CREATING AWS CLOUDWATCH ALARMS USING BOTO
In this post I’ll walk through the process of setting up cloudwatch alarms programatically in Python through Boto. We’ll be setting up a single alarm for a metric StatusCheckFailed, but you can configure other alarms as well. Check the AWS alarms console for the full list. This post assumes you already have an instance, instance_id, AWS, and your boto config set up. Also assumed is...
I'VE MOVED TO PELICAN
As of Sunday, August 25, rustyrazorblade is now powered by pelican. So far, no complaints. It was easy to get started. Installed through pip into a virtualenv and up and running in just a few minutes. It was a significantly better experience than my attempt at using octopress, which mixed theming, code, and my content all into one mess of a projct. The new blog is just a folder of content...
ADVANCED DEVOPS WITH VAGRANT AND LXC
This post was originally published on the SHIFT developer blog. Creating and testing new databases that require clustering can be a pain point when trying to do everything on a local machine. Simulating failures or network failures can be difficult or impossible if everything you’re testing is running on the same machine. To better simulate your production environment you can try using LXC...
CASSANDRA, CQL3, AND TIME SERIES DATA WITH TIMEUUID
Cassandra is a BigTable inspired database created at Facebook. It was open sourced several years ago and is now an Apache project. In cassandra, a row can be very wide and is identified by a key. Think of it as more like a giant array. The data is stored on disk sorted by the key you pick, meaning if you pick the right sort option and key you can have some really fast queries. Here we’ll go...
SETTING UP RAID0 IN UBUNTU 12.04 IN AWS HIGH I/O
Amazon announced high I/O instances today. This is huge for anyone with a database larger than available memory, as it’s been a complete nightmare dealing with EBS up till now. Now your Cassandra, MongoDB, MySQL, or whatever your using should be able to perform well without requiring keeping your entire dataset in memory. With each instance you get 2x1TB of disk. In this tutorial I’ll...
VIM: USE !MAKE: TO AVOID AUTO JUMPING TO FILES
I get annoyed when vim jumps to another file when using :make. To disable it, just add ! to the end, :make!
WEIRD DISUTILS ERROR WHEN RUNNING PYTHON SCRIPTS WITHIN MACVIM
I saw this today when trying to run a nosetest in MacVim: DistutilsPlatformError: $MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET mismatch: now "10.4" but "10.7" during configure Add this to your .vimrc to fix this weird message. let $MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET = "10.7"
INSTALLING VIM-IPYTHON WITH MACVIM
I got really excited at the notion of having IPython built into MacVim (vim-ipython), so over the last few days I’ve spent some time mucking around trying to get this whole thing to work. Unfortunately there’s not a lot of documentation on how to fix the issues that might pop up, so hopefully this will help some people. (spoiler - MacVim download is 32 bit zeromq is 64) First, your...
APPLESCRIPTING A REMOTE X-WINDOWS SESSION FOR VIRT-MANAGER
This isn’t just for virt-manager, but any X-Windows app you’d want to tightly integrate into your daily routine. Instead of firing up X11, then SSH’ing to your VM box and typing out virt-manager (insane!) you can script X11 to do everything with 1 mouse click. I have it in my Dock, and Launchbar also recognizes it as an app. tell application "Finder" launch application...
DRIZZLE DIFFERENCES FROM MYSQL
I decided to take a look at Drizzle today and was encouraged by what I saw. Here’s my favorite part: There is no UNSIGNED (as per the standard). * There are no spatial data types GEOMETRY, POINT, LINESTRING & POLYGON (go use Postgres). * No YEAR field type. * There are no FULLTEXT indexes for the MyISAM storage engine (the only engine FULLTEXT was supported in). Look at either Lucene,...