One of the most important things to get right when setting up server infrastructure is monitoring. Proper server monitoring is your best friend and will easily pay back any time and money you invest in getting it right. On the face of it, server monitoring seems like a fairly simple problem. Just decide what needs to be monitored, find a tool to do it, and set up alerts when something goes wrong.

I’ve never really used ansible before, and rarely get to play with freebsd so when I needed to setup a new IRC bouncer I decided what better chance than now to have a play. Although there are some built-in ansible modules for working with the ports system (Which is what we are going to use to install znc), they aren’t yet complete enough to bootstrap a server from scratch. We first need to setup our local computer to allow us to connect to the freebsd server.

Kubernetes can be a daunting topic even to those well versed in docker. There are so many layers of abstraction on top of abstraction and new terms that it can seem like you need to learn a completely new dictionary just to understand the documenation. This series hopes to change that fact by assuming the only knowledge the reader has is of docker. We will assume that you know about:

After a series of failures hosting my blogs that ran on my ’experimental’ servers that were always a playground for new and oft-breaking changes, I decided I needed to do something a little bit differnet. After being inspired by the static sites of some people at work, I decided I wanted to give Jekyll a go and see what I thought. Having recently had a great interest in learning about AWS, I decided to use exclusively AWS services for the automatic build and deploy of the site as well as the hosting.

Although AWS ECS is not really designed to run stateful apps, sometimes you’ve got no choice. I ran into one of these situations recently where I wanted to run an IRC bot called Limnoria which didn’t rely on any standard database that I could get managed from any cloud provider like AWS. Instead, the data was stored in the filesystem in various flat-file formats. Obviously, it was not feasable to have the data lost across ECS instances, so I needed to find ’true’ persistent storage.