Managing Cloud Services like AWS

Have been a avid user of RightScale Developer service for managing the Amazon AWS services painlessly. Overall have been fairly satisfied with the facility provided.

Recently, started to look out for other options just to manage my risks. Here is what I came up with. I wil not go into the pricing which I will allow others to follow-up on their own as it is largely governed by what one's skills and capabilities are and how much of hand-holding is required.

Scalr - Offers a Open Source installation to manage your own, besides the SaaS model which has a developer version which is free. The added sweet-spot is that I would it supports Spot Instances.

Cloudkick - Seems to be able to manage EC2, Rackspace besides others. Another interesting thing whcih I found there was a python library libcloud which can be considered as another option in its own right except that it is library meaning useful for the developers to build upon. Hence a good option again to look at except that it is in Python, of which I know close to nothing. But maybe ...

Then there is Cloud42, which is totally unknown to me.

Of course then there is Amazon EC2 AWS Management Console and the ElasticFox extension to Firefox.

With this added set of inputs, here are some of the factors whcih came to my mind when evaluating these options.

1. How the server is setup. In teh case of RightScale there is ServerTemplate on which a server can be built from the base AMI. This allows seamless flexibility in setting the new instance type without investing in custom AMIs of your own.
2. Availability of open source tools allow these to be tinkered to one's own satisfaction as well as incorporate these in your own home-bred solution.
3. It would be good to have a feature for an instance to be started outside a service to be visible within the dashboard view of the service. To explain this better, I created a Amazon instance directly using teh AWS Management Console, but was not able to see this within the Rightscale dashboard.

Oh by the way found this really cool-looking app for Decaf, but unfortunately was not able to get it on the ADP.  May has something to do with the paid apps handling in ADP Market. Will need to check further.


By the way after much searching I think the search term which got me best result in Google Search was the  - "ec2 management"

It would be good to know what others feel about these options. Are there other options in the market. Do add those in the comments section.

MySQL Sandbox Utility

Its surprising how sometime the solution stares back at you when you run into something.
Just found a neat little utility called MySQL Sandbox, for creating a side installation for MySQL, just for testing.

Need to test it out.

Mac sites to monitor

Here are some of the sites which you may want to frequent if you are a Mac user –

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/
http://www.mactricksandtips.com/
http://www.macupdate.com/
http://www.macrumors.com/
http://www.pure-mac.com
http://www.macports.org/

This is just a starting point, I will add more to these, alongwith some of the utilities which I find must haves on MacOSX

Using public-private key with ssh / scp

To avoid using the password for ssh and scp, public-private key can be setup.

The steps for same are as follows-
a public private key combination. Either use the following to create a fresh pair -
ssh-keygen -t rsa
or use the following to create a public key from existing private key
ssh-keygen -e > public_key.pub

Add the public key to the remote computer in the file - ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
The syntax should mirror -
from="*.example.org" ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1…

The above should be in single line. Beware there might be other keys in the file.
Ensure that authorized_keys has access permissions set as -  600

Test that this works by calling -
ssh -o PreferredAuthentications=publickey server.example.org

For more details refer the link.

Create Audio files from PDF on MacOSX

Just for the heck of it, I thought it would be cool to create audio files from the pdf files to listen to while driving. Since I am on the MacOSX Leopard, I wanted to have a solution there. Here is what I have gathered so far –

• Convert the PDF file to text, using tools at hand. I have not tested this out on MacOSX yet, but there are hint son internet about being able to do this through Automator scripts. ( You may want to look at - http://www.mactricksandtips.com/2008/12/extracting-text-from-pdf-files.html ). This is also helpful since while trying to read in Preview, it only reads out the current page or selection.

• Use the new Alex voice on Leopard to readout the file and write it in aiff format. The syntax is something like –

say –v Alex –f input_txt_file –o output_audio_file.aiff
From my understanding specifying the –v Alex option is not required as it is taken by default.
Once the output file is written, it can be directly listened through the iTunes.

• Alternatively it could be converted to mp3 using the “lame” utility (available through macports on Leopard). [I need to test this out yet].There are speech commands to control the amount of pauses etc. the details for these are available at – http://developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/Sound/Sound-200.html

The source positing on which most of this information is based can be found at : http://www.leopardtricks.com/leopard/alex-speech-tricks

GTD Tools

I have tried quite a few GTD systems. The once which I like are -

1. MonkeyGTD for the ease of use, although Accessibility will be issue.
2. "Remember the Milk". Besides the weird name it is quite a good system, and the system is quite user friendly, providing many access points. There is no inherent concept of "Projects" although there are workarounds.

My customizations to MonkeyGTD

First, add another section to "Next & Waiting (Single Col)", for Waiting organized by people

<

group:Contact

gView:bold

newButtonTags:'Action [(Waiting For)]'

where:tiddler.hasActiveProject()

>>

Second one is to stop the flashing Ticklers

- Click More/TW/Tags/systemConfig
- Click the triangle down arrow and select MgtdList
- Click 'edit' to edit
- Find this line:

var blinker = createTiddlyElement(place,'blink');

- Change it to this:

var blinker = createTiddlyElement(place,'span');

- Click 'done'

Implement logrotate on Linux

Create files in

/etc/logrotate.d

/var/log/app_name/*log {

missingok    notifempty    nocompress    sharedscripts    postrotate        /bin/kill -HUP `cat /var/run/syslogd.pid 2> /dev/null` 2> /dev/null || true    endscript}EOF

Need to check on -

1. 
   
   

   What else is needed in this regard, or is this self sufficient. 

   
   
   

Using own domain with Google services (blogger)

Need to add the CNAME entry, using the tips as given on the atached page.


Create 'A' NAME records for your naked domain (blog.com)

Creating A records for your naked domain is important as it allows Google to redirect people who use in your naked domain name (blog.com) to your blog page (www.example.com). If you do not do this, visitors who leave off the www will see an error page.
in reference to:

"Click Manage below the Hosting Account section.
On the left side, click the domain you'd like to use with your blog.
Next to DNS Configuration, click EDIT.
Click Add DNS CNAME Record.
Under Name, enter only the subdomain you want to use. For example, if you picked www.mydomain.com as your blog's address, just enter www as the entry under Name.
Enter ghs.google.com under Data.
Click Submit."
- How do I create a CNAME record for my custom domain? - Blogger Help (view on Google Sidewiki)