Update on Amazon Web Services

Posted on October 24, 2008 by Rosalyn Metz

Amazon released some new features for AWS:

Load Balancing — Enables you to automatically balance incoming requests and distribute traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. You will be able to intelligently distribute load within or across Availability Zones, without worrying about load balancing hardware or software solutions.

Auto-scaling — Grows and shrinks usage of Amazon EC2 compute capacity based on application requirements, automatically managing usage of the AWS cloud on your behalf. The auto-scaling capability will monitor your pre-set capacity thresholds and automatically add or remove compute capacity based on your application usage, helping you optimize your use of resources.

Monitoring — Provides real-time monitoring of operational metrics within Amazon EC2, providing even better visibility into your usage of the AWS cloud. These metrics can be aggregated across multiple dimensions including Amazon EC2 instances, Availability Zones, and time slots. With this Monitoring service, you will be able to view your usage of the AWS cloud in much the same way that you can see operational metrics of your own hosted data center.

Management Console — Provides a simple, point-and-click web interface that lets you configure, manage and access your AWS cloud resources.

And that’s pretty much all they have on the page.  Also some exciting news…you can now run a Windows server on EC2.  So for all of you that want to figure out how the hell to do things on Windows without breaking your server, now you can.

But I think the best news is that now they have a Getting Started with ElasticFox Guide.  Man I wish they had this like 2 months ago.

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Installing Tomcat and XTF on my Mac

Posted on October 20, 2008 by Rosalyn Metz

Friday I decided to be a complete and utter geek and install Apache Tomcat on my Mac.  I know, I know you’re asking me “But Rosalyn Apache comes with a Mac, why do you need Tomcat?”  Well that’s a good question.  And the answer is I wanted to install XTF which is an XML publishing tool developed by CDL (California Digital Library), and XTF requires that you use Tomcat in order to run it (or you can use Resin…but I’m an Apache fan).

So now you’re thinking, “How did you do it?”  I wish I could have thought it up on my own, but saddly I didn’t.  I looked at a few pages and then finally settled on Basil Borque’s section (under Update 2006) on this wiki page: http://wiki.apache.org/tomcat/TomcatOnMacOS.  Bravo to Basil for posting the directions.  I didn’t bother with the firewall though because my laptop is behind a firewall by default.  Also I wanted to still run Apache so I left Tomcat on its default port 8080.

Once I got Tomcat up and running, I then moved on to XTF.  This process was ridiculously easy.  CDL has wonderful XTF installation directions on the SourceForge XTF Wiki.  If you’re on Wheaton’s Campus (and my computer is currently connected to the internet) you can view XTF here.

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Notes on Wiki Comparison

Posted on October 15, 2008 by Rosalyn Metz

PMWiki

  • PHP
  • flat file but can use MySQL (by installing a plugin)
  • hasn’t been updated since 2006
  • password protection for individual pages, groups of pages, entire site
  • password protection can be sophisticated or simple
  • can integrate with LDAP

MediaWiki

  • PHP
  • MySQL
  • updated regularly with a vibrant community
  • has a farmer tool which allows for admins for the individual wikis as well as a system admin for all the wikis
  • can integrate with LDAP

DokuWiki

  • PHP
  • flatfile
  • good revision control
  • created with an emphasis on documentation
  • can be used as a blogging tool as well (plugin)
  • uses syntax similar to MediaWiki

Things to Consider

  • if we switch we will need to translate pages or migrate data from the DB: THIS IS NO SMALL TASK!
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