We needed a CouchDB plugin in the office for some of our servers so I wrote one earlier and added it to the Plugin Store over at ServerDensity.
You can download it at http://plugins.serverdensity.com/couchdb/
It’s a straight forward plugin that exposes all your databases statistics to SD for monitoring allowing you to fully customise your graphs/alerts.
I realised it would be really useful to have a Server Density plugin that can query HAProxy and report a few stats back about it. So I wrote one! haproxy.py plugin for Server Density.
RESTClient is a great little CLI and GUI tool for testing your REST API. I recently pushed a new API up in the office and it runs over SSL. I tried to test it in the RESTClient and got a PeerNotVerified error from Java. First thing I did was go to the SSL tab in RestClient presuming I could tell it to just trust the API…apparently not.
So after a bit of web scouring about how to get Java to trust your site I came across instructions and thought I’d re-post here simplified for anyone who needs to query HTTPS from RESTClient.
These instructions are based on Windows 64-bit and Java being installed into C:\Program Files (x86)\Java. So you may have to change a few paths but the core things are the same.
Navigate to the website in your browser, click the SSL icon in the address bar and click Certificate Information or Details etc.
In the window that pops up, go to the Details tab then click the “Copy to File” button. Click Next until you get to the request for a Filename. Click Browse and navigate to “C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\lib\security”. Enter the filename to save the certificate as (I suggest the domain name with .cer ending). Finally click Next and Finish.
Now open up a command prompt (if you’ve got Windows security then be sure to run as administrator [right click the shortcut to the command prompt and the option is there]) and enter the following:
cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6"
bin\keytool.exe -noprompt -import -keystore lib\security\cacerts
-alias (put_domain_name_here)
-file lib\security\(name_of_certificate_you_saved_above).cer
The second command should all be on one line. You’ll get asked for a password, if you’ve never touched any Java passwords on your machine before, it’ll probably be the certificate store default which is either changeit or changeme.
That’s it! You should now be able to query your service using HTTPS without any errors.
Just had a need to reset the mysql root login password for a server, did a bit of Googling and found out this is how you do it (I work on Ubuntu so you may have to tinker with the lines slightly depending on your distribution):
Et voila, you now have a new root password without needing to know the old one!
A few months ago at work we realised the need for lots of “nodes” (servers) in the UK and in the US initially. We have a lot of data processing that we need to do and we worked out it would be faster and cheaper if we could distribute the work over lots of servers rather than a few beefy servers. Dan started looking around and found VPS.net, they looked good so we thought we’d give them a go. Of course we didn’t want to “put all our eggs in one basket” so we took out some VPS servers with different companies too. A few months later, the only servers we’ve been continuously happy with are the VPS.net servers.
There pricing is one of their best features, you can get a “single node” VPS with some basic specs of 400Mhz processor, 256MB RAM, 10GB storage and 250GB bandwidth (what this site is running on currently) for £15 a month. £15 may seem a little steep to some people to start with but when you realise this is for your own root access Virtual Server (i.e. you can pretty much do anything you want with it like it was at home) it isn’t that bad at all! What makes it better though is, as you buy more nodes, the price comes down for each additional node, so the first node may be £15, but the second is only £14 and so on all the way down to £9 per node.
VPS.net‘s idea of nodes is also very cool. You can buy up to 16 nodes that work as one VPS, and you can change this at any time. Lets say you were me with one node and suddenly you got a surge of visitors and it just couldn’t handle the load anymore, not a problem, simply buy an extra node, attach it to the VPS and you’ll immediately get the benefit of it, no need to re-install your VPS or anything!
They also have automated full node backups for £4 a month too, they take a daily, weekly and monthly backup that you can restore from at any time, so if you totally screw up your server, just hit yesterday’s backup and voila! Back to normal again. Not only that, if the actual server your VPS is on decides it’s time to die, they’ll boot your VPS up on another server within minutes, that doesn’t cost and is part of the service.
If your demands are for a webserver, they have free DNS management tools as well so you don’t have to use an external service, just point your domain at their nameservers.
So in summary, if you’re looking for a reliable, fast, cheap place to host a website or host nodes to perform data analysis, I’d certainly give VPS.net a go.
Review ends 
Next time you have a problem booting your PC, why not give this simple flow chart a go? It’s actually easier to use than it first looks, it just covers a lot of stuff.
The full thing can be found at fonerbooks.
