Apple released OS X Lion v. 10.7.3…

• http://support.apple.com/

Google Docs for Android got a nice little update…

• https://market.android.com/

Facebook filed for an IPO…proposed stock symbol? FB, of course…

• http://www.theverge.com/

Awesome plugin for WordPress will be released soon…

• http://www.responsiveplugin.com/

Digging into WordPress has been updated to WordPress 3.3.1…

• http://digwp.com/

Some great advice from Lifehacker on how to turn getting fired into a useful lesson…

• http://lifehacker.com/

Some cool stuff on Twitter Bootstrap and WordPress…

• http://themeshaper.com/

An awesome little guide on how to configure Postfix with Amazon‘s SES…

• http://www.millcreeksys.com/

Lastly, Pfizer screwed up pretty bad…

• http://gizmodo.com/

It stings, but my time as an IT Specialist has come to an end. It lasted exactly a month, and it ended in the same conference room it began in – irony at its best. Though it isn’t fair, and I didn’t deserve to get let go, I’ve learned a few lessons here:

0. Getting let go sucks.

I just wanted to point this out. It’s not fun getting let go from a job you truly enjoy. If you’ve never experienced this, be thankful. I pray you’ll never have to.

1. Don’t shock the system

If you’re hired to build an IT infrastructure from scratch, which I was, it’s going to cost a lot. Hardware and software aren’t cheap and they won’t be…most small businesses know nothing about IT and the costs associated. Take spending slow at first, be conservative in the first budget you propose, and as the grow more comfortable with you and what you’re doing, I believe doors to spend ore on infrastructure will open. Don’t shock the system by going credit card crazy with no apparent justification. Justify everything.

2. Communicate often

I believe if there had been awesome communication between my department and “senior leadership”, I might still have a job. Again, most people don’t understand IT operations, so it needs to be communicated often. Even if you aren’t talking about what you’re doing, establish an amazing relationship with your leadership regardless of your opinion of them.

This goes both ways. Leadership should communicate down. If leadership has questions, they should ask. If you feel like something’s out of control, put it on hold, try to understand it, and after trying to understand what’s happening either allow it to continue or make it stop. It’s simple, and if you’re a leader you should have the strength to do this. If you can’t – you’re unseasoned, unprofessional, and don’t deserve to be in the position you’re in – not to mention, I won’t respect you.

3. Set and re-set expectations

People decide to bring IT in-house to save money. While this is very possible, the chance of  first year savings is slim. In fact, the first year might cost more! Subsequent years will be cheaper and you’ll begin to save  and see ROI then. Discuss expectations often, and put them in writing.

4. Put IT into “Plain English”

If you haven’t caught on yet, I don’t believe people understand IT operations, what it takes to build an infrastructure, or even what “infrastructure” means. Explain what you’re buying, why you’re buying it, and how it will benefit them…if you justify an immediate benefit, you’ll be even better. Translate that nerdy IT speak into understandable English. Think of it as explaining it to your grandmother or a 4 year old.

…

Next time a small business or a start up chooses to hire me to build an infrastructure from scratch, I intend to do all 4 of these things and even more to protect my job and my integrity…and you should probably do some of the same.

By now you should have a feel for the AWS/EC2 console and hopefully you’ve picked a Linux distro!

Launching an Instance

This is the exciting part, we get to fire up a new instance! Let’s do it. Head on over to the EC2 console and click Launch Instance.

This is the Request Instance menu. You can see I’ve chosen an Ubuntu AMI. The gold star means that this particular AMI, if used with a micro instance, qualifies for the free tier. Once you’ve picked your AMI, click Select.

This is the Instance Detail menu. You can usually leave all of this alone unless you want to change the number of instance you’re launching, the size of the instance, or if you want a specific availability zone. You could also choose a spot instance, but that’s beyond the scope of this tutorial. Click Continue when you’re done.

This is the Advanced Instance Options menu. I’d strongly suggest you leave everything default here. Click Continue!

This is the last Instance Detail screen. It allows you to add meta-data to your instances. The default attribute is Name…which is just naming your server. It’s a friendly name; not a NetBIOS name or host name. Click Continue when you’re finished.

In order to login to your instance later, you must have a key pair. This allows for secure, passwordless logins. If you don’t have the key pair, you cannot login to your server. At all! Name your keypair anything you want, I’ve named this one “EC2_tutorial”. Click Create and Download, then click Continue. I’ll come back to this more later on.

This is the Configure Firewall menu. It allows you to configure a virtual firewall that sits in front of your instance. If you choose the default instance, all ports are blocked. I’ll come back to this later in the tutorial.

You’ve made it! Now we can launch the instance. Look over the Review screen and click Launch when you’re ready!

After clicking launch, you’ll be returned to the console. Take note of the Instance Details tab at the bottom. You’ll need to know Public DNS name later in this tutorial. Write it down.
 
Configuring Security

I would assume you want to get into your instance now!

This is the Security Group section of the EC2 console. Click on the Default group, then the inbound tab at the bottom. Delete everything there. Then, on the left select “Allow all TCP” leave the IP range at 0.0.0.0/0 for now. Click Add Rule, then Apply Rule Changes.

Your screen should now look like this. This allows access to every port from any IP address. It’s insecure, but you can fix it later on your own.

Logging In To Your Instance

This is the most exciting part! Logging in for the first time. If you’re on a Mac or a Linux machine, open up the Terminal or Command Line. You’ll be logging in via SSH. These instances usually don’t include GUIs. Enter the following command:

chmod 600 /PATH/TO/KEYPAIR.pem

Where /PATH/TO/KEYPAIR.pem is the path to your key pair file. That’s one of those weird Linux things. Don’t worry about it. We just changed file permissions. Now, to actually login:

ssh -i /PATH/TO/KEYPAIR.pem USER@EC2.PUBLIC.DNS.COM

Again, where /PATH/TO/KEYPAIR.pem is the path to your key pair file.

The username (before the @ symbol), depends on the distro you’ve chosen. Check the documentation. For the Ubuntu AMIs, the username is Ubuntu.

If you’re on a Windows machine, you need PuTTy. Follow the instructions under the “SSH with PuTTy” section here (Normally I would supply screen shots and instructions, but I’m on a Mac…can’t run PuTTY on a Mac!).

Congratulations! You’ve successfully chosen an AMI and launched an instance!

Up next: Installing updates and the infamous LAMP stack!

Booster seems like an awesome company to work for. I’ve been in their Atlanta office twice at this point and the culture is awesome. It’s full of energy which I think will make getting things done relatively easy and a lot of fun.

Another cool part is who I get to work for. His name is John, but most people know him as @Tentblogger. I’ve followed him online for several years, so actually meeting and working with him still feels somewhat surreal…but definitely exciting.

In the past I’ve worked for Kroger, Chick-Fil-A, Kroger (again) and I’ve interned every summer since 2007 at the National Christian Foundation (NCF). I’ve never had a full-time job like this before, so I’m super excited about it! 

On a more sentimental note, I need to thank everyone at NCF for the past 4 years. Being able to learn the ins and outs of IT and everything that goes a long with it has been awesome and I wouldn’t be where I am now without them. It’s been fun, and I’ll definitely miss everyone…but I’m only 7 minutes away.

Day 1 is Monday. I’m amped.

UPDATE: See this post for a quick little update.

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

We lost a great one.

Every generation has someone they look up to, they admire.

I looked up to Steve, I admired Steve. I loved his character, his influence, his ideas, his attention to details. The list could go on.

One of my personal goals was to meet Steve. I wish that could’ve happened.

Though he is gone, his legacy will live on.

Apple will live on.

I installed OS X Lion this afternoon. The last OS X release he got to see; I’m sure he already had influence on 10.8. I’m sure we’ll see it when Apple releases it.

Maybe we’ll meet in heaven. I sure hope so.



Imagine this: A ginormous cluster of computers on an optical network running an OS similar to VMWare ESXi with some of the fattest connections to the Internet in the world. That’s basically what EC2 is. Every time you create a new “instance”, you’re launching a virtual server on top of that platform. It’s incredibly powerful, and you’re here because you want in! Let’s get started.

Signing Up

Signing up is the easiest part of the entire AWS experience. Head on over to the EC2 page on the AWS site and click  (or click that Sign Up Now button…it goes to the same place!). At this point, you can either log in with an existing Amazon.com account, or create a new one. After that, follow the instructions, enter your payment information and you’re signed up! It can take up to 12 hours for your account to become active, but usually it only takes a few minutes. See? Easy.

AWS Lingo

AWS does come with some lingo that you need to understand. Here’s a quick list:

• Region: There’s 5 of them: US East (Virginia), US West (N. California), EU West (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). You can choose the region on the EC2 dashboard. Choose the region closest to you.
• Instance = virtual server
• AMI = Amazon Machine Image; think of any imaging solution. It’s an image of a machine that can run on the EC2 platform. They’re numbered in a format like this: “ami-06ad526f“.
• EBS = Elastic Block Store; These are essentially hard drives (Volumes). Volumes can be mounted and unmounted from different instances. They’re networked, so if this was a physical machine, it’d be like booting off of a SAN
• Instance Store = the equivalent of a locally attached hard drive

EC2 Instance Types

EC2 Instances come in several different types. Each Instance Type has a different memory and CPU capacity. This size of your blog will ultimately determine the type of Instance Type you need. For most, the micro instance is sufficient; it’s also free for a year! You can see the full breakdown of Instance Type pricing and specs here and here respectively.

Access the AWS Management Console

Now that you’re signed up, it’s time for the Management console. This is where we’re going to do everything from here on out, so familiarize yourself with it’s general appearance.

It defaults to the S3 tab, but since we’re working on EC2, click on the EC2 tab. Here you’ll see a ton of information right off the bat: 

The most important things to look at are the Service Health and My Resources sections. It’s a quick and easy way to see the current AWS state as well as how many instances you’re running. As you can see, I’m running a single instance here and AWS health is in the green! That’s good!

Choosing a Distro

We’re not going to start an actual instance just yet for two reasons: that’s the next post, and there’s some planning on your part! Let’s look at the distro options. Click on Launch Instance. You’ll see a few options:

This is the Request Instance Wizard. It’s ultimately how you launch an instance, but it’s also how you choose a Distro to launch. You’ll see of top that you can launch an Amazon Linux AMI, which is basically a custom version of Red Hat, or you can choose Red Hat, Suse, and a few more. I’ve launched a few of these, and you’re more than welcome to assuming you know those distros fairly well. I usually opt for clicking on the “Community AMIs” tab and launching an Ubuntu instance. (Ubuntu is the distro I always use and the distro I recommend for Linux beginners. If you’d like the official Ubuntu AMIs, head to Alestic and click the tab corresponding to the region you’re in.)

Next Steps

Take some time thinking about the Instance Type and Distro that would be best for you. It’s very important to choose the right one the first time since starting over is never fun! After you decide, it’s time to launch the instance, log in, and set up LAMP! ..and that’s what’s coming next!

Coming up this week is a series on Getting Started with AWS EC2! I’m going to focus on the free tier, but it’ll apply for any tier. I could write it all in one post, but it’d be massive and no one likes massive blog posts…at least I don’t. Here’s the breakdown:

• Signing up and choosing a Linux distro.
• Starting the instance, configuring the firewall, and logging in via SSH
• Installing updates and LAMP
• Configuring SNS and CloudWatch for monitoring

EC2 is an awesome platform, but getting started is a definite challenge.

I’m looking forward to this one! Get ready!

I’ve been in the process of server migration over the past few days. It’s been easy and I’ve experienced no down time thanks to Cloudflare and the fact that DNS propagation takes a while.

One of the hardest parts of migration wasn’t the site files, it was the databases! I had exported all of the databases into 1 SQL file via phpMyAdmin, but it was too large for phpMyAdmin to import so I had to find a way to get everything back where it belonged! Thankfully, MySQL makes this simpler than I’d imagined.

To import a SQL file:

1. Login to the server via SSH
2. Login to mysql with: mysql -u USER -p'PASSWORD'where USER is your MySQL user and PASSWORD is your MySQL password.
3. Type: source FILENAME.SQL where FILENAME.SQL is the path to the SQL file you wish to import
4. Hit enter, and watch it import!

I was looking through some Google Analytics reports last night and noticed the site search report. I’ve never paid a ton of attention to it, but it made me think. Iknow why we have search bars, and I even know why WordPress includes one by default, but if you look at the numbers, it becomes tempting to remove it from the sidebar.

I think the biggest issue is people’s prior history with in-site searches. Usually they don’t work – at all. I think people might’ve become accustomed to that and though they see the search bar, they would rather hit the back button and scroll through Google’s search results instead of taking the risk of a bad search algorithm.

My question is how do we tell people that it’s ok to use our blog’s built in search and that if their query exists, they’ll find it? I replaced WordPress’ built in search with a Google Custom Search Engine. I guarantee you’ll find what you want…if it exists within the confines of this blog…it’s Google’s algorithm!

I mean, I don’t want to over glorify it, it’s just search, but at the same time, seeing those stats above is kind of disheartening.

Have you ever thought about this? Any thoughts?