Several services I’ve seen over the last few months provide thumbnail screenshots of webpages, often through an API.  While most provide free options, to use something a lot you’ll either have to pay for it or include some sort of link back to the site wherever the screenshots are used.

Being technically inclined, I set out to create my own such service.  After a few months of fiddling with various tools and utilities, I came up with a simple technique which I set up on an Amazon EC2 server running FC6.

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The other day as I was surfing on Facebook, I got hit with a very well targeted ad.  It was promoting an upcoming Cloud Computing conference to be held here in Toronto on February 11th, 2009.

Cloud Computing: An IT Paradigm Shift

The one day conference to be held at the MTCC,  features keynotes from John Sloan (Info-Tech Research Group) and Richard McDonald (IBM);  two names I have not heard of.  Not surprisingly, with this realm of computing being so new.

At this point in time, reviewing the schedule for the day, I’m not convinced there is enough content to warrant the $429 early bird price tag.  Keynotes aside, I see several periods noted for ‘Breakout Sessions’ in the agenda.  However, no details are given as to what these sessions will cover!  Hopefully this gets updated as the days count down.

Cloud Camp

Thankfully, the evening will bring an open attendance portion of the event run by Cloud Camp.  Sponsoring Cloud Computing focused get togethers all over North America, this portion is sure to draw a much bigger crowd and will be the real highlight of the event.

Whether attending the full event, or just the Cloud Camp portion, this is sure to be a great opportunity to network, and meet other people involved in Cloud Computing.

Hope to see you there!

Recently I noticed that some Amazon EC2 instances I had deployed had an extremely high load.  The servers were basically idle, so I knew something had to be wrong!

Looking at /var/log/messages, I discovered messages like the following:

Nov 27 11:19:55 /sbin/mingetty[14342]: tty5: No such file or directory

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I’ve been using FreeBSD on and off for several years, in conjunction with several flavours of Linux.  Occasionally I run into compatibility issues between the two.  Today the issue I ran into was with a Nagios plugin used to determine the amount of available memory.

The check_mem script bundled with Nagios uses the ‘free’ command to get its numbers, which isn’t available on FreeBSD.  Read on to see my workaround.

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If you’ve read through a few of my articles, or worked with Amazon EC2 a bit, you are probably getting a sense that a lot of the administrative tasks need to be performed via command line.  Well, Amazon does offer alternative interfaces to interact with their services… SOAP and REST interfaces are exposed.  One tool that takes great advantage of these to ease EC2 management is ElasticFox.

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