1. Sign up for EC2 at http://aws.amazon.com/
2. Save the key file at secure location
3. Install ElasticFox in FireFox
4. Create a security group using ElasticFox
   • Name: SSH Security
   • Description: Allow SSH
   • Permissions:
   • • tcp, 22, 22, [your external ip]/32
   • • tcp, 80, 80, 0.0.0.0/0
5. Create a 1GB storage volume
6. Start instance with the “SSH Security” security group

Set up apache, rails, mysql, passenger, etc

• ‘sudo gem install god’
• Get it started automatically on system start and set up a directory for config files -http://atmos.org/index.php/2008/10/19/adding-god-to-etcinittab-on-a-linux-box/
• Create /etc/god/sphinx.god with the following – substitute values for [appname], your app path, uid and gid

require 'yaml'

[
 {
 :name => '[appname]',
 :root => '/var/www/[appname].com'
 }

].each do |app|

God.watch do |w|
 w.group = "#{app[:name]}-sphinx"
 w.name  = w.group + "-1"

 w.interval = 30.seconds

 w.uid = "[uid, e.g. your username]"
 w.gid = "[gid, e.g. 'daemon']"

 w.start         = "searchd --config #{app[:root]}/config/sphinx.conf"
 w.start_grace   = 10.seconds
 w.stop          = "searchd --config #{app[:root]}/config/sphinx.conf --stop"
 w.stop_grace    = 10.seconds
 w.restart       = w.stop + " && " + w.start
 w.restart_grace = 15.seconds

 w.pid_file = File.join(app[:root], "tmp/pids/sphinx.pid")

 w.behavior(:clean_pid_file)

 w.start_if do |start|
 start.condition(:process_running) do |c|
 c.interval  = 5.seconds
 c.running   = false
 end
 end

 w.restart_if do |restart|
 restart.condition(:memory_usage) do |c|
 c.above = 100.megabytes
 c.times = [3, 5] # 3 out of 5 intervals
 end
 end

 w.lifecycle do |on|
 on.condition(:flapping) do |c|
 c.to_state      = [:start, :restart]
 c.times         = 5
 c.within        = 5.minutes
 c.transition    = :unmonitored
 c.retry_in      = 10.minutes
c.transition    = :unmonitored
 c.retry_in      = 10.minutes
 c.retry_times   = 5
 c.retry_within  = 2.hours
 end
 end
end

end

• make sure root user has access to searchd
• make sure killing the god process automatically get respawned
• make sure killing searchd process get respawned by god. To debug, use
  • sudo god status — you will see [taskid] as running
  • sudo log [taskid]
• Added god config file for memcached. Quite similar to sphinx.god, but without the outer loop on apps, and with the following commands -

w.start         = "memcached -u aflatune"
w.stop          = "killall memcached"

Somehow memcached doesn’t start/stop properly with god. Though anytime god itself is restarted, it tries to create a memcached process (and I haven’t seen memcached process going down) so we are okay for now. Anyone has a better way to setup memcached with god?

As the new server does not have svn installed, git-svn wasn’t available and trying to install subversion there proved problematic – getting errors about some perl library that I did not care to investigate. Finally decided to do the SVN to GIT convertion on a windows box.

Following the process in the article above resulted in a perfectly good git clone of the original svn repository. Yay!

Copied the repository folder to the web server.

Gave up on git-daemon and git though apache. Opted for gitois. See further below.

I want to expose the repository like git://[ip or domain]/aflatune.git. The documentation around git-daemon isn’t terribly good – did not find any step by step “set up git-daemon” tutorials – so doing this by trial and error.

1. Create /etc/init.d/git-daemon file with the following contents (taken shamelessly from https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=329445)

#!/bin/bash
# git-daemon    Init script to run the git-daemon
#
# Author:       Marcel Haerry <haerry+rpms(at)puzzle.ch>
#
# chkconfig: - 98 02
#
# description: Run the git-daemon to serve various directories. By default it serves /srv/git
# processname: git-daemon
# config: /etc/sysconfig/git-daemon

PATH=/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin
export PATH

[ -f /etc/sysconfig/git-daemon ] && . /etc/sysconfig/git-daemon
lockfile=${LOCKFILE-/var/lock/subsys/git-daemon}
gitdir=${GITDIR-/srv/git}
gitvhost=${GITVHOST-no}
user=${GITUSER-nobody}
options=${OPTIONS-"--reuseaddr --verbose --detach"}
gitdaemon=${GITDAEMON-/usr/bin/git-daemon}
RETVAL=0

gitoptions="--user=${user} ${options}"
if [ $gitvhost = yes ]; then
	gitoptions="${gitoptions} --interpolated-path=${gitdir}/%H/%D"
else
	gitoptions="${gitoptions} --base-path=${gitdir}"
fi

# Source function library.
. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions

start() {
    echo -n $"Starting git-daemon: "
    daemon $gitdaemon $gitoptions
    RETVAL=$?
    echo
    [ $RETVAL = 0 ] && touch ${lockfile}
    return $RETVAL
}

stop() {
    echo -n $"Stopping git-daemon: "
    killproc $gitdaemon
    RETVAL=$?
    echo
    [ $RETVAL = 0 ] && rm -f ${lockfile}
}

restart() {
    stop
    start
}

case "$1" in
  start)
    start
    ;;
  stop)
    stop
    ;;
  restart)
    restart
    ;;
  status)
    status $gitdaemon
    RETVAL=$?
    ;;
  *)
    echo $"Usage: $0 {start|stop|status|restart}"
    exit 1
esac

exit $RETVAL

1(b). Make sure it is executable

 chmod +x /etc/init.d/git-daemon

2. Put repository in /srv/git/, in my case /src/git/aflatune

3. Create a bare repository – in my case aflatune.git – by doing

git clone --bare aflatune aflatune.git

4. Start git-daemon service

/sbin/service git-daemon start

5. Test to see if the daemon is serving the repositor

git ls-remote git://127.0.0.1/aflatune.git

Here I got the error -

fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

Good resource on different ways of setting up git server – http://www.jedi.be/blog/2009/05/06/8-ways-to-share-your-git-repository/

Decided to set up gitthrough http (apache) – gave up after facing issues setting up auth.

Okay – Let’s try gitosis.

Followed steps in http://scie.nti.st/2007/11/14/hosting-git-repositories-the-easy-and-secure-way and http://eagain.net/gitweb/?p=gitosis.git;a=blob;f=README.rst;hb=master. Got a couple of errors on the way -

1.

-sh-3.2$ git clone git@174.143.169.89:gitosis-admin.git
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/aflatune/gitosis-admin/.git/
Enter passphrase for key '/home/aflatune/.ssh/id_rsa':
sh: gitosis-serve: command not found
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

Resolved by copying gitosis* from ‘which gitosis-serve’ location to where ‘git’ is. In my case -

sudo cp /usr/bin/gitosis-* /usr/local/bin

Probably not the best fix, but I had already sunk in a few hours trying to get this set up.

2.

As I am using a Windows machine with TortoiseGIT, I had to figure out where to put the .ssh folder. That appears to the user folder – “C:\Documents and Settings\[user]\.ssh\”

Tip for setting up the local user to be used with git (more at http://kylecordes.com/2008/04/30/git-windows-go/) -

git config --global user.name "John Doe"
git config --global user.email "john.doe@company.com"

1. Merge infopath forms and then export
2. Export multiple forms at a time

The first approach is useful if you have the infopath form setup properly for merging or when custom merge logic is needed. When that is not the case, and if all you need to get data into Excel, simply exporting multiple forms together is the way to go. Here’s how to use it –

• Open any form from the document library
• Click ‘Export to Excel’
• In Wizard step 1, select ‘All form data’
• In step 2, select ‘Export data from this form and these additional forms’
• Add other forms
• Finish!

You will have data from all the selected forms into Excel.

Get Ruby

We need Ruby to install Enterprise Ruby.
yum install ruby

Get Enterprise Ruby

I store all downloaded third party source code at /var/local/src
cd /var/local
mkdir src
cd src

Get the Enterprise Ruby source code. Go to http://www.rubyenterpriseedition.com/download.html for current version
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/58677/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20090610.tar.gz
tar zxvf http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/58677/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20090610.tar.gz
cd ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20090610
yum install gcc-c++ zlib-devel openssl-devel readline-devel
./installer


Finalize Enterprise Ruby install

Add path to ~/.bashrc
PATH=$PATH:/opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20090610/bin/
Uninstall ruby
yum remove ruby*
Make sure ‘ruby’ resolves to Enterprise Ruby
which ruby

MySQL

Install MySQL

yum install php-mysql mysql mysql-server mysql-devel

Set up MySQL service

Take contents from http://www.centos.org/docs/2/rh-cm-en-1.0/s1-service-mysql.html for /etc/init.d/mysql. Then,
service mysql start
Now set up root password for MySQL
/usr/bin/mysqladmin -u root password 'new-password'
/usr/bin/mysqladmin -u root -h aflatune password 'new-password'

Install MySQL gem

gem install mysql

Set up Rails

gem install rails

Create a test rails project

cd /var/www
rails test

Config test app database

Set up config/database.yml with -
production:
adapter: mysql
encoding: utf8
database: test
username: root
password: [root-password]
Verify database connection with the following -
export RAILS_ENV=production
rake db:schema:dump

Set up apache

Edit httpd.conf
vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
Add a virtualhost at the bottom of the file

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot /var/www/test/public
</VirtualHost>

Now go to http://[server-ip] and you should see Rails welcome message

Phusion Passenger

Let’s set up Phusion Passenger now to optimally serve rails sites.
Follow instructions on http://www.modrails.com/install.html. Quick reference here -
gem install passenger
yum install httpd-devel apr-devel
passenger-install-apache2-module
vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
copy the 3 lines the passenger installer showed and paste under the modules list in httpd.conf
service httpd restart

Get a server

Got a fresh 512MB slice from http://slicehost.com. SSH into the server. On Windows, Bitvise Tunnelizer is an awesome tool.

Get apache server

yum upgrade
yum install httpd
service httpd restart

Open port 80

Open flle /etc/sysconfig/iptables:
# vi /etc/sysconfig/iptables
Add rule as follows before the last ‘reject’ line in the file:
-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
Save and close the file.
Restart iptables:
# /etc/init.d/iptables restart
Go to http://[server-ip]. You should see default apache landing page

export APR_CONFIG=”/var/local/src/httpd-2.2.6/srclib/apr/apr-1-config”
export APU_CONFIG=”/var/local/src/httpd-2.2.6/srclib/apr-util/apu-1-config”
export APXS2=”/var/local/src/httpd-2.2.6/support/apxs”
export HTTPD=’/var/local/src/httpd-2.2.6/httpd’

• DownThemAll! – Great download manager
• FireFTP – Nice FTP client
• Firebug and Firecookie – Must have for any web dev
• Gmail Manager – I have 8 gmail based email accounts. Can’t imaging life without Gmail Manager!

Also trying out a few plugins that haven’t tried before -

• FoxTab – 3D in your browser? Sounds intriguing.
• GooglePreview – Improved google search results. Hope it doesn’t slow things down.

Last couple of years, I have also been trying out this thing called entrepreneurship. During this time, I have experienced a lot and have learnt a lot. Not just the technologies, but a whole new world of corporate management as a senior executive – evaluating new ideas, planning and executing products, setting up and running development and marketing teams and a lot more. Most notable projects I have been a founding member of are aflatune and evonynet.

In this blog I hope to put together my thoughts on everything from the mundane coding intricacies to the world changing ideas.