Tag: Hostnames

I’m a Geek!

The title, by itself, is pretty obvious; I’m a geek, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing, even with the bile refluxes I end up having, just for the gratitude of a few dozens users (which I’ll thank once again from my heart; you make at least part of the insults I receive bearable). But it’s more a reminder for those who follow me since a long time ago, and who could remember that I started this blog over four years ago, using Rails 1.1 and a Gentoo/FreeBSD install.

Well, at the time my domain wasn’t “flameeyes.eu”, which I only bought two years ago but rather the more tongue-in-cheek Farragut.Flameeyes.Is-A-Geek.org where Farragut was the name of the box (which was contributed by Christoph Brill and served Gentoo/FreeBSD as main testing and stagebuilding box until PSU/MB gave up).

At any rate, I’ve been keeping the hostname, hoping one day to be able to totally phase it out and get rid of it; this because while at the start it was easy to keep it updated, DynDNS has been pressing more and more for free users to register for the “pro” version. Up to now, I’ve been just refreshing it whenever it was on the verge of expiring, but.. since the latest changes will not allow me to properly re-register the same hostname if it failed, and a lot of websites still link to my old addresses, I decided to avoid problems and scams, and I registered the hostname with DynDNS Pro, for two years, which means it won’t risk expiration.

Given that situation, I decided to change the Apache (and AWStats) configuration so that the old URLs for the blog and the site won’t redirect straight to the new sites, but rather accept the request and show the page normally. Obviously, I’d still prefer if the new canonical name is used. Hopefully, at some point in time, browsers and other software will support the extended metadata provided by OpenGraph which not only breaks down the title in site and page title (rather than the current mess of different separators between the two in the <title> element!), but also provides a “canonical URL” value that can solve the problem of multiple-hostnames as well (yes that means that if you were to link one post of mine on Facebook with the old URLs it’ll be automatically translated to the new, canonical URLs).

But it’s not all stopping here; for the spirit of old times, I also ended up looking at some of the articles I wrote around that time, or actually before that time, for NewsForge/Linux.com (as I said in my previous post noted). At the time, I wasn’t even paid for them, but the only requirement was a one year exclusive; last one was in December 2005, so the exclusive definitely expired a long time ago. So, since their own website (now only Linux.com, and changed owner as well) is degrading (broken links, comments with different text formatting functions, spam, …) I decided to re-publish them on my own website in the newly refurbished articles section and, wait for it…

I decided to re-license all three of the articles I wrote in 2005 under CreativeCommons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Update (2017-04-21): as it happens my articles section is now gone and instead the articles are available as part of the blog itself.

Okay, nothing exceptional I guess, but given there was some doubts about my choices of licenses, this actually makes available a good chunk of my work under a totally free license. I could probably ask Jonathan whether I could do something like that to the articles I wrote for LWN, but since that site is still well maintained I see no urgency.

I should also be converting from PDF/TeX to HTML the rest of the articles on that index page, but they are also not high on my priority list.

Finally, I’m still waiting on FSF to give me an answer regarding the FSWS licensing — Matija helped me adapt the Autoconf exception into something usable for the web… unfortunately the license of the exception itself is quite strict, and so I had to ask FSF for permission of using that.. the request has been logged into their RT, I hope it’ll get me an answer soon… who knows, FSWS might be my last “gift” before I throw the towel.

Amazon EC2: stable hostnames, for free, really

In my current line of work, dealing with Amazon’s “Elastic” Computer Cloud, I had to cope with the problem of getting a stable hostname for a “master” instance when dealing with “slaves”. I was appalled by the fact that Amazon does not provide a way to assign a “role” or “class name” to their instances, so to have them recognized from within their network.

When I was pointed out at multiple documentation showing how to achieve that feature, I knew that the problem wasn’t that Amazon failed to to think that through, but rather that they are most likely trying to get more money out of the users with these need. The common suggestion to solve the need to identify a particular instance, between executions, is to use their “Elastic IP” feature (which – like many other things they call “Elastic” – is not really elastic at all).

The idea behind this solution is that by assigning a public IPv4 (and keep in mind this is a precious resource nowadays) to the instance, you can pick up the reverse DNS for it (for instance 184.73.246.248 will reverse-resolve to ec2-184-73-246-248.compute-1.amazonaws.com), and use that in your intra-EC2 requests… once using EC2’s own nameservers, ec2-184-73-246-248.compute-1.amazonaws.com will resolve to the (dynamic) internal IP address (10.0.0.0/8) of the instance the IP was assigned to.

All fine and dandy, and this can be set up cleanly with Rudy as well. The problem here is… the IP is not free. Oh yes, the documentation will try to tell you that you won’t have to pay for it… as long as you use it. But it’s definitely not free, especially during the development phase of a project. As long as the address is assigned to an instance, you won’t pay for the Elastic IP service (but you will pay for the running instance); if you don’t have an assigned instance, you’ll end up paying $2.4 per day for the IP address to be reserved.

This is definitely one of the cases where Amazon’s limitation seem totally artificial to get you more money, as much money as they can get from you. D’oh!

What is my solution to this problem? It’s very simple: net-misc/ddclient. The IP address you’re looking for is the one, inside the instance, that is assigned to the eth0 interface. Just tell ddclient to fetch the address and use it on a classic DynDNS (or similar) hostname service. It doesn’t matter that you’re feeding them a local IP address (in the 10.0.0.0/8 range); you won’t be able to use the same hostname for external and internal dealing, but it’ll definitely cost you less.