howto

Create a EC2 Amazon Machine Image - AMI

Submitted by alex on Wed, 12/16/2009 - 02:39

Customize an existing AMI image

It's much easier to customize an existing AMI image to your own taste than to start from scratch so let's do that. First we need to find an image that is close to what we want. Read EC2 quickstart on how to setup the EC2 API tools.

$ ec2-describe-images -a 
…
IMAGE	ami-f0f61599	alestic-64/debian-5.0-lenny-base-64-20091011.manifest.xml	063491364108	available	public		x86_64	machine	aki-a3d737ca	ari-7cb95a15		instance-store
…

Amazon EC2 Quickstart

Submitted by alex on Wed, 12/16/2009 - 02:36

EC2 Preparation

First you need to sign up for Amazon's EC2 service and download your X.509 certificate and private key. The certificate and private key files are named as cert-<GUID>.pem and pk-<GUID>.pem. 

Create a directory to hold your EC2 access credentials.

$ mkdir ~/.ec2
$ mv ~/Downloads/*.pem ~/.ec2

Next download the EC2 API command line tools, add it to your PATH and create a few environment variables.

$ cd ~/bin
$ unzip ~/Downloads/ec2-api-tools.zip
$ ln -s /ec2-api-tools-1.3-46266 ec2
$ export $EC2_HOME=~/bin/ec2
$ export PATH=$EC2_HOME/bin:$PATH
$ export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=~/.ec2/pk-<guid>.pem 
$ export EC2_CERT=~/.ec2/cert-<guid>.pem
$ # JAVA_HOME is needed for ec2 tools to work
$ export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home

Let's list some publicly available Amazone Machine Images (AMI) to verify that the tools are working properly.

$ ec2-describe-images -o amazon
...
IMAGE	ami-a21affcb	ec2-public-images/fedora-core-6-x86_64-base-v1.06.manifest.xml	amazon	available	public		x86_64	machine	aki-a53adfcc	ari-a23adfcb		instance-store
IMAGE	ami-2d5fba44	ec2-public-images/fedora-core-6-x86_64-base-v1.07.manifest.xml	amazon	available	public		x86_64	machine	aki-a53adfcc	ari-a23adfcb		instance-store
IMAGE	ami-225fba4b	ec2-public-images/fedora-core4-apache-mysql-v1.07.manifest.xml	amazon	available	public		i386	machine				instance-store
IMAGE	ami-25b6534c	ec2-public-images/fedora-core4-apache-mysql.manifest.xml	amazon	available	public		i386	machine				instance-store
...

Launch an AMI instance

In order to access an AMI instance via SSH we need to create a EC2 key pair. This can easily be done using the web based AWS management console or following the steps below.

Fix PHP 5.3 timezone warnings for drupal

Submitted by alex on Sun, 12/13/2009 - 03:01

I recently installed drupal 6.14 on Snow Leopard and got these timezone warnings.

warning: strtotime() [function.strtotime]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. 
You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. 
In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. 
We selected 'Asia/Tokyo' for 'JST/9.0/no DST' instead in /Users/<user>/Sites/drupal/sites/all/modules/views/modules/node/views_handler_argument_dates_various.inc on line 67.

Enable clean URLs for Drupal 6.x on Snow Leopard

Submitted by alex on Sun, 12/13/2009 - 02:31

By default clean URLs cannot be enabled on Snow Leopard (Macbook pro) unless one of the following prerequisites is done:

Getting Started with Sailfin clustering and MySQL Cluster

Submitted by alex on Fri, 03/27/2009 - 18:00

Sailfin is the open source implementation of Sun Glassfish Communications Server which basically is Glassfish with support for SIP servlets. It allows you to create converged communication services and has some interesting features that together with MySQL Cluster creates very a nice highly available and high performance service execution environment (a white paper on this at mysql.com). 

Quick Start with MySQL Cluster

Submitted by alex on Fri, 03/27/2009 - 04:30

MySQL Cluster (NDB Storage Engine) is a shared-nothing distributed in-memory database with support for disk-data tables as well. It provides a DB environment with high availability, near-linear scalability, realtime performance, automatic and user defined data partitioning, load balancing and transparent failover.

The data is distributed using a partitioning key (hash calculated on primary key as default) so the performance is especially great for primary key lookups and parallel data access.