Digging my own Ditch

Archive for November, 2009

How to increase the size of vol on AWS

Friday, November 20th, 2009

OK. First a huge disclaimer. If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’re not going to be interested in this post.

It’s a technical post which I’m leaving partly because I found the information very hard to find online, and partly because I’ll probably reference myself it in the future.

I should also point out we have a great sysadmin who looks after the Aroxo production system, but I’ve got a “knock about” server which I like to play with to help me understand what I’m doing, what I’ve done here refers to that server.

So here’s the scenario: you’re hosted using Amazon Web-Services EC2 platform. You’ve created a volume to store your data on, and you’ve run out of space. How do you increase the space on /vol using AWS?

Here are the steps which after a lot of messing around and a lot of help about I eventually found to work, some of this is based on this post. This might not be the most efficient way and some steps might be unnecessary and it’s based on a Debian install, maybe that makes a difference, maybe it doesn’t:

Log onto your machine using SSH
Type
```
umount /vol
```
to unmount your drive (note it’s umount, not unmount)
1. If your machine tells you that the drive is use, and it probably will, do this:
2. ```
fuser -m /vol
```
3. You’ll get a list of the process IDs which are currently using the drive
4. I then just killed them using
```
kill xxxx
```
  but there’s probably a smoother way to shutting them down, you might want to think about that, like a clean shutdown of Apache and mysql at least
5. Type
```
umount /vol
```
Go to your AWS console
Detach this drive from your instance
Create a snapshot based on the volume and wait for it to complete
Create a new, larger, drive based on the snapshot
Attach the new drive (remember the mount point, maybe something like /dev/sdf)
Back to SSH type
```
mount /dev/sdf /vol
```
Type
```
xfs_growfs /vol
```
Restart the box or the services you unceremoniously killed
Check everything
Breath a sigh of relief
Make a cup of tea and find some to tell who’s likely to be impressed (if you find anyone, let me know).

That’s what I did, it worked but it wasn’t pretty.

Posted in AWS, Amazon, Technical, sysadmin | 2 Comments »

Wp-to-go rocks

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

So, like many people I am growing to love Android devices, and not just because of T9 support.

A perennial entry in Google’s top applications in Market has been WP-To-go, a Wordpress client for your Android phone.

I’ve just installed it, set it up, and I’ve got to say, it’s brilliant! You can manage comments, write posts, edit posts and write and save drafts.

Fantastic stuff, thanks guys!

Tags: wordpress
Posted in Google | No Comments »

I have Google Wave Invites!

Friday, November 13th, 2009

I’ve got a nice shiny new bunch of Google Wave invites:

Google Wave invites available

I know that many people are desperate to get their hands on one. So, if you want one, simply blog about this post which I wrote about Google Wave, happy if you disagree or leave you thoughts, just credit me back with a link and I’ll send you an invite!

Matt.

Posted in Aroxo | No Comments »

What went wrong with Google Wave

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Like thousands of people like me a few weeks ago I got my Google Wave invite, I logged in clicked about, played with a few Waves, had some conversations and signed out.

Overall I was a combination of slightly bermused, impressed by the technology bowled over by the real-time goodness and the slick UI, but fundamentally unsure of what I was supposed to use Google Wave for.

But what actually went wrong here? I’ve got a theory and it’s not what you might expect – valid though those criticisms are. Google Wave went wrong, not because of what it is, but because it didn’t harness any viral power:

Invites are not sent fast enough
Wave is closed
Wave has no pointers

Google Wave is first first and foremost a communications technology, which means for people to really see the benefits they need to be communicating with people they know.

When you join Google Wave you receive 8 invites, when you’re through those you get another 12. But when you send the invite they don’t arrive for several days. Meaning you’ve got practically no-one of significance to communicate with when you’re first into it*.

So your first experience of Wave is with strangers.

The second problem with Wave is that you don’t know when you’ve got an unread Wave. You signed in first time around, played around a bit with a few people you vaguely know online, and sign out. If someone now communicates with you whilst you’re signed out you’re not informed.

No email, no RSS feed, no Tweet, nada.

So you don’t sign in and respond and you don’t slowly fall away from being a Wave user.

The final thing which they got wrong is that there are no easy to follow pointers to get your started, clues for intentional uses, a quick “first action”.

When people first use a technology they are in a state of mild stress, in short they don’t want to publicly demonstrate that they don’t know what they’re doing and therefore look stupid. So they want something easy to do, figuring out the complex stuff afterwards. This is as true of techie geeks as it is of our non-techie friends.

Google Wave doesn’t supply these pointers.

What’s important about what I’ve said here is that all of this is entirely fixable, and there are plenty more people who desperately want to try out Google Wave. With any luck the feedback from the 2nd and 3rd round of adopters will be a lot more positive!

* I totally acknowledge that there maybe good technical scalability reasons for this, but it doesn’t change the affect.

Posted in Aroxo, Google, testing | 8 Comments »

Back to blogging!

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

Ok, after a massive period focussed solely on Aroxo I thin it’s time to get back to some proper blogging.

I’ll start with a quick Aroxo update, we’ve been through a lot over the last few months and we’ve got a lot to tell you about.

So, first things first. What have we done with Aroxo in the last few months? Here’s an overview of some of the new stuff we’ve launched recently:

Twitter integration
Questions and answers
Thousands of new products

For a while we’ve enabled you to tell your friends on Twitter when you’ve signed up to Aroxo, or created a Want-it Note. But we’ve now added a live stream of everything that’s going on, on Aroxo. You’ll find the Aroxo buzz here.

What’s best, if you’re only interested in individual product groups we’ve created separate accounts for those too. I’ll post a page with those on it shortly.

We’ve also got a great new Q&A system where you can ask questions about our products and either us, or one of our seller’s will endeavour to answer you. Here’s an example product. Unfortunately it’s attracting quite a bit of spam, a loophole shortly to be closed!

Finally we’ve added in thousands of new products for you to choose from. We’re working even as we speak to bring you price comparison links, as well as videos and reviews of all those products.

There’s lot’s more to come from us too! Watch this space!

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »