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Tag Archives: amazon
How can I recover a crashed Rackspace Cloud Server?
I’m now starting to use Rackspace after a having a lot of experience with Amazon AWS and so I’m having a hard time understanding a few things about the way Rackspace works. One of these things is “Disaster Recovery” for a Rackspace “Cloud Server’s” primary drive primary drive. There is a lot of server terminology with Rackspace so for clarification I’m talking about the ones in the Cloud Servers control panel that are in this tab: So my point of confusion is this: If I screw up something big on AWS, like the /etc/fstab file and the server won’t boot, I can use the AWS control panel to get the console log: If I need to edit things on the primary drive I can “detatch” it from the instance and attach it to another server, and then access the files on it. I searched the Rackspace knowledge base and also read the Disaster Recovery blog post which mentions three ways of doing disaster recovery with Rackspace: Take regular snapshots and restore the instance from one of those Do manual file system and database backups to have a copy of your data NOT on the primary drive Replication with Manual Failover (seems like overkill) I also saw that it is possible to boot the server into “recovery mode” but I haven’t tried it yet. The way I’m planning on running my rackspace server is attaching another drive (aka Storage Volume) and putting all the application data on that. I am also … Continue reading
Amazon Coins
Today Amazon has announced Amazon Coins which can be used to purchase games and apps in the online web store. Here is an image of one fo the Amazon Coins: Amazon says that their selection is growing exponentially and has increased by 25% in the last three months.
Does Amazon ec2 have “Get System Log” for the command line (CLI) API?
Yes! I didn’t realize this at first. I was searching for API tool for getting system log and ec2 command line system log and I even looked at all the ec2 command looking for the word log – but there is a trick. If you want to be able to grab the data that you grab via the web interface at console.aws.amazon.com: I hope this answer the following questions: ec2 “get system log” command line ec2 “get system log” command line ec2 cli system log ec2 get system log amazon ec2 api get system log amazon ec2 system tools Then you need to use the following ec2 command: ec2-get-console-output SYNOPSIS ec2gcons ([ec2-get-console-output]) ec2gcons [GENERAL OPTIONS] [-r] INSTANCE GENERAL NOTES Any command option/parameter may be passed a value of ‘-’ to indicate that values for that option should be read from stdin. DESCRIPTION Display the instance’s console output. The INSTANCE parameter is the ID of the instance’s console to retrieve. SPECIFIC OPTIONS -r, –raw-console-output Raw output. Do not escape the console output. If not specified ^ESC is escaped and multiple blank-lines are folded into one.
chef knife setup
For more info you can visit the knife configuration page on opscode % knife –help Usage: knife sub-command (options) -s, –server-url URL Chef Server URL -k, –key KEY API Client Key –[no-]color Use colored output, defaults to enabled -c, –config CONFIG The configuration file to use –defaults Accept default values for all questions -d, –disable-editing Do not open EDITOR, just accept the data as is -e, –editor EDITOR Set the editor to use for interactive commands -E, –environment ENVIRONMENT Set the Chef environment -F, –format FORMAT Which format to use for output -u, –user USER API Client Username –print-after Show the data after a destructive operation -V, –verbose More verbose output. Use twice for max verbosity -v, –version Show chef version -y, –yes Say yes to all prompts for confirmation -h, –help Show this message
How to use HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) with Amazon CloudFront
I have a mp4/h.264 video that is a around 300mb. I would like users to be able to watch it on both desktop browsers and mobile devices. I have the video file stored on Amazon S3. I have two cloudfront sources enabled – one for download and one for streaming. I know I can use something like VideoJS to play the file with the ‘video/mp4′ source being the “download” cloudfront source which, I believe, plays while the file is being downloaded – I think this is called “progressive download” but it is not true streaming. I also realize that I can use something like JWPlayer and the “streaming” cloudfront source to give users on a desktop device, or a device that supports flash, the RTMP streaming experience. The problem I’m facing is poor performance on iOS devices – especially ones with limited bandwidth. From what I’ve been reading HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) seems to be the only “streaming” protocol that iOS devices really support. And as far as I can tell, Amazon Cloudfront only natively offers RTMP streaming of uploaded mpeg/h.264 files (not HLS). Amazon has a Live Smooth Streaming tutorial for use with Amazon CloudFront which appears to be, in a nutshell, a Windows IIS server running Adobe Flash Media Server and pushing out the HLS stream via Amazon Cloudfront. So, my questions were: If I want to push H.264/mpeg4 files “streaming” to iOS devices or HTML5 players, is the “right” way to do this to use HLS? Can … Continue reading
Amazon Projected Billing
Amazon recently announced that they are enabling “detailled billing reports” – which is a great way to keep an eye on your AWS usage and costs. One of the wonderful things they are have enabled is a fine-tuned billing and even some projected billing. To set this up, log in to your Amazon Web Services Console and visit the Billing / Usage Details for your account. Click on Billing (near the bottom left) and then ‘sign up’ for the detailled billing and the programmatic billing. The reports will be saved to one of your S3 buckets – a few times per hour. Dear AWS customer, We are excited to announce Detailed Billing Reports, a new hourly grain view of your AWS usage and charges. This detailed report enables you to better understand your AWS Bill by providing hourly usage and cost data by product and Availability Zone. In addition, consolidated billing customers can now view unblended rates and cost. This report is particularly useful for analyzing your usage of Amazon EC2 On-demand and Reserved Instances. To get started, visit the Billing Preferences page to sign up for Detailed Billing Reports. You will also need to sign-up for Programmatic Access, as reports are only published to your Amazon S3 bucket. AWS generates new reports based on your estimated bill multiple times per day and a final report for month end. To learn more about Detailed Billing Reports, please visit About AWS Account Billing. Sincerely, The Amazon Web Services Team
AWS Newsletter – December 2012
AWS NewsletterDecember 2012 Introducing Amazon RedshiftSign up for an invitation to the limited preview of Amazon Redshift, a fast and powerful, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. Redshift offers you fast query performance when analyzing virtually any size data set using the same SQL-based tools and business intelligence applications you use today. It is certified by Jaspersoft and MicroStrategy, with additional business intelligence tools coming soon.
Uncaught exception ‘CFCredentials_Exception’ with message ‘No credentials were provided. [solved]
![Uncaught exception 'CFCredentials_Exception' with message 'No credentials were provided. [solved]](http://techblog.willshouse.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/uncaught-exception-cfcredentials_exception-with-message-no-credentials-were-provided-solved.jpg "Uncaught exception 'CFCredentials_Exception' with message 'No credentials were provided. [solved]")
If you’re using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) SDK (Software Developer Kit) version 1.5 “Allegro” for PHP you may have noticed an error like: Fatal error: Uncaught exception ‘CFCredentials_Exception’ with message ‘No credentials were provided. The SDK attempts to retrieve Instance Profile credentials from the EC2 Instance Metadata Service, but doing this requires the “default_cache_config” option to be set in the config.inc.php file or constructor. In order to cache the retrieved credentials.’ in #0 amazon-php-sdk/sdk-1.5.17.1/sdk.class.php:439 Stack trace: amazon-php-sdk/sdk-1.5.17.1/services/ec2.class.php(155): CFRuntime->__construct(Array) #1 amazon-php-sdk/sdk-1.5.17.1/_samples/cli-ec2_sorting_and_filtering.php(59): AmazonEC2->__construct() #2 {main} thrown in amazon-php-sdk/sdk-1.5.17.1/sdk.class.php on line 439 My solution was fairly simple – the PHP SDK download has a config-sample.inc.php file that you can copy to config.inc.php and then add your AWS key and secret key. After doing that you should be good to go.
Posted in Server Administration, Software, Tech Tips, Web Development
Tagged amazon, error, php, sdk
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AWS Control Panel Gets a CSS / Design Refresh
Amazon EC2, CloudFront, and all of the other Amazon Web Services have received a CSS / Design refresh after a few years of using the previous design. A few highlights on the new design: Dropdown Selection of all AWS Services This has been available for at least a few months. Amazon was adding so many “tabs” to the previous horizontal layout that they ran out of space. Configurable View Options Much like WordPress’s “Screen Options” Amazon has added some settings for how you view items in the toolbar: Collapsable Sidebar Amazon now gives you the option to collapse the sidebar more easily (previously you could resize it). Toggling it is a more effective way to quickly see more of the columns in the panel on the right. Quick Toggle for the Properties Panel There are now three icons in to quickly toggle sizes in the Properties Panel at the bottom There have been a few other changes to try and make the panel more “responsive” and friendlier for small screen sizes. However, I would still rather use a mobile app to manage EC2 instances on my phone.
Posted in Design, Server Admin, Tech Opinion, Web Development
Tagged amazon, aws, ec2
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Scale On-Demand and Reduce your Backup and File Share Costs with AWS Storage Gateway
Dear Amazon Web Services Customer, Find out more about how you can use the AWS Storage Gateway to reduce the cost of your departmental backup and file share storage by joining our Dec 5, 10am PST webinar. During the webinar, we’ll discuss how you can easily deploy our recently launched Gateway-Cached volumes feature to reliably back up your on-premises data to Amazon S3. We’ll also discuss how you can seamlessly store your corporate file shares on Amazon S3, minimizing the need to scale your storage on-premises, while retaining low-latency access to your frequently accessed files. After the presentation, we will be answering questions from the audience. Register here for the webinar. Time: 10:00-11:00 AM PST Date: Wednesday, December 5, 2012 Sincerely, The AWS Storage Gateway Team
Posted in Marketing, Server Administration, Tech Tips, Web Development
Tagged amazon, ec2
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