The Cult of Gary

And it was the one my blog was running on.
It was the damnest thing too. I was able to reboot it from the API and look at the console output. As far as I can tell, the network adapter wasn’t able to DHCP an IP address:

Welcome to CentOS release 5 (Final)
Press ‘I’ to enter [...]

EDIT - this post was lost due to a server crash. I’m hoping to put it back in the same spot, but I’m not sure if wordpress will allow me to do that without ugliness.
I mostly like Confluence. I don’t like the {code} blocks. The highlighting and formatting sucks. There’s a limited number of languages [...]

At my current gig, we use Atlassian Bamboo as a Continuous Integration server. It plugs into the rest of our Atlassian tools, which is nice.
It took me a bit to get my perl test cases to work with it, but with the help of TAP::Harness::JUnit, I finally got it to work. It’s really easy too:

Install [...]

Experts Exchange drives me crazy. When I’m trying to solve a problem and I click an Experts Exchange link, I feel like I’ve been duped and I’ll never get those precious seconds back. I’ve been complaining loudly about this to my friends off and on for a while. One of them suggested a solution the [...]

I’ve been playing around with Ganglia for the past couple of days, trying to make it to work with EC2. It was a bit of an adventure. There are two keys for running Ganglia on EC2: use unicast and set send_metadata_interval.
Amazon doesn’t support multicast on their network, so the default configs for Ganglia don’t work. [...]

I’ve been meaning to describe how I handle EC2 and Puppet in an automated way. Part of the problem is getting your host certificates signed.
That question came up on Stack Overflow, so I described my solution there.

It’s been a while since I’ve assessed new load balancers. At my previous gig, we had used LVS successfully for 5 years. It worked great, but was a bit of a configuration nightmare. I think I went through 2 or 3 different frameworks to handle configuration and backend server monitoring.
I’ve just reached the load balancing [...]

I came across something odd today. I’m debugging a service startup on a new EC2 image. When I was looking through log files, I noticed the system was in runlevel 4, not 3.
Apparently this is something that Xen does. I’ve found lots of posts referring to this, but none explaining why. Most people agree run [...]

I started backing up our servers to S3 a few weeks ago. I had been doing weekly tar based backups to my laptop over SSH. Some of the backups are starting to get big, so it was time to move to something else.
My key requirements were to back up to S3 and to use encryption [...]

Good news from the Roger’s website:
Data Usage - Your iPhone will be enabled for data usage. If you subscribe to a plan with no data included, data charges at a pay-per-use rate of 5¢/KB for data sent and/or received over the Rogers network will apply, unless you subscribe to a data plan, which we [...]