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SoftLayer has a private network which is accessible only via VPN. It took me a really long time to figure out how to connect on Ubuntu 12.04 running on VirtualBox. To configure the VPN connection, from the network manager icon in the top right corner click: “VPN Connections” > “Configure VPN…”. Use a PPTP VPN, Read More
SoftLayer will allow to setup a handful of OS images by default, but requires you to jump through extra hoops if you’d like to provide your own ISO or go through the OS install screens yourself. For example, this is most likely the way you’d install LVM if you’d like to backup your database via Read More
I logged into the primary member of the replica set and ran rs.status() which showed me that the replica was too stale (“error RS102 too stale to catch up”): { “_id” : 4, “name” : “55.55.55.55:27017”, “health” : 1, “state” : 3, “stateStr” : “RECOVERING”, “uptime” : 502511, “optime” : { “t” : 1340841938000, “i” Read More
If you need to re-install Windows 7 because you got a new hard drive, you can download a copy of Windows from Microsoft here and then enter your existing product key. ABR provides one way to get your existing product key. You can also get a product key for Windows 7 Ultimate and Microsoft Office from Read More
I frequently use Google video chat. It was common for the person on the other end to have difficulty hearing me, which I eventually realized was because the microphone level kept being auto-adjusted to very low levels. It turns out that it was Google video chat constantly auto-adjusting the volume level and that the behavior Read More
You can create a MySQL backup with Percona Xtrabackup by running: $ innobackupex –user=DBUSER –password=DBUSERPASS /path/to/BACKUP-DIR/ You can then restore the backup with: $ xtrabackup –prepare –datadir=/var/lib/mysql –target-dir=/path/to/BACKUP-DIR/ $ sudo service mysql stop $ sudo mv /var/lib/mysql ~/dbbackup $ sudo mv /path/to/BACKUP-DIR /var/lib/mysql $ sudo chown -R mysql:mysql /var/lib/mysql $ sudo service mysql start $ Read More
The easiest way to get started is to install Apache and PHP: $ sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 php-pear If you need to edit the Apache ports because you already have another server running on port 80 then edit /etc/apache2/ports.conf. You’ll need to install the PHP Mongo connector: sudo pecl install php_mongo Add “extension=mongo.so” to Read More
When dealing with distributed systems, Brewer’s CAP theorem is often brought up when discussing how a system will behave in certain error conditions. The CAP theorem means that you can only have two of: consistency, availability, and partition tolerance. Here’s what you’ll be giving up for each of the three that you may sacrifice: C: Read More
Due to licensing restrictions, Ubuntu no longer comes with Oracle’s Java JDK. The first trick to installing on a headless server is being able to wget the file. I recommend downloading manually and then placing in on a host you control, your Dropbox directory, etc. You can install it by running: sudo mkdir -p /opt/java/64 Read More
IPython is a cool shell to run Python from and Pandas is a Python library for holding tabular data similar to R’s data frame. To install the software run: sudo apt-get install python-pip libzmq-dev python-dev g++ libfreetype6-dev libpng12-dev libblas-dev liblapack-dev gfortran cython libhdf5-serial-dev sudo pip install ipython sudo pip install tornado sudo pip install pyzmq Read More