Sunday, August 26, 2012

Fireworks and fun

Dry wear T shirts do not count as surf wear... My chest will strongly attest to that fact as it is chaffed as can be. While my dry wear shirt didn't pan out well, my $45 wetsuit is all aces!

We spent the morning on the beach, the afternoon napping, and the evening skim boarding! The kids are remarkably good with the skim board. I toss it out for them, and they jump right on for a 10 to 15 foot ride. As for me, I can only make it a few feet. XD

Isaac and Belle seem yo be magnetically attracted to the lazy river. :-)  If we stay in the room for more than a few minutes, the natives get restless and start clamoring for yet another trip to the slowly winding river of extreme adventure. Be wary though... you never know what you may encounter, be it a pirate, sea serpent, or zippy motorboat race. What a great vacation!

P.S. As to the title, I'm watching a firework show explode on the beach just outside my room. Carazy!

Fun Travels

Traveling with kiddos is a great adventure. There are lots of questions about when we'll be there, why can't we find a potty, and what snacks can we buy at our rest stops. :-)

Some of my favorite moments include chasing grasshoppers at a tourist information center, playing alligator at a McDonalds, annd  watching the kids do a team climbing experiment at chik-fil-a. :-)

Equally notable was a bizarre roadside rest stop. We were an hour into a very, very remote stretch of Virginia roadway, and then kids had been asking for a bathroom for the last ten minutes. We searched for anything with a bathroom, but there was just nothing... so, we settled for the side of the road. Cheryl hopped out, grabbed the portable toilet, and pantsed the bub. A second later, she was doing a mad, stomping dance. Ow ow ouch! We had managed to run over a red ant nest, and they were no making quick work of her feet. Ouch! Needless to say, we made that stop in record time and made a blitz for the next available antless pull over.

When we checked in on Saturday, the view from our porch was breathtaking. Literally. The beach is gorgeous, and the twelfth story view blew my mind!


Sunday, August 12, 2012

Cloud Hosting and Application Management with Uhurucloud

A few weeks ago, I received an invitation from Marius to try out UhuruCloud (by Uhuru Software).
Today I finally had a moment to check it out.

 Setting up an account was really easy. It was a 2 click signup process (Sign Up -> Auth with Google... DONE!).

Once I got into the management interface, I watched two getting started videos.

One for the web interface: 
http://uhurusoftware.zendesk.com/entries/21726547-getting-started-with-the-uhuru-appcloud

And one for the windows client: 
http://uhurusoftware.zendesk.com/entries/21434952-deploying-and-managing-apps-with-windows-cloud-admin-tool

Using the web interface, I created a cloud "RochesterPaintball". Next, I prepped the site by downloading and extracting the latest DokuWiki webapp artifact from DokuWiki.org. Once the site was prepped, it was a cinch to upload the app to uhuru using UhuruFS as the backing filestore.

I ran through the Dokuwiki installer, but ran into a hiccup. Dokuwiki kept forwarding me to a weird port number which didn't pass through very nicely. Once the setup was complete, I was no longer able to access the app. Pppt. :P

The dokuwiki installer wouldn't let me run the install again, so I started looking into tunneling:
See: http://uhurusoftware.zendesk.com/entries/21493617-using-tunnels-for-accessing-files-and-databases

With a few clicks, I had a local ftp tunnel to the UhuruFS remote cloud filesystem. Using Notepad++ and Filezilla, I was able to login and get access to local.php. I read through: https://www.dokuwiki.org/config and noticed that I set the baseurl wrong (given the weird port 44448 redirection, I had attempted to fix the failing auto-detect, but failed to specify a port). Tada! The wiki was up and running again!

A few moments later, I got a 404 for wiki syntax. So I went back to the root of the site... but I got a 404 there as well. O.o?!

I logged into the web admin interface, refreshed the site status, and found it in a state of "Starting". I reviewed the logs, but didn't see anything that hinted at the service going down or being unavailable. I cranked the VM up to 512m of memory (up from 128m), and the hiccups went away.

I noticed the user registration page wasn't working. I kept receiving an error about being unable to send mail, so I read the mail section of the dokuwiki docs, and installed the swiftmail plugin to get things rolling. Seems to be working so far. :)

Things I like:
  • Powerful, intuitive local admin client (See screenshot)
  • Easy tunneling
  • Swift log access


Things that Could Use a Little Improvement

  • UhuruFS service configuration is a two step process. It would be great if the required environment variable could be added by default, rather than requiring an unprompted manual step.
  • The only way to access the remote file system is via ftp. You can browse files using the admin client, but can't edit or delete them directly. It would be nice if this could be done directly through the client, or through something like Gladinet.
  • I don't see any record in the logs of the app crashing. I definitely received a 404 several times when I shouldn't have, and the problem seems to correct itself over time. It would be nice if there was some record of the issue, or a note saying it takes X amount of time for services to propagate across all nodes.
  • The web interface is pretty, but very lacking when it comes to functionality. It would be nice to have a status dashboard for all of your apps, and a way to view logs online.
  • There isn't much by way of monitoring. It would be really nice if I could set up notification rules like: "Notify me if the service is no longer in a Running state" or "Notify me if any errors occur in the logs" or "Notify me if the following regex occurs in the log".