Recently in code Category

It seems that the weather forecast for the Internet is a bit "cloudy" nowadays and it will stay this way at least for some time. The "clouds" are a very hot topic right now and more and more companies try to get on the bandwagon as soon as possible - some just run tests while others go into production. You can run "your own" cloud environment for peanuts, the costs are so marginal that it made me laugh when I got my last bill from Amazon AWS, but nevertheless it doesn't always calculate to run your stuff on commercial cloud, especially if you have hardware at hand. The DIY approach is easier than it seems to be. Here is how I've built my own, small "cloud" to solve a problem I was facing at work. It's not a rocket science, it's not full blown management system with hundreds of machines... it works for me and I believe anyone can build similar system - hopefully much better than I did with mine.

Staying away from terminology like HPC/cluster/cloud/grid and meanings of those I use the term "cloud" because I think it's the closest to what I've got now in my prototype - it's still work in progress and it gets even more "cloudy" or change shape otherwise. There won't be any code this time - maybe when I finish it properly and have some proper performance stats - so far it's just a running and usable PoC I describe here :-)

I have decided that from time to time I will be putting here some scrips I find useful. As most sysadmins I am lazy and proud of it - that is exactly what makes me write more and more useful scripts. Following some slightly twisted logic if you are lazy sysadmin as well, you might find those useful (as well). Some code may and will be trivial, but still useful - that is the goal!

Today nothing fancy - just (another) database snapshot script that uses mysqldump to do the job and Bacula to get the daily backups automated.

First shot - migrate several hundreds of websites from one server to another... Copying is a simple task... creating config files is simple task... changing DNS records is boring (and simple)... but keeping track of which DNS domains were properly propagated and which not is a stupid and annoying job... Perl to the rescue!