Posts Tagged ‘cloud computing’

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

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

Using API Tools on Amazon AMIs

I did a fairly deep dive into some new cool things in EC2 this weekend and ran into something that caught me off guard. The default Amazon AMIs come with the EC2 tools pre-loaded and ready to go. Or so I read. But, when trying to run, I was greeted with a nice stack trace:

Unexpected error:
javax.net.ssl.SSLException: java.lang.RuntimeException: Unexpected error: java.security.InvalidAlgorithmParameterException: the trustAnchors parameter must be non-empty
at sun.security.ssl.Alerts.getSSLException(Alerts.java:208)
at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.fatal(SSLSocketImpl.java:1665)
at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.fatal(SSLSocketImpl.java:1628)
at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.handleException(SSLSocketImpl.java:1611)
at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.handleException(SSLSocketImpl.java:1537)
at sun.security.ssl.AppOutputStream.write(AppOutputStream.java:83)
(snipped)

Turns out it doesn’t quite have everything it needs. Even though it’s complaining about trustAnchors and such, all it really needs is a Java Runtime Environment..

yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Dec 13th, 2010

Don’t Trust Your Computer.. Or Anyone Else’s

Last week was a bad week for tech people all over the world. There were outages reported at several major datacenter providers, including the likes of Rackspace, Equinix, and Google. As any good system administrator will tell you, what goes up will come down. Having a contingency plan is critical to any business that relies upon its web services (who doesn’t anymore?). Any person who spends any time working on computer systems knows that you can’t trust them any farther than you can throw them. You have to keep a close eye on them and monitor them closely. Somehow, they always end up surprising you.

Fortunately for me, I wasn’t directly affected by any of these outages. Small as it is, my blog stayed online as it isn’t hosted in any of those datacenters. Unfortunately, I did have a bit of an issue last week and it went on for some time without being caught. I’m not sure that my issues were related to any of these major outages, but one of the plugins I’m using makes a call to an external system that had some problems. I’m not going to point out which it was since it could have happened to any of them, but the lesson that I learned is worth mentioning.

What Happened
I use a plugin that pulls data off another system. That system was down which caused page load times to skyrocket. During the day I was checking my AdSense account noticing that pageviews were quite low, but didn’t really have time to look into it. Later that night I saw that pageviews were still really low so I decided to look into it. The WordPress backend of my site was pretty snappy so I went to view the frontend. The page took forever to load. My site is on a shared web server, but I just so happen to be the system administrator at that hosting company so I quick logged into the shell of the web server. Loads were normal with no I/O wait, low CPU usage, and normal memory usage.

After checking loads of my own systems – something that’s already monitored, but I checked anyway – I popped open Firebug and reloaded the page. Bingo. I found the culprit. It was the service I talked about earlier that was slow to respond. I disabled the plugin and the site worked again immediately.

What I Learned
While my site is extremely small and I would not invest much time in this at this point, as you add external services to a site, it’s important to monitor those services as well as your own. Just because you watch that services are alive and responsive on your own web server, the services on others’ web servers are just as important as they can have a detrimental effect on your services as well. Of course, there’s nothing that you can do to control those services outside of SLA’s, but in my case, if I knew about the outage I could have simply disabled the service to minimize the effect on my site. Okay, I know I wasn’t losing millions of dollars or pageviews. I barely lost tens of page views over the whole thing, but as software and web services start relying upon ‘cloud’ services, keeping a close eye on all of those services is key.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jul 7th, 2009

Why Windows Needs ‘the Cloud’ To Fail

Buzzwords and hype aside, the world is moving towards a web-based future. This future inevitably means that our workstations are no longer our “application servers”, but we are starting to shift that responsibility and that management into the data center. It just makes sense. Bandwidth has become drastically more available and we have become increasingly mobile, leaving traditional desktop applications in the dust. This shift in paradigms, however, causes one of two things to happen. Either we a) build plugins into existing desktop applications such as Microsoft Office to accommodate these changes, or b) we stop using desktop applications altogether (or mostly). While “option a” is definitely a viable option, we would really be using a workaround to allow old technologies to work with new techniques for accessing information.

As this shift away from dependence on traditional desktop applications happens, we become increasingly dependent upon browsers. Since a majority of browsers are fairly cross-platform, the dependence upon the platform of the operating system is suddenly stripped away as well. A vast majority of Linux haters’ complaints about Linux revolve around file sharing, permissions, and application compatibility. If we start to depend upon web-based applications, suddenly those issues are no longer issues that the desktop operating system has to handle, thus Linux becomes a much more viable, cheaper option for users. Shares and permissions issues will be handled through their respective web applications. Application dependencies and compatibility will become the responsibility of the server administrators, not the end user. That makes even a $122.99 (from Newegg) price tag on a Windows Vista Upgrade license look pretty steep.

If this paradigm should come to completion (or at least completion for most users), the world’s dependence upon the Windows platform will be no more. We won’t need to have our PCs on a domain with Windows Group Policy. We won’t need to depend upon Windows-only libraries or applications. We even don’t have to depend upon media players (assuming all the web multimedia vendors play fairly).

This, of course, is all hypothetical, but it has to be in the back of the mind of Microsoft executives. Linux and Apple don’t currently control a very large market share, however, they pose a huge threat indirectly through ‘cloud computing’ to the traditional software licensing software used by Microsoft. Red Hat has all but conceded victory to Microsoft in the traditional desktop world where we depend upon desktop-based applications. However, they are working towards meeting Microsoft where the battle is moving.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Mar 26th, 2009

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