Managing Tech

Ubuntu has had a great way to automate the building of your Amazon EC2 server through something called ClouldInit. What this allows for is that during the creation of a new instance, you can also pass in a variety of data needed to setup your server & application. Normally what is passed is a script but there are several other options. The script can be created in bash, perl, python or awk. The script normally installed any packages needed by your app, configures the various services, loads any startup data and finally installs your application. By scripting the setup, you are ensured that your server is 100% built the same way each time you create a new server. As of yesterday, CloudInit can be used by those of you more comfortable with Redhat/Centos as Amazon has announced their own CentOS-based linux AMI image that includes CloudInit. So now, there is a standard way to automate the building of your server, no matter what flavour of Linux you use.

Amazon is clearly the right answer for most people’s cloud services. But when you are developing software and just need a small server to do some testing, their smallest instances was about 6 times more expensive than competitive offerings. As a result, a lot of developers also had a rackspace or slicehost account. Now that [...]

In the tech world, once you have something working, you tend stick with it for a long time. I’ve been using Zoneedit to host my various DNS domains for almost 10 years. But today, I’m switching to DnsMadeEasy. This is being driven by Zoneedit’s Dynamic DNS limitations. Specifically, when you update the IP associate with [...]

When you are building a server on a cloud like Amazon’s EC2, its quite typical to create a shell script to automate the process. This saves you time when you need to create a test server or god-forbid, your production server dies. But one of the challenges in creating these scripts is that some packages [...]

One of the hassles of being a geek is that you actually get your hands dirty with technology.  Usually that’s a good thing.  But sometimes it isn’t.  Yesterday at 5am, I started getting SMS messages from our mail server indicating that services were failing.   I had no idea why this was happening. Now if [...]