain text

All the lines are commented, except the one that describes the virtual machine; there we can quickly change anything we need (IP address, listening ports to connect via SSH, etc.). For now we’ll use the vagrant halt order to shut down our machine.

The “mantra” of Vagrant

The idea is, by means of a Vagrant File that we get to download a virtual machine and, in addition, with additional instructions to carry out the provisioning and configuration of a development environment (or of production). This way we will have our own machine, we will turn on and off, and if at a certain moment we want to restart and start again we will use vagrant destroy.

Remember to save OUTSIDE the virtual machine all your work, or if you use Git apply the command git push; in Pandora FMS we use GitHub to store the source code since 2014.

Working with Vagrant

How do we connect to our Vagrant File (as we saw, this file is the core of the matter)? Because always located in our folder to that effect created, we introduce vagrant ssh and we will be connected to begin our work.

Do we want to connect in a “normal” way, as we have always done? The only change human beings like is the diaper change; if we want to connect with the command, ssh, first we must run vagrant ssh-config to know the configuration we will use.

“vagrant ssh” and “vagrant ssh-config”

Monitoring Vagrant

From the SSH connection we can add the parameter “-o LogLevel=VERBOSE” to know what happens with our connection (by default it is configured to “FATAL”, the other possible values are QUIET, FATAL, ERROR, INFO, VERBOSE, DEBUG, DEBUG1, DEBUG2 and DEBUG3). Also for logs, if we use VirtualBox, they are located at
“~/VirtualBox VMs/vagrant-nombre_de_nuestra_carpeta_default_XXX/Logs/VBox.log” in a very particular format… But before going deeper into that, we tell you that it is just the tip of the iceberg, because it only shows us the record of SSH connections and perhaps we should aim higher.

To keep track of the boot of our virtual machines we must use the parameter “–debug”to be able to get all the details of each boot and shutdown:

Result of the command “vagrant up –debug”

Note: always “VBox.log” will contain the last record, the previous ones will be listed and kept and if we want to monitor we must automate so that it always reads the record after a “vagrant halt” or “vagrant destroy”. The other possible values are: info, warn and error. If we want to save absolutely all the startup record we must send all the output to a file in the same folder where we run: “vagrant up –debug &> nuestro_registro.log” (the debug parameter has two dashes as prefix).

Any information we send you to register may contain personal information and/or sensitive data of the device where you are running Vagrant. Be careful.

Using Pandora FMS as a monitoring tool

We saw that Vagrant has a very particular way of keeping records. Therefore, the default option we have to monitor with Pandora FMS is like any other device, either installing a Software Agent or performing a Remote Monitoring, having the foresight to provide an IP address to the Vagrant virtual machine to communicate with the Pandora FMS server, central or satellite.

A few steps beyond

Once we have experienced working with third party Vagrant Files, it will be time to create our own well-customized virtual machines to share with our colleagues. To do this, we must use Packer, a tool specially designed for such tasks.

When we are very experienced we can even review the logs without having to connect via SSH through a very elaborate artifice called codeyourinfra, which consists of an Apache web server with Jenkins, which will allow us reading access.

Don’t hesitate to contact us in Pandora FMS to start working in your company or office. We have years of experience and a well-qualified team at an international level.