According to my LastFM profile↗ I have been listening to the following a lot this month … David Bowie — Nothing Has Changed↗ The Smashing Pumpkins — Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness↗ New Order — Get Ready↗ The War on Drugs — Lost In The Dream↗ Amplifier — The Octopus↗ Flying Colors — Flying Colors↗ Depeche Mode — Songs of Fair and Devotion↗ Suede — Dog Man Star↗ The Stone Roses — Second Coming↗ Led Zeppelin — Led Zeppelin IV↗

I am currently using most of these tools day to day … Desktop Apps SublimeText↗ — Still the best text editor around Dashline↗ — Cross device password manager Desk↗ — Great editor for writting blog posts Photoshop↗ — For ermmmmm Photos OmniGraffle↗ — For diagrams and stuff Reeder 2↗ — For reading all the feeds GitHub Mac Client↗ — The Mac GitHub client Commandline Apps Home Brew↗ — Install “missing” stuff on macs Cask↗ — Install Mac Apps using the command line using Brew StormSSH↗ — Key & hosts management known_hosts↗ — A simple cli known hosts manager Packer↗ — Build machine images Z↗ — Jump around the CLI Vagrant↗ — Run machines built with Packer Services Digital Ocean↗ — Server Hosting AWS↗ — Server Hosting CloudFlare↗ — CDN & Stuff Github↗ — Code Hosting Pinboard↗ — Bookmarks Evernote↗ — Note taking RememberTheMilk↗ — Task management Feedly↗ — For managing all the newsfeeds Pocket↗ — For reading articles later Toggl↗ — Time tracking Authy↗ — A nice Two Factor Authentication tool Plex↗ — An impressive cross device media centre … so not much in the way of changes since I last wrote about the tools I use. ...

I noticed yesterday that my DigitalOcean monthly spend was a little more than I was expecting, turns out I have launched the wrong instance size when I last rebuilt my machine, so to save myself a few dollars a month I migrated the instance to a fresh server with a lower spec. By default DigitalOcean servers do not come with swap↗ enabled, because of this you run the risk of oomkiller↗ killing processes to try and keep the server accessible. Luckily as all DigitalOcean servers are SSD backed and come with a decent amount of disk space so enabling swap isn’t an issue; ...

I wanted to have a quick play with Googles Pagespeed module, as I use NGINX and not Apache I needed to compile NGINX from source to enable the ngx_pagespeed module. The following assumes you are have a clean CentOS 7 installation. First off you need to install the packages which enable you to compile NGINX with ngx_pagespeed from source. NGINX & ngx_pagespeed on CentOS 7 1/8 y u m i n s t a l l - y g c c - c + + p c r e - d e v p c r e - d e v e l z l i b - d e v e l m a k e u n z i p o p e n s s l - d e v e l Now create a NGINX user and make so the user doesn’t have a shell. ...

In my line of work one of the things you learn quickly is that there is no such thing as too many backups. Call me paranoid, but I would rather be spoilt for choice should the worst happen. So what backups do I have in place? Website While this website is nothing more than a place for me to dump my thoughts and various tech ramblings it does generate a small amount of traffic. I hate to think how much time I spent messing about with it over the last year and half, so while it is not the end of the world if it was to disappear it would be hours of work gone. ...

I have watched numerous videos and seen quite a few slide decks which cover tools such as Puppet, Chef & Ansible. I have witnessed an entire rack of servers PXE boot, installing their base operating systems, configuring their services and then finally checking out a copy of a production ready codebase. Even after seeing this several times the old school sysadmin in me still thinks this is witchcraft. In the world of dedicated servers or virtual machines this is great, however when it comes launching an auto-scaling instance in a service such as Amazon Web Services using orchestration tools in real-time could be the difference in your application staying online or failing. ...

As someone who deals with the word “Cloud” as part of their day job it can get very confusing. When a client or colleague says “I want cloud” or “what about hosting it in the cloud” what does it mean? Well, in my line of work it could mean any of the following …. Virtual Machines hosted on a highly available hardware platform Instances hosted in a an auto-scaling available configuration Using Content Delivery Networks (CDN) for content Uploading static content Distributed Object Storage Software as a Service (SaaS) Platform as a Service (PaaS) Thats only a small list of what services which the word “Cloud” is used for. What makes things even more confusing is when I try and explain to friends and family what actually I do their only points of reference for “Cloud” are advertisements like this one from IBM …. ...

All of the posts on orchestration on here have been about Puppet on CentOS however last week I had need to script an AWS architecture and then launch instances built with Packer↗ into it. After much swearing I managed to hack together a python script which used Boto↗ to create a launch configuration and register it with an auto-scaling group, I then used a second script which re-cycled instances behind the Elastic Load Balancer which were launched with the previous launch configuration. ...