This idea hit me this morning. Assuming you have a decent connection at home (not ADSL or Cable that is), Amazon S3 (or Jungle Disk) makes a pretty nice back-bone for a home NAS. It is fairly cheap and you will no longer worry about growing out of your array or failing disks. Yes, I reckon that if you store your data without encryption (even in a private …
To increase the reliability of our backups at WireLoad, we wanted to utilize S3. Obviously we couldn’t just send our backups to S3 without encrypting them, so GnuPG was part of the equation from the beginning. As I started my research, I found a ton guides on how to utilize a variety of backup tools to get your backups delivered to S3. Some of the tools …
Last night we rolled out a new version of Chronicle.IM to the production servers. The product is not quite ready yet, but you can sign up with your email address if you want to be invited to the beta-version. Over the next few weeks we will start letting a few beta-testers in. If everything goes well, we will invite more. So what is Chronicle.IM? The slogan …
Yesterday I posted an article on how to monitor Apache and PostgreSQL with Monit. After setting that up I was amazed how simple and flexible Monit was, so I moved on with two more tasks: monitor Nginx and disk usage. This article assumes that you’ve set up Monit in accordance with the previous article. It also assumes that you’re on Ubuntu 9.10 or 10.04. If …
Monit is a great little utility that monitors your daemons. If a daemon fails, Monit will start the daemon it will automatically restart the process. It comes in very handy if for web-servers, such as Apache. For Red iGone we use Apache as the web-server, and PostgreSQL as the database. I wanted to configure Monit to keep an eye on these processes. As it …
If you are new to SEO, or just want to learn more about SEO, Matt Cutts and a few colleagues did a really good presentation on Google I/O where they went through several websites and reviewd them from an SEO perspective. The whole presentation is about an hour long, but well worth watching.
Last week I published a new version of my ZoneMinder Virtual Appliance. The virtual appliance is great if you want to easily deploy ZoneMinder without having to spend time setting it up. However, in some situations, you want to run ZoneMinder directly on the hardware. Perhaps you need better performance or simply need to capture video streams from …
Last week I launched ZoneMinder VA 0.2. Unfortunately there is an issue with the image that prevents it from loading properly into VMware Server 2. The root of the problem is actually an incompatibility issue between VMware Fusion and VMware Server, but that doesn’t matter. Fortunately the workaround is pretty simple. Delete any vmdk.lck directries Delete …
I just recorded a screencast of Red iGone in action. The video is a bit rough (in particular the audio), but I hope it gets the message across. Enjoy.
In the last few weeks I had to set up a few new Linux servers. Since Ubuntu is my preferred Linux dist in recent years, 10.04 LTS was a natural choice. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is a great Linux distribution, with one exception: Grub. I really mean it. Grub is probably the worst boot loader to date. Is so bad that it could equally well be replaced with the following …
ZoneMinder is a great piece software. It is a very powerful video surveillance tool that can be configured with both IP cameras and regular cameras (via V4L). Unfortunately it is a bit difficult to get up and running with. A while back I needed to deploy ZoneMinder myself for a client. One thing lead to another, and I ended up with a fully working Virtual …
A while back, WireLoad took over the management for the forum Google Community.com. I’ve been a member of the forum for a few years, and seen how it has gone from a lively forum to a spam-infested forum with hardly any active members. As the spam increased, all the serious and senior members went away. I knew that the forum had potential. It used to …