Provisioning a new Ubuntu server for Django

Posted by on June 25, 2010.

I've been a long-time satisfied user of Webfaction, but recently I've had a strong urge to move to VPS hosting so that I can have greater control over the environment. After some research, I went with Rackspace Cloud because of the incredibly cheap low-end options. My site doesn't use a huge amount of bandwidth, so Rackspace looks to be the most feature-packed and still cost-effective option. A friend of mine, Kevin Whitaker, recently posted a great article about getting up and running with Django in a server environment for testing or production. He used Ubuntu, Postgres, Nginx, and FastCGI to make up his stack. I've never set up Nginx before, so his post was a great help in getting Nginx configured. My stack is slightly different, however, since I prefer to use Gunicorn instead of FastCGI and I use supervisord to manage my processes. I also use virtualenv to manage ...

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Dynamically Updating IP Addresses with Update-ip

Posted by on May 29, 2010.

A couple of years ago, I write a post including a snippet to automatically update your DNS overrides with WebFaction. That script served my purpose well until I moved to an ISP that gave me a static IP. Recently, though, I moved to a new apartment and signed up for service through Clear's 4G network in Dallas. I'm back to a dynamic IP, and so I dusted off the old script. Being the coding geek that I am, I decided to expand it into a full-blown command-line utility that could support multiple services. I cooked up an updater class and a DNS service base class, added some tests and a setup script, and posted it to Github. Installation is as easy as pip install update-ip, and from there you can use it from the command line with minimal effort. Right now, Webfaction is the only DNS service supported, but I ...

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LVM-Based Virtualization with KVM and Jaunty

Posted by on April 27, 2009.

A month ago, I had three tower PCs running in my home office 24x7 - a desktop PC, a web server, and a home media server. Routinely high electric bills prompted me to make the decision to combine the two servers into one, but I wanted to do everything possible to isolate the media server activity from the web server. I decided on virtualization to accomplish this, allowing the web and media servers to run as separate virtual machines on the same hardware. I liked the idea of virtualization, because it allowed me to install the bulky multimedia conversion packages that I needed for my media server, while keeping my web server streamlined and focused. Additionally, if I switch hardware later on, I can simply set up the core virtualization system and then copy my VMs over without having to reinstall and reconfigure my entire stack for both servrs. After ...

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Installing Adobe Air on Ubuntu Jaunty 64-bit

Posted by on April 5, 2009.

I just finished installing Adobe Air on my Ubuntu Linux desktop running a fresh install of the Jaunty 64-bit beta. It was a lot more straightforward than the instructions that Adobe provided here. I found that in my installation of Jaunty, all of the libs that that have you manually download and extract in that article were already present on my machine. Before we go on, I should note that I had the ubuntu-restricted-extras package installed before I began installing Adobe Air. That package includes the Flash player, but I'm not 100% sure it is needed before installing Air. UPDATE: According to Antitezo below, the lib32nss-mdns package is needed in order for Air apps to access the internet. I didn't experience this issue because I had unknowingly already picked up this package at some point before going through this process. First, I went to the http://get.adobe.com/air/ site, and it automatically ...

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