Postgres Open 2012
By David Christensen
July 31, 2012
I’m excited to be speaking at the 2012 Postgres Open Conference; Chicago, September 17-19. (Conference details at http://www.postgresopen.org/.)
My talk will be “Choosing a Logical Replication System: Slony vs Bucardo”.
I look forward to seeing many of you there!
conference postgres
Ruby on Rails software developer needed
By Jon Jensen
July 31, 2012
This position has been filled. See our active job listings here.
We’re looking for another talented Ruby on Rails developer to consult with our clients and develop their Ruby on Rails web applications. If you like to focus on solving business problems and can take responsibility for getting a job done well without intensive oversight, please read on!
End Point is a 17-year-old web consulting company based in New York city, with 28 full-time employees working mostly remotely from home offices. Our team is made up of strong ecommerce, database, and system administration talent, working together using ssh, Screen and tmux, IRC, Google+ Hangouts, Skype, and good old phones.
We serve over 200 clients ranging from small family businesses to large corporations, using a variety of open source technologies including Ruby, Python, Perl, Git, PostgreSQL, MySQL, RHEL/CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu.
What is in it for you?
- Work from your home office
- Flexible full-time work hours
- Annual bonus opportunity
- Health insurance benefit
- 401(k) retirement savings plan
- Ability to move without being tied to your job location
What you will be doing:
- Consult with clients to determine their web application needs
- Build, test, release, and maintain web applications for our …
jobs-closed rails
Are you sure you want a MacBook Pro?
By Brian Buchalter
July 30, 2012
The “UltraBooks” trend has been been made popular by Apple’s efforts at making the computer an appliance. There are clear benefits to this, but for enthusiasts, it means less control to upgrade to hardware of their choosing. Let’s contrast this experience with my own Dell Vostro 3500. It was purchased two years ago and yet through upgrades, it has many features the recently refreshed MacBook Pro with Retina display lacks, while offering the same processing power.
MacBook Pro Advantages
Let’s be clear, the MacBook Pro (MBP) has a number advantages over my Dell. The Retina display of course trounces my 1376×768 resolution on a 15" display. For designers, photographers, and video editors, Retina is a great asset. For someone who spends their day inside Vim and SSH, not so much. Similarly, the MBP’s seven hour battery life is impressive, although I’m sure with my processor intensive work load, it would be lower. But for me, I’m not terribly mobile. I need to be mobile from room to room perhaps, but I don’t find myself without power and needing to complete mission critical work less frequently than my replaceable 90 watt-hour battery can provide over 3 to 4 hours. Similarly, weight …
linux mac hardware
Interchange “on-the-fly” items
By Jeff Boes
July 26, 2012
Interchange has a handy feature (which, in my almost-seven-years of involvement, I’d not seen or suspected) allowing you to create an item “on-the-fly”, without requiring any updates to your products table. Here’s a recipe for making this work.
First, you need to tell Interchange that you’re going to make use of this feature (in catalog.cfg).
OnFly onfly
Simple, no? The “OnFly” directive names a subroutine that is called to pre-process the custom item before it’s added to the cart. The default “onfly” routine can be found in the system tag “onfly”: code/SystemTag/onfly.coretag in the standard Interchange installation. (If you need more that what it provides, that’s beyond the scope of my post, so good luck, bon voyage, and please write back to let us know what you learned!)
Then, you need to submit some special form parameters to set up the cart:
- mv_order_item: the item number identifying this line
- mv_order_fly: a structured string with | (vertical bar) delimiters. Each sub-field specifies something about the custom item, thus:
description=My custom item|price=12.34
Now, in my particular case, I was encapsulating an XML feed of products from another site (a parts supplier) so …
ecommerce interchange json
cPanel Exim false positive failure & restart fix
By Jon Jensen
July 24, 2012
I’m not a big fan of add-on graphical control panels for Linux such as cPanel, Webmin, Ensim, etc. They deviate from the distributor’s standard packages and locations for files, often simultaneously tightening security in various ways and weakening security practically by making several more remotely accessible administration logins.
On one of the few servers we maintain that has cPanel on it, today we did a routine Red Hat Network update and reboot to load the latest RHEL 5 kernel, and all seemed to go well.
However, within a few minutes we started getting emailed reports from the cPanel service monitor saying that the Exim mail server had failed and been restarted. These emails began coming in at roughly 5-minute intervals:
Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2012 14:21:05 -0400
From: cPanel ChkServd Service Monitor <cpanel@[SNIP]>
To: [SNIP]
Subject: exim on [SNIP] status: failed
exim failed @ Tue Jul 24 14:21:04 2012. A restart was attempted automagically.
Service Check Method: [socket connect]
Reason: TCP Transaction Log:
<< 220-[SNIP] ESMTP Exim 4.77 #2 Tue, 24 Jul 2012 14:21:04 -0400
<<
<<
>> EHLO localhost
<< 250-[SNIP] Hello localhost.localdomain …hosting redhat sysadmin
Automated VM cloning with PowerCLI
By Brian Buchalter
July 23, 2012
Most small businesses cannot afford the high performance storage area networks (SANs) that make traditional redundancy options such high availability and fault tolerance possible. Despite this, the APIs available to administrators of virtualized infrastructure using direct attached storage (DAS) make it possible to recreate many of the benefits of high availability.
High Availability on SAN vs DAS
A single server failure in a virtualized environment can mean many applications and services can become unavailable simultaneously; for small organizations, this can be particularly damaging. High availability with SANs minimize the downtime of applications and services when a host fails by keeping virtual machine (VM) storage off the host and on the SAN. VMs on a failed host can then be automatically restarted on hosts with excess capacity. This of course requires SAN infrastructure to be highly redundant, adding to the already expensive and complex nature of SANs.
Alternatively, direct attached storage (DAS) is very cost effective, performant, and well understood. By using software to automate the snapshot and cloning of VMs via traditional gigabit Ethernet from host to host, we can …
hosting sysadmin virtualization
GoRuCo 2012 Recap
By Brian Buchalter
July 18, 2012
A few weeks ago, End Point graciously agreed to send me to GoRuCo, “the premier Ruby conference in New York City”. I was excited to try and apply the lessons from our own Greg Sabino Mullane, who gave a talk about attending conferences during End Point’s 2012 Company Meeting. He emphasized a focus on interacting with the speakers and attendees instead of the presentation content.
Pre Party at Pivotal Labs
The pre-party was located just blocks away from our offices, making it a convenient after work stop. On my walk to the party, I tried to think about the type of connections I wanted to make and the topics I wanted to discuss. I was intrigued by Pivotal Lab’s policy on pair programming, but realized I could continue to read up about that extensively online. What was a question I could ask that would be interesting for both asker and askee, providing me something a Google search couldn’t?
After the usual introductory chit chat, I found myself asking, “so, what are you struggling with in your work right now?” It was broad and open, giving the speaker a chance to perhaps go somewhere outside of the normal conversation. I asked Haris Amin this question and got what would become a …
conference ruby
Liquid Galaxy at the INFO Summit
By Josh Ausborne
July 18, 2012
End Point was tasked with setting up and manning a Liquid Galaxy at the two day INFO Summit at the Four Seasons Hotel in Westlake Village, CA. Josh Ausborne and Alejandro Ramon were in attendance representing End Point, and performed the setup and the running of the system.
INFO is the short name for Illicit Networks: Forces in Opposition. The INFO Summit is an event designed to get people to understand how drug smugglers, arms dealers, and human traffickers operate, and how people can get involved to develop technology in an effort to disrupt and thwart the networks. You can read an overview about the summit and its purpose here.
Jared Cohen, Director of Google Ideas, was interviewed by Fast Company to discus the breaking down of illicit networks. According to Cohen, Google “focused on disrupting violent and coercive illicit networks, including drug cartels, the mafia, human trafficking rings, organ harvesters, illicit arms dealers, and forced labor networks.” You can read the article here where he explains some of the ways that Google is stepping up the fight.
End Point’s involvement in the summit is as the installer and presenter of a Liquid Galaxy tour that shows the various …
visionport kml