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Recently, a hosting provider’s ‘upgrade’ dramatically changed the stolen CPU time on one of our systems. I investigated and found that our virtual machine’s CPU allocation had been deprioritized. The rest of the post describes “stolen CPU” and the behavior that we experienced on our virtual machine. Anyone who runs operating systems (especially UNIX or…
Tmux is a powerful terminal multiplexer, and its built-in support for scripting allows you to create new features according to your own workflow. I spend most of my day in Tmux, at the command line, grepping through codebases and editing files with Vim. I copied and pasted or re-typed file names for a long time…
Thinking through some security concerns recently, I found myself wondering if it was possible to achieve full system Linux encryption in the cloud — running GNU/Linux off of an encrypted root partition (using LUKS). I thought that it should have been possible — it was achieved easily running with a local virtualization platform (VirtualBox, VMWare…
No, not that Red Green! Even a thoroughly-tested application can wreck havoc if it hasn’t been tested in the context of a production-like system under production-like conditions. Tools like Puppet and Chef make it easy to produce a production-like environment for testing, but what about the production-like conditions? One aspect of these conditions can be…
When working on multiple web applications, it can be taxing to remember which applications are running on which ports. By default, Ruby on Rails serves on port 3000, MAMP serves on port 8888, many applications start up listening on port 8000, and you might even find yourself using a non-traditional port like 8012. Knowing where…
In the battle of data formats, the two heavyweights are XML and JSON. Of late, JSON seems to be winning, in large part because most languages natively support JSON’s chosen data structures, but there’s one arena where JSON hasn’t made much of a showing: the command line. The command line provides a lot of programs…
At Atomic Object, we like to keep things simple. For Justin and I, this often means using Puppet Standalone or Chef Solo to configure servers that don’t yet (and may never) require the coordination of a Puppet Master or Chef Server. Justin recently blogged about the pattern we use with Chef Solo. I’m going to…
Not that long ago, I wrote about a standalone Puppet pattern that Mike English and I use in conjunction with Capistrano to provision and manage our server configurations. While we still make use of Puppet, we’ve also added Chef to our repertoire. Similar to Puppet, Chef allows for a client/server model in which a Chef…
The problem that this post describes has now been fixed in RVM stable (1.17.0). To diagnose performance issues, be sure to check the options that Ruby was compiled with:ruby -rrbconfig -e ‘puts RbConfig::CONFIG["CFLAGS"]‘ The Situation While working with Patrick Bacon, migrating a large Ruby (ruby-1.9.2) web application from an older Solaris system to a new…
Carl is the president and co-founder of Atomic Object