This article shows you how to install a gem (a ruby package) that provides access to Amazon APIs for EC2, ELB, and RDS. But along the way it also provides important information on the entire Rubygems environment. This information is critical for anyone who is tasked with maintaining a working Ruby environment.

Yesterday I posted an entry about using Ruby to access the Amazon EC2 API and I mentioned a gem that provided the classes needed to make such access easy. Gem is the package system for ruby, and fills a role similar to one that CPAN provides for perl. The Amazon gem is called amazon-ec2 and it is written and supported by Glenn Rempe.

I've been recently extolling the virtues of Ruby on the Lopsa IRC channel so I thought it would be fun to take a real world problem and write a Ruby-based solution. This particular problem has to do with manipulating snapshots in Amazon's EC2. Those who administer EC2 instances know (or should know) that the storage associated with an instance does not outlast the instance. If you want persistent storage you have to create a volume of elastic block store. Not only will it outlast the instance, it can be moved between them and it can be backed up into something called a snapshot.

On most of our instances we have a cron job that creates a snapshot of

Recently I was building a ZenPack for Zenoss. The ZenPack included an Event Command which executed a custom script. I wanted to store the custom script in the ZenPack and I didn’t want to do anything other than have proper script dependencies in place for it to work. (Read More)

Just submitted an article on Cfengine 3 to http://sysadvent.blogspot.com/ - I guess it'll be a few days before it's posted.

Download xtrlock source code from the Debian project (I used http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/x/xtrlock/xtrlock_2.0-13.tar.gz)

Follow the instructions in debian/README.Debian:

xmkmf

make

Then, take the first of the two gcc commands that were run by make, and rerun it manually, but add -DSHADOW_PWD to the defines section of the command line (-Dthis -Dthat -DSHADOW_PWD). (I tried to muck around with the 1000+ line Makefile but found it easier to just re-run the gcc commands)

Then re-run the rest of the commands from that previous run of make

make install

chmod u+s /usr/bin/xtrlock (if you want non-root users to use it)

We are migrating from our old mail server to a new one with a completely different internal structure and many new features. I am using imapsync to migrate the data over (slow, but it works well). Before we do the last sync, my boss asked me to figure out a way to run the servers side by side so we could have the early adopters try the new mail server. The kicker is that both servers are set up to serve the same domain and we need to be able to have the early adopters get to their mail from either server.

This solution works for us, but I am not sure if this is the best solution and would love to hear your ideas.

http://blog.sqawasmi.com/index.php/2009/09/28/ping-tip-ctl-backslash/

confirmed on Linux

I was asked recently to find a low cost setup for a small software development company (about 30 people) for their infrastructure that had growth potential. I came up with the following:

- One server running Open-E DSS software SAN/NAS: This holds 12 1TB disks in a raid 10 mirror and shares out the disks via iscsi, smb, and nfs (I am not using the other protocols available such as AFP, FTP...). It is certified for VMware. They use it for home directories and as an iscsi SAN for ESXi.

- Two servers running ESXi software attached via iscsi to the SAN.

along with a UPS, rack, switch, and firewall.

A while back I wrote about using Apache as a dynamic reverse proxy. Anyone who has done even minimal research into web servers knows that Apache is the swiss army knife. It trys to be everything for everyone, and like a swiss army knife may not be as good as a more refined too at least as far as efficiency is concerned.Read the full article Transparent dynamic reverse proxy with nginx at -->