VPN-Cubed was a solution that Amazon listed for some time, allowing users of EC2 or S3 cloud services to VPN their resources in Amazon’s cloud to their own offices. But Amazon recently went a step further with their own offering and now provide the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. Pricing is based on a per-VPN connection, running at a nickel per hour that the VPN Connection is alive. Data transfer over the VPN is charged at a dime per gig into the cloud and between 10 and 17 cents per gig out of the cloud. There have been a number of concerns about security with regards to cloud services. The ability…
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MiFi
MiFi, a product from Novatel Wireless, is a credit card sized device that provides a 7 Megabit connection to the internet as a portable wireless hotspot. It’s GPS-enabled and it can serve up to 5 devices using WiFi. Nice little device overall. In my testing it was about twice as fast as my Sprint USB card.
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S3 Command Line Part II
Earlier we looked at using s3cmd to interact with the Amazon S3 storage cloud. Now we’re going to delve into using Another S3 Bash Interface. To get started, first download the scripts and then copy the hmac and s3 commands into the ec2 folder created in previous walkthroughs. To use the s3 script, you need to store your Amazon secret key in a text file and set two environment variables. The INSTALL file included with the package has all the details. The only tricky part I ran into, and from the comments on Amazon, other people ran into, is how to create the secret key text file. Now go into your…
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Amazon S3 from the Command Line
In a previous article we looked at how to upload Final Cut Server content to s3 using Jungle Disk. We also looked at how to upload ec2 images to s3. But now we’re going to take a deeper dive into using s3 from the command line. There are a number of tools that have been developed by the community to leverage Amazon’s S3 Storage Service. This isn’t as cut and dry as using ec2 due to the fact that the Amazon tools are written in Java, C#, Perl, PHP, Ruby and Python. However, I’m a shell kinda’ guy to a large degree and I was able to find a couple of places where people have written…
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Custom VMs using S3+EC2
I’m obviously enjoying using Amazon for a number of testing applications (in addition to of course buying books and light bulbs from them, and not one showed up broken). So far, I’ve done articles on getting started with Amazon ec2, using the command line with ec2, whitelisting an IP address, deploying ec2 en masse, and setting up a static IP for ec2. But the S3 articles have been sparse. So, now let’s look at using Amazon’s storage service (S3) from the command line. Funny enough, if you’re going to upload your own custom Amazon Machine Instances (AMIs) you’ll need to leverage S3. When you go to bundle an image, you will have a…
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Deploy EC2 En Masse
Render farms, cluster nodes and other types of distributed computing often require using a lot of machines that don’t have a lot of stuff running on them and are only needed during certain times. Such is the life of a compute cluster, which is what EC2 is there for. Because cluster nodes are so homogenous by nature you can deploy them en masse. Picking up where I left off with deploying EC2 via the command line we’re going to look at spinning up let’s say 100 virtual machines with the large designation, from a pricing standpoint. As with the previous example, we’re going to use ami-767676 (although you’ll more than…
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10 Tips and Tricks for PowerLine Networking
In the IT industry we can often discount certain technologies off-hand simply because they don’t fit into our paradigm. I did this for a little while with PowerLine networking but have been trying to dabble with products as they’ve been released over the past few years. While I think PowerLine is cool technology, it’s got some caveats. Therefore, here’s my own list of tips and tricks for utilizing PowerLine in a manner that doesn’t suck: You probably want to think it through before you do this. PowerLine isn’t going to work for everyone. There are two types of technology that don’t work together: High Definition Power Line Communication, aka HD-PLC (Panasonic) vs. HomePlug (D-Link,…
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Getting Started with Amazon's EC2 Cloud
Yesterday I did a quick review of the various cloud offerings from Amazon. Previous to that I had done a review of using S3, the Amazon storage service, with Mac OS X, primarily through the lens of using S3 as a destination for Final Cut Server archives. Today I’m going to go ahead and look at using EC2 from Mac OS X. To get started, first download the EC2 tools from Amazon. Next, log into Amazon Web Services. If you don’t yet have a login you will obviously need to create one to proceed. Additionally, if you don’t yet have a private key you’ll need one of those too –…
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Fibre Channel Switches vs. Hubs
In the FC-AL (Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop) protocol, when devices enter loops, they send out a Loop Initialization Primitive (LIP) request for an address. All other activity on the loop then comes to a halt as each node reestablishes its connection. Since a hub-based fabric is one large arbitrated loop (which can in many cases similarly be built without the actual hub but with less aggregated speed), it must be entirely rebuilt every time any device is rebooted, added to the loop or removed from it. This causes the potential for processing errors, iNode issues/volume errors and even physical disk failures. A “LIP storm” can also cause multiple devices to…
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Big-endian vs. Little-endian
Endianness is the bit/byte ordering (thus aka byte ordering) used to store values, typically in regard to memory and streams of data over a network. This comes up occasionally with heterogenous integration and the bugs that can result. Basically, little-endian is used with the x86 chipset and big-endian is used for the PowerPC line, although in some cases PowerPC can be bi-endian, meaning that it can switch endianness. Well, it doesn’t actually do so from a hardware standpoint but instead when they’re in little-endian mode the software is little-endian, but multi-byte values end up getting swapped to big-endian during memory load. Big-endian moves up in order – addresses increase upward.…