Category: Open Source Software
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AWS Route 53 DNS Migration Adventure
I recently worked with a client to transfer authoritative control of one of their domains to AWS Route 53 and it was a minor adventure. It was trivial to setup the hosted zone in Route 53 and import the zone file, although not all records were created properly. In particular, the MX records that were…
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EC2 Instance Recovery
Amazon has released a feature to EC2 that will allow you to setup a CloudWatch alarm to monitor your EC2 instance and auto recover it if there is a hardware issue. One of the best features is that it will retain the same instance ID, IP address, and instance metadata! Read about it here. While…
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Tuning EC2 Network Stack
I recently had an issue with web requests taking 1.2-1.5 seconds from a service hosted in AWS. I had a small SSD-backed EC2 instance with a small SSD-backed RDS instance running a wordpress site and this type of performance was not acceptable. After a bit of troubleshooting I discovered that the network was suffering from…
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Puppet node inheritance deprecation
Puppet 4.0 will deprecate node inheritance which is currently a common way to organize resources. I have been using node inheritance to group common configurations into a basic role and then inherit that with a node declaration like the following: # site.pp … node webserver { # add all generic web server configuration here }…
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GnuGK with Polycom RealPresence Desktop
I recently setup a GnuGK Gatekeeper to facilitate H.323 Video Conferencing registration outside a client network to allow remote personel to register and make calls into and out of the company network. This setup makes it very easy for clients to register and initiate or receive calls from nearly anywhere, as long as H.460.18 is…
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Book Review: Puppet Reporting and Monitoring
I just finished reading “Puppet Reporting and Monitoring” and I gained quite a bit from reading this book and will change the way that I work with Puppet to use techniques that I’ve learned here. I have traditionally used Puppet and other configuration management tools as a simple configuration tool and haven’t expected much back…
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Puppet Reporting and Monitoring
I received a new book from Packt Pubishing: Puppet Reporting and Monitoring. It’s a good read so far and I will be posting a review soon.
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Packt Publishing 2000th Title Campaign
I’m a big fan of Packt Publishing and the work they do to provide quality ebooks to folks. Check out Packt’s amazing Buy One, Get One Free offer http://bit.ly/1j26nPN.
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MySQL 5.6 Transportable Tablespaces
Transportable tablespaces in mysql 5.6 are an amazing feature allows InnoDB tables to be exported from one database and imported into another. This allowed me to recently consolidate 4 large but lightly used databases onto one server with little down time by exporting, copying to a new server, and importing. In versions prior to 5.6…
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git branching strategy – what’s yours?
When it comes to deploying code to various environments, the ideal scenario would be to continuously deliver a specific branch to production, after delivering to dev/test/staging with unit tests to validate the code on the way. The other end of the spectrum is to manually deploy and test to each environment. All clients I work…