fnokd!

I did the round-trip from the land of cows to Raleigh to attend the Raleigh RubyCamp over the weekend.
I think I heard about 80 folks showed up, but I’m not certain on that.
Mark (root@37s) and James did a very nice job of organizing it.  They provided good coffee and donuts to start the morning right.  [...]

Thanks to the typical demo demons, I’ve been unable to get everything functioning perfect for instantaneous clustering on EC2 by tomorrow.
Oh well.
But here’s the first draft of some slides I’m taking with me to the Raleigh RubyCamp.

It’s a BarCamp style event, so I anticipate the slides probably changing throughout the day. I’ll published updates [...]

Trying to debug why my init scripts weren’t initing on EC2, I checked all the normal places.
The chkconfig tool reported that my services should be on at runlevel 3:

jboss 0:off   1:off   2:off   3:on    4:off   5:on    6:off

My /etc/inittab says I was booting to runlevel 3:

id:3:initdefault:

Yet the console did not show my things to be [...]

On my path towards clustering a Rails app on JBoss on EC2, I stumbled across Bryan Kearney and the other Thincrust guys. With their help, I now have a JBoss AS5 + jboss-rails “appliance” ready to roll.
Grab the raw image or the VMWare image, and play along at home.
Fire up the image in your favorite [...]

It can sometimes be funny, the paths we take.
Once I’d verified that a Rails app deployed on JBoss would indeed cluster, I sat in my farmhouse, looking at my lone little Mac.  Not much of a cluster to play with.
So I started looking at Amazon EC2, which is truly very nice, particularly when paired with [...]

Elasticfox is a nice extension for managing your relationship with EC2 from within Firefox.  It’s XUL-based, somewhat homely and odd.  But it’s so much nicer than dealing with the ec2-* scripts directly and copying Amazon’s wacky hash identifiers hither and thither.
But on OSX, the “ssh to this instance” button is wired up to Terminal.app.  I [...]