A virtual computer in Amazon’s EC2 service, called an instance, has an ephemeral existence. They are created as needed but when they are stopped they disappear. This comes as no surprise to those of us who work with virtualization on a regular basis, but it can be a bit of a shock to the administrator…
My report from USENIX 2010 Configuration Management Summit is at http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7841
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. Continue reading
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…
SIGGGRAPH 2010 Trip Report of Cool Things Aleksey Saw in the Exhibition Hall (Coolest stuff at the top.) – FusionIO had the coolest demo!! 1500 DVD-quality videos streaming from a single Fusion IO (RAM-based) 640 GB drive displayed onto a large virtual screen (composed of 16 – that’s 4×4 large displayes). all 1500 videos were…
My results transferring 685 2K frames (11MB per file, 8.1 GB total) using GNU tar to/from LTO4 tape GNU tar Blocking Factor Write LTO4 Read LTO4 1024 2m34s 1m16s 2048 1m24s 1m16s 4096 1m19s 1m34s
Sixth Annual Triangle InfoSeCon Conference – “Call for Papers” Sixth Annual Triangle InfoSeCon Conference – “Call for Papers” > > Members and Fellow ITSec Professionals, > > CALL for PAPERS is now open! See conference webpages > (http://raleigh.issa.org/conference.html). > > Spread the word within your organizations and among your cohort. > > The Raleigh ISSA…
Problem: Sufficiently long regular expressions start to look like line noise and become unmaintainable Solution: Use perl regular expressions with the /x modifier perlre manpage reads: /x Extend your pattern’s legibility by permitting whitespace and comments. These are usually written as “the /x modifier”… The /x modifier itself needs a little more explanation. It tells…
LOPSA-NJ has started a mailing list for the people that run technical user groups (LUGs,sysadmin user groups, SAGE or LOPSA chapters, and so on). The purpose of this mailing list is to encourage information sharing on topics such as: How to promote your group, how to find speakers, how to get started, tips on how…
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)