I took this pic the other night at a bus station. Classic example of arbitrage opportunity for someone in the lolly snakes game, check the price of the two packets!
EC2 Ubuntu 10.04 Apt-get upgrade
The other day, like a good admin, I attempted to keep my Ubuntu 10.10 EC2 instance up to date and performed and apt-get upgrade, it failed horribly as alluded to in one of my earlier posts and resulted in my getting to sleep at 1 in the morning.
The offending package was java-6-sun and it is a known bug for 10.10 (see this link).
In any event I followed the fix, shut down the instance )(after creating a backup AMI just in case), started it again as a small instance and performed the upgrade without a hitch. The only thing I am now concerned about is the fact that it would appear there are reports that the instance remains unstable!! This is not something I need so will look at a dist upgrade shortly but I concerned at what other issues this may introduce.
Bitcoin – If you can’t beat them join them
OK, so I just purchased some bitcoins at a reasonable price for the day.
EC2 Instances and EBS
Here are a few things I have recently learnt about EC2 instancess:
1. I think (but am yet to test again and confirm) an attached EBS will be dropped when you create an AMI from a currently running Instance.
2. Before you apt-get upgrade create an AMI as a back up, its just to much heart ache creating eveything again – especially when its a “I’ll just do this before I go to bed l” late Sunday night and then don’t get to be till 1am because your last AMI was created a week ago and now you have to rebuild a recently installed wordpress blog.
3. Make sure you at least attach an EBS and mount it to store your email, at least then when 2 above happens your golden for your emails.
4. Seriously consider moving mySQL db to an EBS volume, wehn your micro instance falls over you have lost everything since the last AMI was created (or the last backup at least).
The move to EC2 rolls on.
Well I have flicked the switch on my email server at EC2 and its humming away as I write this.
So far so good but still some wrinkles to iron out, in particular the odd IMAP folder mapping that courier has (as opposed to my dovecote of old) and some issues that this is causing me on my Android Phone. With luck I will figure that out shortly.
Last thing to move will be a forum that I host for a motorcycle club I am in and then the ESX box can get turned off. I’m having a few issues with move on the forum as the MYSQL db is a different version on my old installation as compared to the EC2 instance and they are not playing nice together when I try to import the MYSQL dump.
The complication now is that I run my Subsonic server on a Fedora VM so it will be a bummer to have to turn that one of especially given I have licensed the subsonic server – lets hope I can use the registration serial number again.
Mobile Phones
I just mentioned this to a few friends tonight. What is it with people and mobile phone. They go out, buy something that looks great, is small and oh so stylish then stick a massive ugly phone cover and screen protector on it and it becomes a thing functional ugliness.
Please, everyone, throw away the cover and the screen protector, use the phone as it was intended, naked. You know it will be worth nothing when you all finish your 24 months contract don’t you……
Just moved my blog to EC2
Hello all.
If you are reading this you are in fact reading it from my new snazzy EC2 instance at amazon, sweet hey! With luck it will be a cheaper way to host my websites as opposed to the power bill that I seem to be incurring at home with my dual Xeon CPU old clunker.
The big 4…
I read something very interesting today that sums up working in some accounting firms.
“When large numbers of people are after the same commodity, be it stock or bond or a job the commodity quickly becomes overvalued.”
I think I agree.