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Installing the AppFog CLI w/ Caldecott on Mac OS X 10.8

After a bit of fumbling around with different install methods, I’ve finally come across what I believe to be the simplest/cleanest way to install the AppFog Command Line Interface with Caldecott (for service tunneling) on Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. For those of you who are wondering what the heck Caldecott is, its a part of Cloud Foundry which enables us to easily tunnel into supported services such as mysql, rabbitmq, etc.

Since I’m a sysadmin and not a developer, I didn’t want to download and install the entire enormous Xcode package. So, with the below steps, we’ll accomplish setting everything up in a clean, minimal way, taking up as little space on your hard drive as possible.

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Categories: Apple / Mac, Cloud Computing.

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By Andrei Matei
— October 24, 2012 at 12:23 pm

PHP Fog and Custom Domain Names

For obvious reasons, many folks will want to link their PHP Fog applications to a custom domain name, rather than the standard *.phpfogapp.com subdomain structure. Luckily, this is very easy to do. I’ll cover two of the most common scenarios below:

AWS Route 53
If you are using AWS Route 53, its best practice to create the following records in a Hosted Zone:

  • An A-record for domain.com pointing to the PHP Fog ELB: http-1559636850.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com. Note this is done via an “Alias” and this ELB should never change.
  • A CNAME record for www.domain.com pointing to cname01.phpfog.com

Also, make sure that you point the name servers at your domain registrar to the ones given under the NS record in Route 53. Here is an example screenshot of what you’re Route 53 dns configuration should look like.

Other DNS Providers
For all other DNS providers, a simple standard DNS configuration can be used.  Create the following enteries in your zone:

  • Three A records for domain.com to: 50.19.115.173, 184.72.222.30, and 107.22.161.126
  • A CNAME record for www.domain.com pointing to cname01.phpfog.com

That’s it! Note that more information can also be found in the PHP Fog Documentation under “Custom Domain Names” but do note that a DNS redirect (302) is not needed, and most providers do not offer such a service. If yours does, it is an option, however.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask them in the comments section below.

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Categories: Cloud Computing.

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By Andrei Matei
— July 5, 2012 at 2:41 pm

Installing the PHP Fog CLI on Mac OS X Lion

Installing the PHP Fog Command Line Interface is generally very straightforward. However, a few tips and tricks exist which can save a lot of time, especially if you are new to getting CLIs working in OS X. I’ve broken down this tutorial into three parts, the first two of which are prerequisites for getting PF up and running and the third covering actual installation. Let’s get started.

1.) Installing Homebrew

Homebrew, in my opinion, is the best package manager for OS X and has easily surpassed MacPorts in functionality and package freshness. To install Homebrew, we need to ensure we have two packages pre-installed:

Installing the entire Xcode package simply to get Homebrew working is no longer needed. Apple recently released a separate CLI Tools package which is only 150MB and contains everything you need. This makes things much easier and cleaner if you are not a developer. Note: If you don’t have an Apple Developer account or Apple ID, you can create one free of charge prior to downloading.

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Categories: Apple / Mac, Cloud Computing.

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By Andrei Matei
— July 2, 2012 at 12:54 pm

Installing the HP Cloud CLI on Ubuntu 11.10

After some initial trial and error, I was able to successfully install the HP Cloud CLI on Ubuntu 11.10 Desktop (64-Bit). It’s not a necessarily difficult task to complete, but knowing all of the needed dependencies and steps from the start can speed things up dramatically. With the below guide, you should be able to be up and running in 5 minutes or less.

1.) First, we’ll add some needed dependencies:

sudo apt-get install curl git-core build-essential libssl-dev libreadline5 libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev

2.) Next, let’s install RVM, the Ruby Version Manager. We’ll be using this to install Ruby instead of doing it via apt-get. (Note: You need to execute this, and all of the additional commands below, as your local user and *not* the root user.)

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Categories: Cloud Computing, Linux.

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By Andrei Matei
— February 3, 2012 at 8:43 pm

Option to NOT save PPTP VPN Password (Ubuntu 11.10)

If you are running Ubuntu 11.10 and are using Network Manager to connect to a PPTP VPN, you may notice that once you enter a password, it is auto-saved for future use. Mysteriously, there isn’t a check box to NOT save the password. If you are connecting to the VPN with a 2-factor authentication system (such as OATH which generates a unique pin-code with each login), you have to manually re-edit the configuration file each time. That’s a huge pain.

Anyway, here is the quick fix. Simply open the VPN configuration script:

nano -w /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/[your_vpn_name]

and change “password-flags=0″ to “password-flags=2″.

That’s it! I googled for several days (literally) until I found this bug report covering the issue. Either I’m a bad Googler (fact), or lots of information isn’t readily available on this topic. I hope this helps someone in need.

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Categories: Linux.

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By Andrei Matei
— January 15, 2012 at 9:21 pm