Some useful presentations from the AWS 2011 Tech summit in London

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2 years ago
by Chris in ,
email Some useful presentations from the AWS 2011 Tech summit in London

The following two presentations are really useful for people just getting started with hosting websites on the Amazon AWS infrastructure.

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Running databases on AWS

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These presentations were from guest speakers, the take home points for me were that Eagle Genomics have security tested AWS hosting and believe it to be secure enough for the kinds of sensitive data they are dealing with and that Servicetick were able to make good use of the data processing facilities

Eagle Genomics AWS Customer Presentation

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Servicetick - AWS Customer Presentation

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Overview of Security Processes for Amazon AWS

1
2 years ago
by Chris in
email Overview of Security Processes for Amazon AWS

When trying to evaluate the security of AWS over the last few years this document would have been REALLY useful.

It's a couple of years old now and there may well be a more up to date version out there, but I've just stumbled up on it so I thought I'd repost it here for anyone else who needs a reference/is looking into AWS structure and security for their applications.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/aws_blog/AWS_Security_Whitepaper_2008_09.pdf





Where is that library?

0
2 years ago
by Chris in , ,
email Where is that library?

Recently I had to compile some software designed for 32 OS’s but which would work perfectly well on 64 OS’s if re-pointed at the correct libraries on a 64-bit system.

I set the paths to the libs I knew about but, post build, the software was failing to run correctly even though I followed the installation instructions to the letter.

Thankfully I had strace installed on my system and by using a single simple command I was able to get a trace of the program’s activity across the system and find out what it was missing where.

A symlink later and everything was fixed!

The moral of this story: If you’re compiling 3rdparty software and it doesn’t work out of the box, why not use strace to debug the running application and save a lot of future headaches!





Soocial – Contact Sync

0
2 years ago
by Chris in
email Soocial Contact Sync

So lets say you have a load of contacts on old mobile phones, in Google, Facebook, Outlook, on PDA and other devices, and you wanted one central tool to synchronise them all and provide a decent interface for de-duping and/or merging the common entries?

Well if that sounds like you, give Soocial (www.soocial.com) a try. I first used it about a year ago and although I'm now heavily using Google Apps and my Android phone for day to day work, it's a great starting place for you to manage your contact list effectively.

How to mount an Amazon EBS disk as a drive in Linux (CentOS)

8
2 years ago
by Chris in , ,
email How to mount an Amazon EBS disk as a drive in Linux (CentOS)

These instructions on how to mount an Amazon EBS volume apply to CentOS Linux specifically but with little modification can be applied to all Linux distributions. By attaching EBS volumes (aka. disks) to your instance you can get around the majority file space issues that might encounter when hosting popular websites or those which contain a lot of data (e.g. image galleries, music sites, podcasts, etc.)

  1. Note down the instance id of the instance you want to add more storage to
  2. In your AWS account go to the volumes link (under Elastic Block Store) click the Create Volume Button and choose how big you want this device to be.
  3. Attach the new EBS volume to your instance by right clicking it and choosing Attach Volume. Select the instance id from the list that you noted down in step 1. and give the new device a name to reference it on the instance, e.g. /dev/sdf
  4. Login into your instance on the command line and do and run (# represents the command prompt):
    # ls /dev
    You should see that /dev/sdf has been created for you
  5. Format /dev/sdf by running:
    # mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdf
    It will warn you that this an entire device. You should type y to allow the process to continue unless you want to create specific partitions on this device
  6. Create a directory to mount your new drive as on the filesystem, for example we’ll use /files:
    # mkdir /files
  7. Add a reference in the fstab file to mount the newly formatted drive onto the /files directory by running the following command:
    #  echo "/dev/sdb /files ext3 noatime 0 0" >> /etc/fstab
  8. Mount the drive by running:
    # mount /files
  9. Check your drive has mounted correctly with the expected amount of file space by running:
    # df -h /files

It really is that simple, within a few cli commands you can simply add 1GB to 1TB of storage at the drop of a hat!

Questions? Leave me a comment and I’ll do my best to answer them for you icon smile How to mount an Amazon EBS disk as a drive in Linux (CentOS)

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