Technology and geeky stuff Archives - Page 19 of 46

Building out infrastructure for a Traveling Geeks tour

3 December, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

The Traveling Geeks are at it again. This time the destination is Paris for LeWeb and some other tech meetings.

Organizing a tour for 15 geeks was a nightmarish task for TG Co-Founder Renee Blodgett, who worked for weeks to put this one together – much shorter lead time than for previous tours. And her co-organizers Eliane Fiolet and Phil Jeudy, plus two web developers, did a heroic job.

The online developers were tasked with creating the new web site, but I came in for the last few weeks to preside over one of my (current) specialties – ensuring that we can mash information together in real time. Here’s what it required and what I learned: [Read more…]

Visualizing data helps us find opportunities

19 November, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

I had run into GapMinder some time ago, but was reminded of it when I encountered this talk that Ola Rosling^[1] gave at Gov 2.0 Summit^[2] that really makes it clear how the visualization of data — especially visualizing data over time — can give us valuable insights into trends in the physical and social world(s). Their Trendalyzer software is used by Google…as you’ll see in this presentation. [Read more…]

Security in the Cloud – Matey, there be challenges ahead

14 October, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

Being a user of and a promoter of cloud computing, I am also aware of challenges to the security of cloud computing environments. Cloud computing suppliers come in several flavors. I’ll address two of them here: 1) those who provide virtual hosts; and 2) those who provide automatically-scalable hosting solutions without distinguishable hosts.

A virtual host looks like an actual server. You (or your programmer/sysadmin) can use it as if it were your own dedicated server. In fact, however, it is only a portion of a much larger server. Rackspace/Mosso, and Slicehost are two I’ve discussed and actually use. The focus is on the virtual server.

An automatically-scalable hosting solution is a service or set of services which are hosted on one or more computers, and you can’t actually tell how big the server is or for that matter, whether it’s a whole array of servers. The focus is on the virtual service (not the server itself).

What’s good: Virtual servers are a more secure environment than shared servers because you are only dependent on your own security efforts. (On a shared server, if another user picks a poor password, or doesn’t upgrade their PHP software when security upgrades are released, you can be hacked if their account is compromised.) Automatically-scalable hosts may also be secure in this same way if accounts are adequately protected from each other.

What’s bad: A root compromise of a virtual server may be possible. In fact, it’s probably inevitable that such things will happen. And if you don’t update your underlying software (like WordPress, for instance), they you’re likely to be in trouble anyway. So ultimately any server can be compromised.

“Cloud-clobbering” (talk – is cheap)— cloud servers may become a target for hackers.at the 7th Hack in The Box Security Conference in Kuala Lumpur.

I’ve written about “economic denial-of-sustainability” attacks, in which an attacker causes a cloud user to so scale up their server usage that it becomes economically impossible for the defender to survive. These wouldn’t be possible if there were no cloud computing.

Is the Sidekick failure a cloud failure?

12 October, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

When all data for Sidekicks got lost recently [read this article in the Wall Street Journal] was it a cloud failure or was it a single system failure?^[1] [also New York Times article]

In the sense that data was being stored somewhere and the customer didn’t know where it was, then yes it was a cloud failure. But I contend that it was also a failure caused by the existence of a single-point-of-failure. (As system developers, this is our constant nightmare.) The product/service was set up to use a single data service with (apparently) inadequate backup. That created the possibility of this single-point-of-failure. The real failure was that T-Mobile didn’t provide the option to back up your data in a location under your control, so that you could later on restore it if the central service went down. [Read more…]

Slicehost- Tomcat installation on a tiny virtual server

7 September, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

Geek alert! This article is for Slicehost geeks only.

Talk about playing on the edge, I almost fell off this time. I have eight slices (virtual servers, that is) on Slicehost (which is now owned by Rackspace) and believe me they are tiny!^[1] But they can serve low-volume to medium-volume web sites pretty well. For instance, Shaping Youth (several thousand visitors a day) and GirlsHorseClub are on these little servers and they serve up pretty rapidly.^[2] Nice thing about Slicehost is that any host can be scaled up from the tiny size to 16x that size, and because it’s cloud computing, you can also bring up multiple instances of any server and have them share load. This allows me to implement the traditional three-tiered architecture (web/application/database) quite well without having to worry about whether my servers will be able to handle the load because I can scale ’em up whenever I need to.

But, the catch is that when you start with the tiniest slice (256MB RAM) you really have to fine-tune your operating system and applications in order to get good performance out of them. [Read more…]