The Open Source Cloud and why it matters
Earlier today RackSpace announced that they are releasing their Cloud technologies as Open Source under the newly formed project OpenStack. RackSpace is the second largest cloud provider, behind cloud computing pioneer, Amazon. They have partnered with some of the largest names in the industry to create Open Stack including NASA, Dell, Citrix, AMD, Intel, Right Scale and many others. Read on to see why this matters. Read more
Unix Jobs Management
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Every self respecting linux, mac os X or *nix user should have a solid handle on managing jobs in unix. The following will explain how to run tasks in the background, bring tasks to the foreground, background already running tasks and keeping a task running while logged out. Read more
Human readable du sorted by size
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du is the *nix command for disk usage. It tells you how much space everything in the given directory is taking up. GNU du introduced a handy option -h making it human readable, or showing sizes using K, M, G rather than bytes. Unfortunately this makes it not sortable numerically. Here’s how to sort du by size and keep it as human readable. Read more
Using the right keys
Image by HeyThereSpaceman. via Flickr
Today I was visiting a friends office and like many offices in NYC they have a shared bathroom in the hall for the entire floor. In this building it had five buttons on the door that when pressed in the correct order unlocked the door. A simple password.
In our office we have a similarly shared bathroom, but instead of a password, we have a physical key required to unlock the door.
A password for the bathroom was just the right amount of security. It prevented just any stranger from easily accessing the bathroom, but wasn’t inconvenient and easy to provide access to. My friend simply told me the password and I as a visitor had all I needed to enter. It was the right amount of security for the right purpose. Read more
Benchmarking Cloudfront (and S3)
- Image via CrunchBase
Amazon has done it again bringing another computing service to the masses. This time it’s the Content Delivery Network or CDN. Cloudfront is a direct competitor to other popular CDNs such as Akamai. While Akamai requires a fairly substantial amount of traffic to become a customer, Cloudfront doesn’t. It follows all of Amazons, pay for what you use mentality. This means that everyone can benefit from incorporating Cloudfront into their blog, site, store, etc.. Read more
SOAP vs. REST
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Someone asked me a question today “Why would anyone choose SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) instead of REST (Representational State Transfer)?” My response: “The general rule of thumb I’ve always heard is ‘Unless you have a definitive reason to use SOAP use REST’”. He asked “what’s one reason?” I thought about it for a minute and honestly answered that I haven’t ever come across a reason. My background is building great internet companies. Read more
7 security practices you need to follow
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Some of this may seem like a broken record, yet every single time you hear about a bank losing millions of customer data, or a company having a security breach they consistently have failed to implement and enforce the most basic security practices. Here are 7 simple security practices that you cannot afford to not follow. Read more
Secure Automated, Key Based SSH
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SSH is great and secure… Unless you need to automate it. Then it sucks because your only options are to create a passwordless key, or login add your key to ssh-agent, stay logged in forever. Here’s a quick guide to having the best of both worlds. A Secure SSH Connection that can be used in automated scripts. ( with the single catch, that upon reboot you need to re-enter your key’s password ) Read more