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 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 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 [...]

John Willis has a blog post asking how to handle NMS in the cloud. 
At my current gig, we have one piece of hardware that isn’t in the cloud — that runs our our wiki and our RCS. I chose to put our Zenoss NMS station in the cloud. It was a toss up between running it [...]

I’m trying to do some simple load testing. I have a couple of web servers being “load balanced” with Round Robin DNS. That part is simple and is working fine.
I’m trying to simulate load using JMeter. JMeter has worked great when pointing at a single host so far. I’ve been able to spin up threads [...]

S3 was down for a couple of hours this morning. There is still no post from Amazon about why yet, but they have promised one.
Jesse Robbins from O’Reilly is reporting that EC2 was down as well. I currently have 8 EC2 instances running (including this blog). As far as all my monitoring goes, my EC2’s weren’t down. I’m currently [...]