Chef by Opscode: The Cure for Insanity.

Jul30
2011 1 Comment

Written by tightwork

Generally the practice of server management has been either manually logging into each machine individually and configuring it. The other is crafting cruft scripts for some kind of automation. Neither of these are scalable. Especially scripting that as a whole on the industry is a complete waste of time as scripts are generally written by past admins and specific systems and that is as far as they get. Enter, Chef. A Ruby based platform to manage all your systems. Chef contains the ability to create cookbooks to provision systems. Even more amazing is the knife utility that allows me to interact with all my systems through the Chef server from my workstation. For example say I want to load a rackspace cloud, All I need to do is quickly execute:

knife rackspace server create -r ‘role[apache-webserver]‘ –server-name mywebserver –node-name mywebserver –image 69 –flavor 1

Furthermore not only interacting with many cloud API. Is the ability to create roles which contain many cookbooks. The previous example I launched a cloud onto rackspace with a Apache Webserver role that contains all my preconfigured attributes. Definately give Chef a try to put some sanity back into computing.

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The Browser Wars: An Epic Battle Through Time

May30
2011 1 Comment

Written by tightwork

The year is One Thousand Nine Hundred and Ninety Five, and while The Microsoft Empire controls most of the browser outpost with Explorer. Yet, there is still hope for the Netscape Allies. Unfortunately the allies lost this battle and had to regroup. Around 2000, They brandished themselves as Mozilla and went for the attack implementing tools like Gecko and XUL. While Microsoft was involved with the Counsel of The Courts concerning their Operation of Ways and Means, the system seemed to drive out of control. Once again both teams falling back to only retaliate with Themes, Personas and another name change; Firefox. Really? The industry has long been set on a main frame design where servers take the load. Come 21st century with tons of API and Frameworks and the browser is busting at it’s exception calls. The explosion of what Javascript can do is crazy. This is coupled with the ease and cost of faster hardware for consumers. Companies design systems to offload some of the work now. With all this being said, it seems the two forces have been so wrapped up in their quarrel for so long they forgot what is really going on. What’s that, off in the distance! A strange force of being and matter and… Chrome! There is no doubt from what I’ve seen with V8 and Cappuccino along with the Chrome App store is not so much a new Force but one that has been growing without caution. Knowing this seems to be no action from the warring factions. FF4 is pretty weak from all the hype and wait. No webkit or web sockets hello wtf?! I admit to bias from not using IE anymore, but from what Cappuchino devs tell me IE is pretty broken as usual.

I’ve been at war with myself between FF and Chrome. As always stated, Firefox has a ton of plugins I am dependent on; Vimperator for one. I am also using a Linux desktop and from what I recall neither are capable of hardware rendering.

And the battle goes on.

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Backup To The Cloud

May29
2011 1 Comment

Written by tightwork

I have not had a very good personal backup solution for much too long. Still using CDs or relying on RAID, which isn’t backup. Though even industry players do have this mentality. Of course because of financial and semi-moral reasons I am looking to Open Source solutions. Reflecting onto proprietary solutions such as Continuous Data Protection from R1soft I can make the next claims without too much bias. I have also worked with IBM Netvault which is horrid. The costs of both are crazy. CDP is ~$300 for each system to backup. When actually in production Netvault will cry over in use files or fail to restart because it ran out of file-writers. CDP works, no doubt but but you really are just paying for that pretty GUI.. which pretty much sucks. The greatest annoyance of CDP I can think of right now is if you want to restore a file, there is no search. You have to click through each data set. So this brought me full circle back to my tried and true, defacto. Bacula. Overall once you get a backup system in place, having a super fancy GUI is somewhat asinine since this type of system is set it and forget it, disk notifications by E-Mail. I digress, they are useful for quick results and queries during restoration of files. You’re user base may vary. I’m sure bconsole recover is just as fast too. Bacula has had a standalone application for sometime called ‘Bat’ The Bacula Administration Tool. I never thought of that as a scalable solution, yet I still like the idea of having a desktop app. Do I? That’s kinda 1990′s right? Bacula now has two very promising solutions http://bacula-web.dflc.ch/ http://webacula.sourceforge.net/. Box backup appears to make high claims by actually providing continuous data protection features (realtime backup). Amanda seems to also look like a contender but the GUI looks overzealous and clunky like a CDP wannabe. I definitely will take my Bacula setup though and drop my file volumes onto a s3fs share

I really would like to use a enterprise system for this rather than a cruft script on a cron job. So I have been lurking around here for the scoop on what systems are available. Please comment your solutions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backup_software

Tightwork

Posted in Apps

Chef by Opscode: The Cure for Insanity.

The Browser Wars: An Epic Battle Through Time

Backup To The Cloud

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