PoolParty doc push

Wednesday we went to ISI to meet with the PoolParty devs, but mainly to learn how to install it as we are evaluating it vs RightScale.  They just released 1.1 this month and seem to be pushing to get 1.2 done with VMware support which is a plus for our infrastructure.  If you need to manage your cloud, start by apt-get or yum install git or get a DMG for your Mac then 

git clone git://github.com/auser/poolparty.git

gets you a local copy of the repo.  

$ git clone git://github.com/auser/poolparty.git

Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/ralf/poolparty/.git/

remote: Counting objects: 26692, done.

remote: Compressing objects: 100% (6554/6554), done.

remote: Total 26692 (delta 19138), reused 26122 (delta 18718)

Receiving objects: 100% (26692/26692), 106.27 MiB | 251 KiB/s, done.

Resolving deltas: 100% (19138/19138), done.

So some white boarding was done with the architecture and how to get started

You may want an IRC client, Colloquy seems popular on the mac, MIRC on Windows and Pidgeon on Ubuntu. Then join Freenode.org#poolpartyrc.

As cool as PoolParty seems, it will take more time for me to implement at this point it it seems I should spend time on clearer procedures as to what we are installing and worry about automation later.

FreshBooks seems like a pretty cool invoicing website, free if your 3 people.

CloudComputing and Conficker

Up way too early, this week is fun, maybe because it is the last full week I get to work in the office on cloud computing and we have a PoolParty meeting on Wednesday at ISI in Marina del Rey. This area is at the beading edge, I keep reading things that are just published and getting to play with them. The tide has definitely turned from colo to cloud.

Meanwhile I am listening to podcasts again and they have been great, Flossing with Bacon was cool but having Security Now call: "Windows is a steaming pile of crap" was really neat. He did some research on Conficker and found it a very interesting

At the office early, regretting chickening out of AMR yesterday, at least I didn't get rid of the whole position. So trying to buy C at 2.5 today and sell the rest of AMR at 5.5, while buying it back cheaper.

Shopping for internet

Seems like I may be working from home next month, can't go into office anymore, so I am looking for a better internet connection. Got better later in the day, but I think I need more reliability, time to run copper.

EC2 vs Colo

I have been reading up and considering the financial implications of EC2 vs. colo. Seems like there are lots of articles about this these days: The Weakness of Commodity Server to Cloud Server Cost Comparisons, Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance: The Good, Bad and the Ugly

LiLAX

We moved the meeting to 530 8th last minute, not to confuse our speaker, but being that he was late and then later because he didn't have my number, guess I will have to give that out to speakers in the future. This could be one of the last meetings downtown, we may move to El Segundo again.

Lots of interesting things were talked about.

tcpkill
tcpnice
fragroute
ettercap
ssh tuneling

Layer 5
dnspoof
sshmitm
webmitm
filesnarf
mailsnarf
msgsnarf
urlsnarf
webspy
sshow
driftnet

Injecting Network Traffic
scapy
hping3
nemesis
isic

Gizmo5 Skype calls

Today I got a cool email from Gizmo telling me that we can now make and receive calls with Skype, neat video showing it on an N95. But I have Fring loaded on my N95 and have been pretty happy with it for a long time. Either way it is cool that things are starting to interoperate. I bet in time everyone will know what Skype is, and Gizmo is a second to that right now, unfortunate as it supports standard SIP, but given how unstable the software is, has hurt it. Still it is a pretty cool platform. Things are also interesting on the Skype side as they have released a very cool app for the iPhone. I haven't tried it yet, but hear that it works great from Jacques. It is however limited to the WiFi for the free calls and does work on the Touch. So it makes the Belkin Skype phone obsolete for him.

Spring cleaning

Today I started spring cleaning, need to find a home for that 2000-01 MSDN, 50 pounds of CDs, books, computers, laptops and all the other things that might be turned into something easier to store, money. Some can be free I guess, why bother. I bought a cheap, used bar code reader at the TRW swap meet, sweet, should be helpfull in getting stuff out of here on Amazon and SwapTree which I signed up on today. I should figure out now how to get my inventory on my blog, since I figure that I might meet in person with some of you making exchange easy.

Eucalyptus

Today I want to play with Eucalyptus, the free Amazon API implementation that is developed at UCSB and there even is integration with RightScale going on right now as well as an annoucement at NY Cloud Computing Expo by RightScale. I am told Eucalyptus is based on Karmic Koala, or Ubuntu 9.10, this seems strange, since it was only announced Feb 20 by Mark ShuttleWorth. Ubuntu 9.04 includes Eucalyptus, sweet. Perhaps autoinst can be used to automate host config, but I am still leaning towards RightScale. There is some cool info coming from its CTO soon, not at liberty to disclose, but been asking for it. Karmic Koala is the 9.10 Ubuntu release in the works.