Amazon EC2 is the most powerful and customizable cloud based system management tool I’ve used. However nothing is obvious and everything needs to be researched and learned. I should probably start from the beginning, but I won’t, and I’ll start with backups. Lets focus on taking consistent daily snapshots of your data on Amazon and how long we will store them for. Continue reading
In this day and age of 3rd party cloud providers, we find ourselves allocating some of our most important resources to their network. This is a lot of trust! Some providers I trust more than others, depending on size, history, etc. Drop.io was a clear case of trust misused. That specific scenarion left me searching for a replacement service and a clouded ideal. Dropbox and Box.net are two providers that also hold some of our most dear data, all based on trust, money means nothing. What if there was a product that accomplished the same thing, but I owned the hardware, software, etc. Instead of putting this on my server, I’ll use a cloud that has proven my trust, EC2. Now I’ll become my own cloud provider.
How to build your own Dropbox, Box.net esq server using Novell’s iFolder
Step 1. Create an Amazon EC2 Account
Step 2. Go AMI’s, change viewing to All Images, and search for ami-bc57a1d5 You should see 960615132494/russgreenwald-ifolder-server
Step 3. Right Click and choose Launch Instance I use an m1.small, but feel free to use larger. Go through all the keypair creation. Choose a new security group and allow ports 22, 80, and 443 Launch
Step 4. Connect to the server using the keypair you created in step 3. If you go to Instances and right click on your new ifolder server, click connect and it will give you instructions. It should look something like ssh -i sysadmin-keypair.pem root@ec2-174-129-67-179.compute-1.amazonaws.com
Step 5. sudo -s to become root
Step 6. run “dpkg-reconfigure simias-server”
When it asks for your domain name, either enter the ec2-174-129-67-179.compute-1.amazonaws.com that relates to your server, or enter a FQDN i.e. ifolder.russgreenwald.com. If you do the later you will have to setup an elastic IP, associate it with your server, and configure an A record to that IP.
Time to Connect http://ifolder.domainname.com or http://ec2-174-129-67-179.compute-1.amazonaws.com /admin for the admin interface /ifolder for the web interface
Admin Here you can setup your users, sync intervals, file exclusions, etc. Default Admin username is admin password is ifolderadmin
ifolder clients Go http://ifolder.com/download/# and click on ifolder
Have Fun!!!
Via http://htop.sourceforge.net
It is a useful GUI for analyzing Processor and Memory usage. It enhances the functionality of “top” and gives a more friendly view. Continue reading
Have you ever run out of disk space? Do you know what is taking up that precious real estate? Is it your music, your movies, a basic collaboration of your computing life? Continue reading
A podcast is a series of digital media files (either audio or video) that are released episodically and downloaded through web syndication. (via [wikipedia][1])
So, what is a podcast? i.e. I’m a fan of NPR’s “This American Life”. I don’t know what times it’s actually on the radio, nor do I need to know. Even if I did, I’m sure I would not spare that specific 1hr dedicated to listening to its broadcast. If I tried, I would probably do something else at the same time, and never fully obtain the value of it’s content. In Lieu, I download “This American Life” episodes, via iTunes, to my iPod and listen to them in the car commuting, or on long road trips. Continue reading
Have you ever needed to email someone a large file (lets say over 10 mb for arguments sake). Do you know how to find the size of a file? On a Mac or PC you can typically right click on the file and choose “Get Info” or “properties”. Most email servers do not support emailing files over 15 mb and personally I don’t like to email anything over 5 mb. The email might bounce, or just slow down your ability to send and their ability to receive.
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EverNote was created for the information gatherers of the world. The software allows you to create, access, sync your notes across all your media access devices. Work Computer, Home Computer, Cell Phone, Web Site Accessible from Anywhere. Record a voice note, jot down an idea, copy an entire web page (with graphics) for later reviewing. Continue reading