AWS - First Impressions

So, I've been looking at Amazon Web Services, expect to see some tutorials up here soon covering the likes of setting up an instance, wiring it to an external IP and hosting a website on it, or trac, or SVN etc etc....

But, one thing has struck me about the AWS console, its not very user friendly.  I don't mean to demigrate the system, its a great innovation, and very interesting that I can turn off the PC I always keep hosting my code at home, but the things not mentioned, hard to find, or simply obscure in the way the system works is boggling.

A good example of a boggling way of working is that you can create your virtual instance, you can be instructed how to connect to it, you can be inside it and you can see it has an IP, that is a local address to the cluster of machines around it on the node its running on, not an address on the internet through which you can access it.  So, to assign an address which can be seen by the outside world, you have to use an "Elastic IP".  This is all documented, but its obscure, you add the Elastic IP in a completely different place to your virtual machine, its on a different page, and then you have to associate it with the running VM.... This is clearly so as if you have more than one machine in the cloud you can address them separately, or even stop external access to the machine, but when you've selected the VM wizard to help you put it together, and the solution you've picked is the web server, to now have this Elasstic IP automatically created and assigned is... well its weird.

I'll leave this here, and go get on with some work...

Mounting Virtual Disk Images in Ubuntu

I've had a bit of a problem today, I've taken a virtual disk image of two of my older machines, binning them and started to use the virtual machines on my nice new shiney laptop, however, sometimes I just want to reference some of the files, to have to boot the entire vritual machine, or open the visual VMWare Player software in order to mount the drive was a bit of a pain.

So, I set about looking at how to use "vmware-mount" the utility to let you mount drives in the command line. Here's my step by step guide to the activity, which I'm blogging as I've not got my little note book with me, and I want to keep this knowledge around for future use... So if it benefits anyone else out there, go you.

My host operating system is Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with VMWare Player 4.0.1 installed.

1. You first need a mount point, so we create one, with any name.  I'm going to call mine "vdisk":

sudo mkdir /media/vdisk

2. Browse to the folder containing your vmdk image files, so I'm going to:

cd ~/virt/images

3. List the images there and make sure you have the name of the one you're going to use, mine is called "vista.vmdk", but it was called "vista 32bit.vmdk" and I noted that the command line tools, though supposedly supporting spaces in the filenames by wrapping everything in quotes actually worked better when I'd renamed the file without the spaces.

4. We need to know the partition within the disk image, so we perform:

vmware-mount -p ./vista.vmdk

You can substitute your filename or the whole path as you wish there, the output of this is the different logical partitions on the virtual disk image.  For my example this gives two partitions, the first is the tiny Vista boot partition, the other is my working 130gb of data files, so I now know my partition to mount is in that file and its index is 2.

5. The actual mounting of the virtual image through the partition to the mount point we created:

sudo vmware-mount ./vista.vmdk 2 /media/vdisk

Voila, the image should mount and become accessible.

6. To unmount the image you can't just click on the desktop icon and unmount, nor use unmount itself, you must use vmware-mount once again.  In my working I have been mounting multiple virtual images and then before logging off for the evening killing all the mounts, to do this perform:

sudo vmware-mount -x

All mounts should then drop.

Falklands Again

I'm a utterly at a loss, how often and to how many people, must the British Foreign Office say "The Falkland Islands determine for themselves whether to be British or not" and they chose to be British.

The Argentines are getting right on my tits with this attitude they have "we'd rather see the heir to the throne in civilian attire" all any Argentinian politician need do, to gain influence and votes, is shout "viva las malvina's" and all the troggladites come crawling out the woodwork to agree.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-16939043

And to say sending the Dauntless down there is militarisation is a laugh and a half, we often send a ship down there on patrol in the south Atlantic, the Royal Navy do more good down there than the Argentine armed forces combined!

Server Server Server Everywhere

The last 24 hours have been a pain in the bum, firstly because I've got man flu and keep coughing hunks of lung butter, but mainly because I've been in a quandary about servers.  Specifically I've an idea to design and build a system, which uses a server to host a database on the back end to store the data, I've been playing with MySQL for this very purpose and am happy to proceed on technical ground.

But, and its a bit But... I'm not entirely sure what to do about a server in general, I have set up a virtual machine hosting the server on my laptop, so wherever I go I have the server on a local looping back address, great for development.  I can copy this virtual machine to other physical hosts.  I could even place the development virtual machine (after a security check) on the final host system showing the whole thing to the world at large.

My trouble comes when I think about that final host... Will it be a box in my front room attached to my anaemic cable modem?  Will it be one of my physical Dell servers, which I buy hosted rack space for at a data centre?  Will it be a hosted server I buy/rent from a data centre?

These questions have no easy answer.  Especially as my project has £0 financing until at least in the late alpha stage, when I intend to tout it to a few known interested parties to see if they want to run with it as a concept and pay the bills at my end.

Certainly to host it myself on a box in the front room is free, I can even select to set up the linux server as "Free Software Only".  To demonstrate the system on such a slow uplink however could be detrimental, so what about the hosted offerings?

To rent 2U space (this is two wrack slices in a data centre) was not too bad in London, with unlimited I/O with the server for customers, and a simple sign up process the two hosts I looked at were decent enough... but you could not bring the machine yourself, you had to ship it to them, and it had to pass safety checks and power checks and be of a certain age.  Neither of my servers passed any of these checks online, let alone in person, they're slightly battered, old, Dell 2650's.  Running a vulnerable (to hack) version of Ubuntu Server... Plus, to ship the machine to them for checking would cost almost as much as I paid for the machine in the first instance.

To rent a hosted solution seemed to be the way to go, a little more expensive per hour of operation then using my own machine, but with the advantage of their support and their network behind it.  My only concern was to ask whether the data on the machine remained wholly and under my sole ownership.  They said it did, but reading the small print of two different hosting solutions I noted phrased such as "access to your data, files and programs, maybe deemed necessary at any time and shall be left accessible to the root or administrative users by your assigned administrator".  Essentially, saying they're going to look at the files at any time...

Is this a problem?  For my purposes 99% of the time, no, I only planned to place compiled binaries and a database on the machine, none of my intellectual property (IP) would be at risk.  Though, its not he IP we're worried about, its that pesky database.

Specifically the users database, these days you have to be very careful storing other peoples personal information, and in a secured database or not, if the machine is not physically on your premises you have you be very careful with your EULA wording to ensure that those signing up to your service know where the box is.

All very tedious, and means I need to go run around checking legal loops before committing to a hosting plan, for what should be a simple enough progression of a small, un-funded, project.

PC Specialist - Review

My new laptop then, I ordered it from PC Specialist, and I have come to my blog to make a fair and even handed appraisal of what they're up to... because, they maybe a PC Specialist, but customer service specialist they are not.

First of all, when you order you're presented with an excellent price and a miriad of choices to configure your machine, I agonized over this and then went for a fairly powerful machine (Core i7-2670M Processor, 8GB of RAM and an nVidia GT-540M graphics card) and was happy to do so with the reassuring reviews and testimonials on the PC Specialist site.

However, I did have a pre-sales query, this was handled, and I placed my order.  From there on, the customer service level dropped a little.  Not drastically, just enough to get me worrying, and even to make my wife ask questions - never a good thing.

So, according to the rather complex diagram on the site:

My order should have gone through pre-production into building out to Awaiting Dispatched and then out the door.  All good, I even bought "Silver Extra Care Delivery (Mon-Fri before Noon)" so on Monday this week I was happy to see (last thing) my machine move through building through quality control and into "Awaiting Dispatch".  I assumed I'd missed Mondays courier, so expected to see the machine ship Tuesday and be in my sweaty eager hands Wednesday...

But no, the machine did not ship, Wednesday afternoon still with no sign of it shipping I sent them a message asking "Is there a problem?"  No, no problem, came the reply, it'll dispatch and be with you Thursday.

Its Thursday right now, its after noon, clearly it didn't ship.

So I contact them, and I am assured it's shipping and gets moved up the queue (a head of who knows) and is supposedly shipped.  Save for two problems, when I put the consignment number into the DPD tracking website it says "Your search did not find any matching tracking. Please refine your search criteria."  And I have no faith that their customer service reps actually action what they've said they action.

Assuming it has shipped I'll have my hands on it tomorrow Friday, meaning of the entire length of my order it spent 4 whole days and one part day sat "Awaiting Dispatch".  Combine this with it sitting in "pre-production" for three working days (and a weekend - so five days) and you can see that nothing quite matched their own vaunted processing and production diagram above.

I'm not going to knock the quality of the product, I have after all not received it yet, but I am going to say that their customer service is neither transparent, nor objective.  You ask questions and you don't always get answers to the question posed, you get generic replies.  And their dispatch process is clearly not working as it appears it should, with "< 1 day" shown, how long did it take my boxed up laptop to travel from the testers bench to the dispatch gate?... Four days by all accounts, that's pretty poor when it was build in less than half a day...

Fining Insurance Companies

Am I the only one who finds it a little absurd to hear of Direct Line being fined for tampering with customer complaint files before submission to the regulatory body... How is fining them telling them off?.. All they'll do is pass on the cost of the fine to the already adversely affected customers in the form of higher premiums.

Surely to punish the insurer they should have enforced a drop in the amount of money they could charge for products for the next year... "24p per customer" or some such thing would be a fine, it would tell them off, and would enforce higher customer service standards as they would be scared of getting another fine.

Gah, the world whirls around and insurers charge what they like, and now the regulator enforces things in the most customer unfriendly way!

New Laptop Ordered

So, I've decided on my laptop specification and I ordered it... I've gone for a completely custom machine, without any Operating System.  Yes, after all my seeking I found a vendor able to produce me the machine I want without any Operating system.  The saving I made not having the operating system was significant.

So, I've had an Intel Core i7 Quad Core mobile processor (infact its HT, so its got 4 real cores and can run 8 threads) with 8GB of 1333Mhz DDR3 RAM and a dedicated 2Gb nVidia 540 GT Graphics card... its a 15.6" form factor.  All for under £550!

The only place I've skimped is on the hard drives, where I've gone for just a single 250GB 5400 RPM SATA drive, but this is mainly due to drive shortages following on from the flooding in south east Asia.

But this is a lot of processing power for the money, the same power from DELL costs over £1250 on the XPS 15 product line, and it seems impossible to get the Windows License refunded from anyone.

I will be going shopping for a new 15.6" carry case/shoulder bag.

And my chosen Operating System is going to be a Ubuntu derivative, I had toyed with Linux Mint being my chosen distro, but having used it for a few days on a virtual machine I'm not happy with it.

But my favourite distro is Ubuntu, the base from which Mint came, and also the inspiration of different offerings with the KDE shell, Gnome Shell (with and without Unity) and Xfce.  So I think I'm now going to go with Ubuntu to use Gnome as and when I like, but with the Xubuntu-desktop package installed so I can use the Xfce interface whenever I like.