Anyway, I’ve been using that setup b/c it’s inside the AWS free-tier ; but with the problems I’ve had recently (see last post), I’m not sure if it’s the on-demand-iness, the micro’s virtual disk instead of an s3 distributed drive backing (my money is on the on-demand bit).

So I’ve been looking at the prices.  I looked first at the low-utilization micro instance, since I really don’t see enough traffic to qualify as “high utilization,” but apparently in AWS-speak, utilization is “how much would this system be online.”  Since the blog/sites would be on all the time, that’s “high utilization”

Current prices are on-demand at 2c/hr, so 1yr is 175$

Light Reserved is 23$ registratoin and 1.2c/hr, total 130$

Heavy utilization is 62$ and .5c/hr, 105$

To go up to a standard small (instead of micro) for the s3 backing:

on demand – 8.5c/hr, 745$

light – 98$ & 5c/hr, 535$

heavy – 276$ & 2c/hr, 450$

So … yeah, apparently it’s not quite as cheap as I was thinking for the year on AWS, but even if I split out across three instances for the various bits (my blogs, a couple sites we host, and a forum we run) it’d be ~300$/yr, opposed to currently we pay ~80$/mo on the business internet to run those things .  Still a net-savings of 400$ give or take.  And a massively higher throughput ; Not to mention that we can upgrade our home network from 1.5/1.5 business to probably 25/5 and STILL save 50$ a month  (there’s more on that bill, so I’m not sure which parts exactly would be removed, but I’m sure it’s more than the 300$ I’d be paying on the new structure)

So, there will likely be some flickering as I move to the reserved instance in the next month or so; I’m really hoping it helps the occasional choke-out I’m seeing.  If not, then I will DEFINITELY be putting in a support question

But it seems like maybe it’s having some issues with the 24/7 uptime concept, b/c the other day it was mentioned that my main blog had flaked and browser was declaring “unknown!”

Well, sure enough, couldn’t ssh into the server either, weird.  All the status checks said good, but the system was definitely not responding well.  So I bounced it from their admin interface, it came back up, and has been happy for a few days now.

So, I’m guessing that it doesn’t actually like being on all the time, maybe it swaps out when it’s not being used, and eventually gets GC’d even though it’s “active”

Not sure why the status notices said clear though …

Anyway, that’s a potential issue I’ll need to figure out better before moving anything bigger over.

BUT! The instance hung/crashed a week or so ago, and when I restarted apparently it got a new IP!  oops.

So I finally hooked up the “Elastic IP” settings, and we’ll see if that’s static or not.

If this works for another week or two I might look into offloading more stuff.  Because honestly, the home business line is costing way more than it’s worth.  I can cut the price by half and raise the speeds by 10x …

I started with experimenting with some of my blogs, and didn’t find any significant issue with the process.

I want to look at all the docs, find out the benefits of using amazon’s RDB system, elasticache (memory caching) etc.

Charges are based on having the system, then network traffic, disk space and disk access, for the simplest construct.  So the question arises — if I hooked up a cache, could I keep everything in cache and have less disk access?  would it be more efficient costwise?  at a guess, no, I doubt all my sites combined could combine to anything noticeable on the scales those are probably structured at.

OTOH, running a business, it seems a sight simpler than the old business line concept, and then you can just hook it into their CDN and even distribute the site amongst their data centers so processing is done in local spaces (which I presume is when cache and their DB system come in really handy)

See, here’s the problem I’m having.  When I get home, I play computer games with my son, then frequently spend the rest of the evening trying not to move too rapidly a my daughter sleeps on my back.  I haven’t been having the time to play with fun things lately at home.  Heck, I only manage to do the dishes a couple times a week (and we really have enough to do it every day and a half)

At the same time, I decided early this year that I wasn’t going to post about the stuff I’m doing at work.  First, there’s all the various clauses about what we can or can’t say and how we can or can’t represent our selves, our companies, clients, allies, and bitter enemies.  And a lot of what I’m doing right now is very specialized bits of stuff.  It’s also quite cool.

But, if someone went looking, it would be trivial to link my work to this blog.  Not that I work that hard to hide my name, but if I start talking about all the widgets and sprockets and cogs, it becomes a blog about work.  And that’s where the problem comes in

So, for now, I’m again going to put this blog in deep-freeze.  Add it to your google reader or feed subscriptions, and then when it comes back you’ll know about it.

Originally this blog started as a place to talk about the seriously geek stuff I wanted to discuss on my main blog, but that none of the people I knew would really be interested in.  It was more for me to have someplace to talk.  Then I decided I was interested in explaining and tracing crypto.  A kind of how-to primer.  B/c I can’t be the only kid who found that kind of thing interesting

But when I got to DES … well, that stalled the blog the first time.  And the second time.  So I broadened it out.  Time constraints mostly killed it that time.  And time again now.  I have a bunch of interesting stuff I’d like to post, but I don’t know when I could make it live anyway, so it hardly seems worthwhile.

And it’s not like I post on my personal blog either, so, maybe I’m just past the blogging phenomenon and i’m “old” now … So maybe deadbeef will come back in a new form.  Not sure what that would be, but since it still requires that I have time to do it … could be some time

I’ve got some huge pics for the kcachegrind post, but they’re 1277×995, which seems a bit LARGE to embed in the post …

Partially that’s because I lost track of the date, and partially that’s because I was going to do an update from ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 on my secondary server, so I figured I’d review the process.

The idea being that I ran Slackware for like 8 years, and loved it, but quit having time for the hand-compiling management that I wanted with that system.  But there wasn’t (AFAICR) any good base system version upgrading.  There might have been, but by the time the first update would have gone, i had so many customized compiles that it would have caused more problems than help.  And my system was more up to date with latest versions, because I didn’t have to go through package testing.

Then I went to gentoo, to keep that compiled “for your use”, and it was good, except some of the things I wanted to do I had to customize too much for, and so I couldn’t do upgrades again.

So now I’m moving to ubuntu.  Most of the things I’ve looked for i can find prebuilt packages for; and the VM management seems a little cleaner than the last try through gentoo, in that I don’t need to install X-Windows on my server to install the VM servers; it’s partially because ubuntu has good docs on Xen and KVM; I think gentoo had these options too now, but not positive.

Except 10.04 is still only in RC, not yet released.  I’m figuring on sometime this week, maybe, but figured I’d post since I was already a full week off.

I’ll probably write up that post when it happens and queue it up.  Trying to get some of these queued up, but I never get a chance to take all the screenshots I want for a few of them

So for now, I’m going to post the first and third Tuesday of each month.  If I can get up to say 12 entries ahead in my queue, I may raise it to weekly.  But between two kids and being one of the seniormost developers at the office, I’m not always getting time to post often.  It’s a nice problem to have, I suppose, but I do like posting things here.

So, first and third Tuesday, for now.  So the next post would be 19 January 2009.  Let’s see if I can hit that rather sad target

Apparently I hadn’t finished all the posts, so I hadn’t queued them   I’ll try to get some new posts up this week, and maybe my son will give me an opportunity to get ahead some

To wit:  I’ve added “Tool Tips”, which is a category I’m going to use for posting about various programming or security tools I find and use.  Sort of a cross between overviewing and my personal review of it.   Not going to get all fancy dance with “4 shebangs up!” or fancy pics or anything, but will be posting my thoughts and opinions on the pieces.

And I’m going to currently lay that out as every first and third Tuesday.  I think that’s a reasonable frequency right now, two tools a month I think I can hit that.  And I’m hoping to set up some pipelined posts during the hiatus (like this one, for instance). And hopefully that will give me a little leeway in case I don’t hit up any new tools immediately.

Actually, now I almost want to make a graphic and do 4-shebangs out of 7 or something …