Indexing the Cloud

I think from now on I’ll give all my machines names based on buzzwords. It makes for some awesome error / status messages. Today’s message from Spotlight after upgrading to OS X Lion definitely didn’t let me down. I had to share.

The cloud is a big place..

 

As an aside.. be sure to give plenty of time after the upgrade is finished for Spotlight to index things again. While my laptop isn’t unusable, it slows things down quite a bit.

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Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (0) : Sep 17th, 2011 by Wyatt Walter

Enabling Tab Complete for Python Shell on OS X

I have been struggling with an issue for a bit while trying to get tab completion working on the python shell on OS X. I’ve been working on a Django project and not being able to tab complete has been a bit obnoxious. It took a few sessions of searching around to find out what’s going on, so I thought I’d share it in one place. Turns out that the default shell settings are ready to go with tab complete (I spent a lot of time making sure configs were correct), but OS X simply doesn’t ship GNU readline. Instead, Apple just symlinked BSD libedit which is problematic because the default python readline module links to GNU readline.

Someone has already created an egg with readline statically linked just for OS X so the fix is super-easy. Just install the standalone readline module with your favorite python installer. I used:
sudo easy_install readline

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : May 30th, 2011 by Wyatt Walter

SugarCRM Chef Cookbook Published

After delaying cleanup on the code for a week or two, I’ve published my cookbook for deploying SugarCRM CE using Opscode Chef. The cookbook utilizes the community cookbooks from Opscode for deploying the standard LAMP stack on a machine, grabs a copy of the latest stable build of SugarCRM CE from Github, and creates a silent installer file for super-easy installation of SugarCRM.

Some quick notes on setup:

Usage

Usage is super easy, especially with a general knowledge of Chef. I’m not going to dive into setting up Chef, they’ve got some great documentation for that.

You’ll need to pull down the php, apache2, mysql, openssl, and git community cookbooks from Opscode and upload to your organization as well.

Then, you can just download the sugarcrm cookbook and upload to your organization:
knife cookbook site vendor sugarcrm
knife cookbook upload sugarcrm

Then, add the sugarcrm recipe to whatever node or role you desire. For me, I created a role for sugarcrm:
$ knife role show sugarcrmchef_type: role
default_attributes:
description:
env_run_lists:
json_class: Chef::Role
name: sugarcrm
override_attributes:
run_list: recipe[sugarcrm]

You can either bootstrap a new VM / cloud instance or apply the role to an existing machine and do a run of chef-client.

For my example, I created a new EC2 instance based on Ubuntu (can be any OS that the Opscode community cookbooks support):
knife ec2 server create -r 'role[sugarcrm]' --image ami-7000f019 -d ubuntu10.04-apt -S mykey -x ubuntu -i ~/.ssh/mykey.pem

Then, you can navigate to your server’s FQDN/sugarcrm in your browser to complete the install. Not to worry, the cookbook configures a config_si.php (si = silent installer), so no need to know any details about your install.

Once complete, you’ll reach the login page. Default login is admin/admin (which can be overridden with override attributes in the role/node).

That’s it!

Filed under How-Tos / Tips, News : Comments (0) : Apr 30th, 2011 by Wyatt Walter

No Software Repositories in SuSE Enterprise on EC2

For anyone who knows SuSE Enterprise, you can file this one under “what a n00b!” (my SuSE experience in the past has been with openSUSE), but I recently inherited a project that required RHEL or SuSE Enterprise so they chose to deploy SuSE Enterprise on EC2 to reduce acquisition time. (Who would’ve thought a cloud provider like Amazon would be faster to acquire an install of one of these softwares that used more traditional licensing models?) Anyway, I needed to install a few extra pieces of software, but when I ran yast, its list of repositories was empty!? Turns out the fix is really easy, but I couldn’t easily find the answer within a minute or two, so I thought I’d share:

suse_register -a email="myemail@whatan00b.com"

Yup, that was it. No license key required (at least on the EC2 build). Novell just wanted my email address.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Mar 25th, 2011 by Wyatt Walter

Zimbra Upgrade to 7.0

Upgraded my Zimbra system from 6.0.9 (haven’t kept up-to-date with the 6.0.x series) to 7.0 tonight. The upgrade was pretty straightforward (though a couple of weird things happened). Just have to install sqlite3 as an added prerequisite on my platform (Ubuntu 10.04 x64):
apt-get install sqlite3

At the end of the upgrade, it the upgrader complained a bit about finding my license file. I have a valid license, and I just hit enter to go past the message and it wasn’t an issue after that…
Looking for valid license to install...failed to install license.
*******ERROR
Failed to install a license - this will prevent your server from functioning properly
Please contact Zimbra to obtain a license
Press RETURN to continue Activating license...license activated.

One more note. Once again, I lost my MTA and zimbraMailMode settings. :(

I haven’t had time yet to play with the new fanciness, but the geek inside me didn’t allow me to let a major upgrade sit for too long. So far I’m at least digging the new UI.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (2) : Feb 10th, 2011 by Wyatt Walter

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