moxiefoxtrot » General

PowerDNS Interface – Update

Ryan — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 14:52:45 +0000

Awhile back I posted about my PowerDNS interface and I’ve had a lot of interest. I’ll be releasing this code to the general public this summer, most likely towards the end of July. Stay tuned!

Just a quick blog update..

Ryan — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 17:43:54 +0000

I haven’t really blogged about anything in awhile so I figured I would do a quick right up on a new VPS I got running Ubuntu 9.10 on the VMware platform, in the past I’ve used a Xen based VPS from Slicehost and I’m currently using shared hosting from Fivebean. I’m particualy interested in this because myself and Matthew Helmke wrote a book on VMware awhile back and I wanted to see how the performance was compared to Xen or OpenVZ in a VPS market. So, I picked up this VPS a few days ago and it’s running Ubuntu 9.10, 25GB space and 256MB of ram for $20/bucks a month from Bluemile.

One thing I like about VMware vs. Xen or OpenVZ, is it’s almost bare metal, I can manage it like a Dedicated server without having limitations imposed like a Xen or OpenVZ.

In the next few days I’m going to migrate my blog and personal websites off shared hosting and back on to this VPS, just in time for the 10.04 upgrade next week!

His facial expression is priceless!

Ryan — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 01:07:12 +0000

Every spring we get our long-hair orange persian cat shaved because his fur gets so long and matted. This year he is really disguested with the fact his hair is gone

Upgraded to WordPress 2.7.1

Ryan — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 12:44:32 +0000

I just did the automatic upgrade from WordPress 2.7 to 2.7.1 and it went smooth!

VMware View Open Client

Ryan — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 13:53:07 +0000

VMware released the first open source virtual desktop client yesterday allowing Linux end users the ability to connect to Windows desktops managed by VMware’s View product, which previously was only available to Windows users. Check the app out on their Google code page http://code.google.com/p/vmware-view-open-client/. I hope we start seeing more open source utilities from VMware in the near future.

PowerDNS web frontend

Ryan — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:15:24 +0000

A couple years ago I was working on project to manage PowerDNS via the web called MoxieDNS. Unfortunately, it got put on the back burner because of other projects. However, I decided to revive the project in limited form, cleanup the code and release it to the public in hopes someone will be able to expand upon it. In its current state, the application works. However, there are bugs and inconsistencies.

The goals behind creating the project were pretty simple:

End User: Allow for the creation of DNS templates for fast deployment
End User: Create primary DNS and secondary DNS for domains.
End User: Add URL forwarding
End User: Add DNS records A, AAAA, MX, PTR, CNAME, TXT, SRV
Admin: Create/delete/modify users
Admin: Put application in maintenance mode (do not allow modifications to records)
Admin: Set domain, template, url forward limits for users
Admin: Manage application settings, dns servers, TTL times etc.
Admin: Billing module (not completed)
Admin: Set per domain query limits (not completed)
General: Per user logging
General: Simple/clean interface for managing records.
General: PHP, mySQL back-end, using PEAR DB modules to allow for fast porting to other SQL platforms
General: Full permission system

Some of the known issues with the project include:

Interface bugs, not redirecting correctly after making changes
Browser compatibility issues (not compliant by any means)
Dirty code
Logging needs to be improved
Possible internal permission issues (need code auditing to verify)
Priority edit field shows on records other then MX
Adding secondary dns is broke (template issue)
I’m sure there are more

I set up a end user demo at http://xlogicgroup.com/dns/ login: test , password: test

For anyone interested in checking it out until its released. The current demo has a max of 20 test domains.

KVM over IP with Synergy

Ryan — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:36:33 +0000

For a couple months now I’ve been using a free/open source application called Synergy to share a single mouse and keyboard between my Mac, Linux and Windows computer. It’s a great alternative to using a hardware based KVM solution, the only downfall is the lack of developement over the last couple of years. However, it appears the developer is working a new version.

Hosting with slicehost

Ryan — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 01:19:25 +0000

I decided to move my blog and a couple other websites I maintain to an Ubuntu 8.10 based VPS/slice at slicehost.net. For various reasons the shared hosting provider I was using wasn’t fitting my needs, specifically there was downtime and performance issues.

I choose to start with slicehost’s “256 slice” which gave me 256BM ram, 10GB storage and 100GB of monthly transfer. I opted to install Ubuntu 8.10, although there are other Linux flavors available. The install took about 5 minutes and Slicehost’s control panel allows me to rebuild my slice anytime, view stats, login to a console and much more.

Since I choose to start with the smaller 256 slice I needed to make sure I wasn’t going to max out my resources since I need to have specific applications installed to maintain my blog. I decided to go with nginx as a replacement for apache2, mysql5, php5 and postfix to handle sending mail.

It’s only been a couple days since I made the switch and so far slicehost is really working out for me.

Edit: I stumbled on Slicehost when researching Linux HA for work. Slicehost has a nice write up on using HA with multiple slices.