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10:53am UTC: We have restored services on our european mirror machine which was not compromised. DNS should be shifting you over right about ... now..


Clickable - http://www.uzvy.com/


http://www.simplynoise.com/

http://www.simplynoise.com/download.html#soundscapes


Thanks for this, I usually listen to deep house/trance, but this is really relaxing.. I especially like the brown/red noise with oscillation.


Is there a rationale for this? I read on wikipedia but couldn't find anything - have links to any good papers?


White noise is a common synthetic noise source used for sound masking by a Tinnitus masker.

White noise machines are sold as privacy enhancers and sleep aids and to mask tinnitus. White noise CDs, when used with headphones, can aid concentration by blocking out irritating or distracting noises in a person's environment. In open plan offices, large corporations such as ExxonMobil apply white noise to reduce the reach of speech, thus, by preventing office staff from being distracted by conversations in the background, safeguarding productivity.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_noise


Well, you can do the same thing for lot less by developing a facebook/opensocial application.


It'd be great if you can share it.


It's really something that is specific to what we do and I had/have no intention of making it generic or let alone designing the type of thing that helps people who don't have experience doing sys admin - because I want to stay focused. For those that are interested these are the main techniques I use:

First I go to slicehost and create a machine, they send me a email when it's done (about 5 mins or so).

I have one install script and a syncing script, The install scripts one calls the sync script. After the machine is live I just use the sync one to update it. $hostname is the name or IP address of the new machine.

First I copy SSH authorization over, so I can login without a password (assumes you have created SSH keys already - which is one time event):

ssh root@$hostname "mkdir /root/.ssh; echo \"`cat /root/.ssh/id_dsa.pub`\" > /root/.ssh/authorized_keys2"

Then run various commands on the new machine. I put these in a file "commands.fragment". which contains things like

  mkdir /var/www

  groupadd -g600 web

  chgrp web /var/www

  yum -y install iptables ntp
and so on, then run it:

  cat commands.fragment | ssh root@$hostname
The I run the syncing script (which I'll rerun over the life of the machine) Then I sync my code across:

  rsync -avz -e ssh /var/www/ root@$hostname:/var/www/
and programs I've complied:

  rsync -avz -e ssh /usr/local/ root@$hostname:/usr/local/
and so on.

Now we have everything in place we can start the services for whatever the box does, for example to start a web server:

  ssh root@$hostname "/sbin/chkconfig --add lighttpd; /etc/init.d/lighttpd start"
And that's it.

My script took me a few hours to write and I did so that I can scale up (and down) in a hurry by adding a machine rather than taking the existing machines (there are 2) down whilst slicehost resize it - which is not something I wanted do while there is a lot of traffic coming in. We don't really need multiple machines, but buying one big slice is expensive to have running the whole time.

Hope that helps.


Thanks for the excellent follow up! It sure helps.


This is excellent advice. But would it give an edge if you are starting a product on the lines of http://basecamphq.com/ ?

37 signals does have customers outside the US but I suppose its a small figure.


http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hans...

I agree with David that no amount will ever keep programmers from programming. So instead of sweating out 14+ hours a day in hope that you can retire in 5 years, why not live your life as you go.


http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/ is a useful tool too.


http://domainsite.com/ works really well. Simple UI and full domain control is what I look for. It also has a simple 1 click integration with google apps.


We could automate all these steps using scripts. A very good example is the scripts by RightScale - http://github.com/rightscale/right_link/tree/master


Definitely agree, and the series will move in that direction. However, I think it is important to go over the setup sans automation first -- for the sake of people who have never used the utilities I'm going over.

After all, some will need to step out of an automated script's / puppet config / chef recipe box to do something custom to their setup.


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