misfoc.us

BigCouch Clustering

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 10:50:00 -0400

In a previous article, I wrote on how to install BigCouch 0.4 on FreeBSD. One of the benefits of going to BigCouch over straight up CouchDB is the clustering capabilities. I had to do some digging around and spend some time talking to rnewson in the irc room to get everything working. Here’s a quick step-by-step setup:

(paths are all freebsd based)

After getting BigCouch installed, you’ll need to edit /usr/local/bigcouch/etc/vm.args on each node:

node 1

-name bigcouch@123.456.789.200
-setcookie some_text

node 2

-name bigcouch@123.456.789.100
-setcookie some_text

(make sure that the name is fully qualified as it must be resolvable on each node)

If you’ve changed these settings while BigCouch was previously running, you’ll need to restart to load the new settings.

You now need to tell at least one member of the cluster about the other node(s): (the nodes db will be replicated to all members)

curl -X PUT http://123.456.789.100:5986/nodes/bigcouch@123.456.789.200 -d {}

Now that you have this in place, you can now create a new database:

curl -X PUT 'http://bigcouch.cluster.com:5984/new_database?n=3&q=32'

You should now see this database appear on both boxes.

Note:

The Q and N are fixed at database creation time.

This means that if you add a new node, the existing database does not automagically scale out to include the new node.

You have a couple ways of getting around this:

Create a new database and use replication to migrate data to the new, larger cluster.
Manually move shards from existing nodes to the new node. You can find some solid instructions for this option here

Syncing Sublime Text 2 Settings via Dropbox

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 13:22:00 -0500

I just recently purchased Sublime Text 2 and thought I would do some digging into syncing the config files via Dropbox (affiliate link). There’s no real way of changing where Sublime looks for it’s file, but we can skirt this issue using symlinks. I run Sublime on Mac and a Windows machine, so I’ll post directions for both platforms.

Windows

(has been tested on Sublime Text 2 build 2165 on Windows 7)

First, create a folder in your Dropbox path where you’d like to put your Sublime files. I used

{Dropbox Path}/appdata/sublime

You’ll need to find out where Sublime is saving your settings. I found this by clicking on the Browse Packages menu option under Preferences. Here’s what mine looked like:

C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Sublime Text 2\Packages

Make sure you’ve closed Sublime Text before continuing.

Copy Packages, Installed Packages, and Pristine Packages to the folder you’ve created on Dropbox.

At this point, remove the actual folders from the Sublime path. We’re going to create some symlinks now. Open a CMD window with administrator rights and navigate to the the above folder location and run the following:

mklink /D "Installed Packages" "C:\path\to\Dropbox\appdata\sublime\Installed Packages"
mklink /D "Packages" "C:\path\to\Dropbox\apps\sublime\Packages" 
mklink /D "Pristine Packages" "C:\path\to\Dropbox\apps\sublime\Pristine Packages"

You should now be able to fire up Sublime Text which will pull your data from Dropbox.

Mac

Make sure Sublime Text is closed before continuing.

Open up a Terminal window and navigate to the Sublime Text setting folder

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Sublime\ Text 2/

You’ll most likely already have package folders here, so you’ll need to remove them first

rm -r Installed\ Packages
rm -r Packages
rm -r Pristine\ Packages

Now, we’re going to create symlinks to the folders in

~/Dropbox/appdata/sublime/

Run the following commands to create the needed symlinks

ln -s ~/Dropbox/appdata/sublime/Installed\ Packages ./Installed\ Packages
ln -s ~/Dropbox/appdata/sublime/Packages ./Packages
ln -s ~/Dropbox/appdata/sublime/Pristine\ Packages ./Pristine\ Packages

You should now be able to fire up Sublime Text using the settings information present in your Dropbox folder.

Installing CrashPlan headless on OpenIndiana using Mac for GUI

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 22:55:23 -0500

I decided that I wasn’t quite ready for the work it was going to take to convert from OpenIndiana to FreeBSD 9.0 so I decided to quickly tackle a CrashPlan Headless install and also set up my Mac to access as the headless server when needed.

OpenIndiana: Installation and Setup

I pretty much followed the installation directions on the Crashplan’s website with a couple tiny modifications.

Download the application from here.

Move the downloaded file to /var/spool/pkg

pfexec mv CrashPlan_2010-03-08_Solaris.tar.gz /var/spool/pkg/

Unpack the archive

pfexec tar -xzvf CrashPlan_2010-03-08_Solaris.tar.gz

Install the package

pfexec /usr/sbin/pkgadd

At this point I diverged a little and made a change to a CrashPlan configuration file: (this tells the service to accept connections on any IP that my server will respond on)

/opt/sfw/crashplan/conf/my.service.xml

I changed the line

serviceHost 127.0.0.1

serviceHost 0.0.0.0

then fire up the service

pfexec /opt/sfw/crashplan/bin/CrashPlanEngine start

Mac: GUI Setup

You now need to setup the gui to point to your remote engine. Make sure you’ve installed CrashPlan on your Mac. After you’ve got it installed, open

/Applications/CrashPlan.app/Contents/Resources/Java/conf/ui.properties

and change the line that reads

#serviceHost=127.0.0.1

serviceHost={IP_OF_ENGINE}

If all goes well, you should now be able to fire up CrashPlan on your Mac, connect to your headless box, and setup your backups.

Todo

Create a config for my local box and a config for my headless box
Write a script that will switch configs depending on which system I want to manage

Sick-Beard & Notify My Android

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:29:46 -0500

Sometime in the past, I discovered Notify My Android while configuring CouchPotato. It’s essentially a Growl type application for Android phones. I eagerly ported the code from CouchPotato to Sick-Beard so I could get alerted when a new TV show downloaded.

Unfortunately, despite the support for this feature, it’s taken Midgetspy some time to accept my pull request. In the meantime, I’ve spun up a fork that is using the latest Sick-Beard code along with the Notify My Android update. If you itching for some NMA alerting, but don’t want to give up the latest cool Sick-Beard features, check out my repository.

Feel free to throw feedback here or over at Github.

My Favorite Android Apps

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:43:00 -0500

I’m sitting here without power at work right now and decided I would throw together a quick article on the apps that I use regularly on my Android phone.

DoggCatcher

DoggCatcher is a podcast application. I’ve been using DoggCatcher on a daily basis for over a year now. I’ve tried several other apps and always find myself working back to this app. One thing I appreciate is the amount of things I can tweak. The developer has incorporated a ton of features ranging from sort order, variable speed playback, to number of items to download. The app is also regularly updated; new features are constantly being added and existing features are constantly being polished. It is an expensive app coming in at $4.99, but it’s entirely worth it.

Website - Market Link - Trial

Screebl

I picked up Screebl a few months ago when it was free on the Amazon App store. Screebl is an interesting application that can keep your screen from entering sleep mode depending on the orientation of the device. How many times does your screen blank out while waiting for a long loading website or while reading an article? Screebl lets me set custom ranges, while the phone falls within those ranges, the screen will not go to sleep. This is amazing and I don’t know how I survived without it. It’s only $1.99 and well worth the cost.

Website - Market Link - Trial

ADWLauncher EX

I love customizing the look of my phone and find ADWLauncher EX to be very slick. I also find that it’s pretty snappy even on a crappier phone. It’s been incredibly stable and lets me tweak all the things that I want. I do wish I could customize folders a little more than I can, but it’s not a big deal. This app runs $3.32

Website - Market Link - Trial

Feedly

I use Feedly as my rss feed reader. I dig the interface and the fact that it syncs with my Google Reader account. Even better, it’s completely free! Check it out.

Website - Market Link

Gentle Alarm

You can find a dozen different alarm apps in the app store right now, but I’ve fallen in love with Gentle Alarm. It was originally a free app on the Amazon App store when I grabbed it. I don’t use an alarm clock at home, so I need something that I can depend on. Gentle Alarm has a couple nice features that I enjoy such as having a captcha when I go to snooze or shutoff the alarm. It also has a pretty slick widget. I can’t think of any features that makes it different from any other alarm app, but I like the way it looks and the alarm has always gone off. This app runs $2.86

Website - Market Link - Trial - Widget

Titanium Backup

I’ve been a fan of rooting my phones since I was first introduced to Android. One of the first apps I’ve ever purchased was Titanium Backup. This app allows you to back up the app and app data on your phone to your sd card or sync it out to Dropbox. It has some other interesting features such as freezing bloatware installed by your carriers (this simply prevents the app from running without actually uninstalling it), creating groups for batch operations, along with scheduling automatic backups. It’s a little expensive at $6.58, but if you root, I highly recommend it.

Website - Market Link - License

BigCouch 0.4 and FreeBSD

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:43:00 -0500

With great excitement, Cloudant announced the release of BigCouch 0.4 yesterday. One of the exciting features for me is FreeBSD support. For a complete list of new features, click here for the changelog. I didn’t find any good sources for installation help in FreeBSD, so I thought I would throw something up. Here goes:

Let’s start with the dependencies:

# pkg_add -r gmake libtool help2man erlang-lite icu spidermonkey curl git
# rehash

We’re going to grab the latest from Github for our setup:

(The source is available as a package here)

# git clone git://github.com/cloudant/bigcouch.git
# cd bigcouch

If you have bash installed in your environment, you can skip this next step:

(there was a push that changed the configure script from requiring bash, but was changed back after some issues with Solaris)

# grep -rl '/bin/bash' * | xargs sed -i "" 's/bash/sh/g'

If you’d like to change what ip the single-node port (5986) listens on, run this command:

(this is used for some admin functions)

# sed -i '' 's/127.0.0.1/<Desired IP>/g' rel/overlay/etc/default.ini

Next, we need to create a directory were we will be installing BigCouch:

# mkdir /usr/local/bigcouch

We’ll finish up with a quick config change and then the standard make stuff:

# ./configure -p /usr/local/bigcouch
# make
# make install

If all goes well, you should be able to fire up BigCouch:

# /usr/local/bigcouch/bin/bigcouch

There currently isn’t a port for FreeBSD that I’ve been able to find aside from this dated one on Github. After some more testing, I’ll most likely end up getting a port put together so I can get this build out puppetized easier, but that’s another project for another day.

Perfect Task Management App

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:33:00 -0500

I’m on the hunt for the perfect or as close to perfect as I can get task management application. I’ve looked over several of them and am currently checking out Nirvana. Nirvana follows the GTD methodology. I’m not a traditional follower of the GTD way of time management, but the format allows me to setup projects and tagging nicely.

So far it’s working pretty decently. I’ve got a little more setup to do to see if it will hold up to what I’m looking for. I like the email to task functionality, that’ll be pretty handy. I’ll post a follow up in a week or so and let you know if I’m still using it.

Nirvana is currently in a private beta, but you can join up if you use LIFEHACK as the join code.

Goodbye OpenIndiana

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:47:21 -0500

I’ve reached the point where I am completely frustrated using OpenIndiana. As great of an OS it might be with it’s fantastic implementation of ZFS and all the other amazing components, it is a completely foreign OS. This wouldn’t be so bad if the documentation wasn’t so horrible.

When I return home, I’ll be spending some time setting up FreeBSD 9.0 and puppetizing my entire downloading system. At least I know how to use FreeBSD and if I don’t, the documentation is amazing!

Cookie Cleaning with Nginx

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:30:20 -0500

A few days ago, we discovered that there was some odd behavior with some traffic hitting our sites due to a cookie with a null name. It was causing some weirdness with our application and causing our alerting software to freak out. I was tasked with coming up with a solution to handling this. I dabble in the load balancing space and decided to solve this by stripping out the cookie in Nginx.

set $cookies $http_COOKIE;
if ($http_COOKIE ~* "(.*;)\s=deleted;(.*)") {
    set $cookies $1$2;
}
proxy_set_header cookie $cookies;

Republic Wireless - A Month in a Review

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 07:13:49 -0500

So, last week I received my Republic Wireless phone. For those who don’t know, Republic Wireless is a new cell service that is attempting to merge wifi voip with a traditional cell service. They piggy back on Sprints network, so when you are in an area that you can’t connect to wifi, you still have 3G. There is still a little confusion on exactly how much 3G data / voice amounts you have access to, so I can’t really comment on that too much just yet. They are charging $19 a month for this service. That’s the HUGE selling point for me. Laura and I are currently spending around $180 for our two phones…so if this works out, I could save over $130 a month.

I pretty much shutoff my Verizon Wireless phone as soon as the Repubic Wireless came in the mail. There are some Youtube videos out there showing the unboxing and demoing the phone. I’m not going to touch on that as I don’t feel a review of the phone is important as much as how well the service is working.

I’ve made serveral phone calls at my house over Wifi and the call quality has been amazing. I did have one call drop, but I’m not sure if it was on my end or the other. I’ve made a couple calls on 3G and it’s what you’d expect from Sprint 3G. When I’m at home or in the office, I’m connected to the wifi so all my data runs through there. However, at work Wifi is much more restricted, so I can’t make any voip calls over the wifi. That’s something to keep in mind, if the wifi you conect to is restricted, you might lose the voip ability.

I know this isn’t much of an indepth review, there’s not a whole hell of a lot to review. At this point, after a week with it, I’m ready to drop VZW for me and rely strictly on this. I’m just waiting to find out about porting my number out. We’ll see what happens.

Installing SABnzbd, Sick-Beard & CouchPotato on OpenIndiana

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 06:11:18 -0500

I’ve been a Freebsd user for several years now and I’m quite comfortable on that platform. Recently, however, a guy I work with has spoken really highly of OpenIndiana and I decided to spin it up on a new server and see how it goes. So far, it’s been an uphill battle. Solaris is very different than what I’m use to. After a few hours, I was able to get the first couple apps running. I’m going to give a quick run down of what I did to get them running and configured.

Dependencies

GCC

One of the dependencies for SABnzbd requires a compiler.

# pfexec pkg install SUNWgcc

We also need a math header

# pfexec pkg install math/header-math

Unrar

# pfexec pkg install archiver/unrar

Par2

# wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/parchive/par2cmdline/0.4/par2cmdline-0.4.tar.gz
# gunzip < par2cmdline-0.4.tar.gz | tar xvf -
# cd par2cmdline-0.4/
# ./configure
# make
# pfexec make install
# pfexec mv /usr/local/bin/par* /usr/bin/

Cheetah

# wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/C/Cheetah/Cheetah-2.4.4.tar.gz#md5=853917116e731afbc8c8a43c37e6ddba
# gunzip < Cheetah-2.4.4.tar.gz  | tar xvf -
# cd Cheetah-2.4.4/
# pfexec python setup.py install

PyOpenSSL

# wget http://launchpad.net/pyopenssl/main/0.11/+download/pyOpenSSL-0.11.tar.gz
# gunzip < pyOpenSSL-0.11.tar.gz | tar xvf -
# cd pyOpenSSL-0.11
# pfexec python setup.py install

yEnc

# wget https://bitbucket.org/dual75/yenc/get/default.tar.gz
# gunzip default.tar.gz | tar xvf - 
# cd default/
# pfexec python setup.py install

SABnzbd / Sick-Beard / CouchPotato

Once you’ve got all the dependencies installed, it’s really simple to get the three apps fired up. I used git repositories for all my installs for simplicity sake.

# cd /usr
# pfexec git clone git://github.com/sabnzbd/sabnzbd.git
# pfexec git clone git://github.com/midgetspy/Sick-Beard.git sick-beard
# pfexec git clone git://github.com/RuudBurger/CouchPotato.git couchpotato

At this point, all you need to do is fire up each application and configure the settings.

Comcast Bandwidth Script

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 14:09:00 -0400

I just made an update / addition to a script I found on asktherelic.com. I added Notify My Android and rewrote the command line argument support. My code has been combined, you can get it here.

Another Update: After I accidently committed my username and password to Git, I added the support for a config.ini file to prevent others from doing the same thing.