Waiting For Torquebox / JBoss to Start

Posted by on Oct 21, 2012 in Infrastructure, Rails | 1 comment We recently started to use Torquebox on one of our projects. Torquebox is a Ruby application platform built on top of the JBoss Java application server. It has a lot of great features that you can read about on their website torquebox.org. Switching from a custom coded Tomcat environment for deploying JRuby applications to Torquebox has had it’s share of challenges. We have to deploy a mix...
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Using Vagrant for Ruby (or nearly any other kind of web…) development

Posted by on May 12, 2012 in Featured, Infrastructure, Rails | 1 comment I recently had the opportunity to talk at the DC Ruby User’s Group about how we use Vagrant in our web development projects.  My slides are available here.  The short version is that Vagrant provides a virtualized development environment.  This doesn’t mean you have to write everything using vi or Emacs in a shell (though I won’t judge you if you do that… some of my...
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Multi-field extractions in Splunk

Posted by on Jun 13, 2011 in Infrastructure | 0 comments As a SysAdmin, one of the cooler tools that I’ve worked with is Splunk.  A project I’m on indexes absolutely every log that it generates into Splunk, from firewall logs to system logs to custom application logs.  Splunk does an excellent job of identifying the format of the data we ingest and automatically extracting fields for log types that it knows about.  Our custom application...
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Replacing a MacBook SuperDrive with an SSD

Posted by on Mar 4, 2011 in Infrastructure | 7 comments At Element 84 it’s pretty common for us to “just handle it” when something doesn’t go the way we wanted. That’s what happened this week with the recent MacBookPro refresh. A couple of us were ready for new laptops and were really itching for the rumored 16GB SSD + HD and higher resolution for the 13″ MBPro. Obviously it didn’t happen, though the new...
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Loading NIC drivers in Hyper-V Core

Posted by on Jul 28, 2010 in Infrastructure | 4 comments This is a somewhat random post to put up here but maybe it will help save someone else time. I’m fascinated by virtualization and cloud technologies and recently virtualized all of Element 84′s infrastructure into an AMD based server running Microsoft’s Hyper-V Server Core 2008 R2. On the whole installation and setup went well with the exception of the built-in Realtek NICs. ...
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