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 [...]

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 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 [...]

This morning, Hyperic’s CEO,  Javier Soltero, did a presentation on their new website called http://cloudstatus.com. They do performance and availability monitoring of Amazon Web Services. It’s a little more in-depth than the existing AWS Status page. The site actually tracks metrics instead of outages, so you can see the performance of the different services [...]

I used to rename my EC2 instances. That is, I would manually set the HOSTNAME variable in /etc/sysconfig/network. I usually didn’t have that many running, maybe two or three. Not everything was automated, so it was definitely helpful to see my hostname in the bash prompt instead of Amazon’s. Amazon’s hostname is based on the [...]

Part of the application I’m working on right now can take advantage of grid (as in chunking up jobs and distributing them to work nodes). I’ve spent my day getting EC2 and Sun Grid Engine to work together. It was a long and hard battle, but I prevailed.
The crux of the problem is DNS. Out [...]

It looks like Amazon is responding to AppEngine with fire and motion. There were two more announcements this morning that I think are big:

Premium Support for the Web Services. I’m not currently in the market for support (we’re not live at this point and I haven’t run into any problems the forums or google couldn’t solve), but [...]

I’ve been thinking about what AppEngine is. I’ve read some of the docs and watched some of the youtube videos. I agree with Don MacAskill’s impressions. Google has taken a very laser-focused approach.
Valleywag thinks that if Youtube was built on AppEngine, it would have been easier to integrate into the Google family. The problem is that you can’t build [...]

I was very happy when I opened my email this morning. Amazon has announced Elastic IPs and Availability Zones. It’s time to update your EC2 tools!
The Elastic IP implementation looks good. There must be some smart engineers working at Amazon. I haven’t played with it yet, but I have some ideas on how to use it.
My first thought [...]