Recently Rackspace added Role Based Access Control to the identity system. This means the main account user can create sub users and roles and that main user can allow the sub users to have access to portions of their Rackspace Cloud account. We’re only going to look at CloudFiles for this post.

note i’m going to use the tool, !(httpie)[https://github.com/jkbr/httpie] since its awesome and does some really nice formatting. it works much like curl.

CloudFiles and Swift has a neat feature that allows you to provide a temporary URL for users. You can limit the URL by method and time. This is useful if you have a file you want to allow someone to download temporarily, but not make completely public through the CDN. Note My examples will use Rackspace CloudFiles, but you can do the same thing with any Openstack Swift setup, provided it has the TempURL middleware enabled in the pipeline.

I belong to geekdom and I get their emails about things going on. Personally I don’t spend a lot of time at geekdom, because it is not near my house or work. It is in Downtown San Antonio on the 10th and 11th floor of the Weston Center. I like the idea. It’s billed as a collaborative workspace with community events. It seems to be populated mostly by “social media marketing ____” types, which means there isn’t a lot of things I’m interested in going on, but tons of buzzwords flying about.

Salt is a python based infrastructure management tool. With it you can use a master to control a bunch of minions. One feature I like is the ability to spin up servers in the cloud. To start with you’ll need salt and salt-cloud installed. On your master you have to create a file with all your image profiles in /etc/salt/cloud.profiles, mine looks like:

ubuntu_12_04_512:
    provider: openstack
    size: 512MB Standard Instance
    image: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin)

ubuntu_11_04_512:
    provider: openstack
    size: 512MB Standard Instance
    image: Ubuntu 11.04    

Here are my provider settings I use to spin up a server on Rackspace CloudServers (/etc/salt/cloud):

I passed my Technician Class amateur radio exam. My call sign is KF5WAY. I’d like to get a Elecraft KX3 with all the bells and whistles, but gotta save for the wedding!

I got a Harley a few months ago. Trying to ride when I can. Going for nice long rides in the Hill Country is easy from Boerne, provided the weather stays nice. I got a 2013 HD Switchback FLD. Nice part about the Switchback is that it comes with both hard bags and a windshield which are removable.

Here is the bike with the gear on:

and with the bags off:

I hate meetings. Some are necessary, most are not. What I’ve noticed is that certain people will just start adding people to meetings and then the meeting has 20+ people in it. There is no way to negatively reenforce that they are doing something bad, especially when 17-18 of those people are just sitting there staring at the wall. The other situation is the 2-3+ hour meeting that doesn’t really accomplish anything. Giving people a short meeting time causes people to work things out quickly and take less important and off task issues outside of the meeting. So my proposal is Meeting Points.

Trying to get back on my bike. I’ve setup my trainer in one of my extra rooms with a TV and the Roku. Trying to ride for at least a hour a day, then hope to get to an hour in the morning and night. I think with that and eating less I can get down to where I’m “supposed” to weigh. So far 222lbs is the lowest I’ve gotten down to.

One of the really cool features of CloudFiles is StaticWeb. Essentially you can host whole static site within a CloudFiles CDN enabled container. I’m going to show you how to get a static site setup under CloudFiles.

You need to have a Rackspace Cloud account, which you can get here. Once you have your account setup, you can get your API key from the control panel. Authenticating with Rackspace Cloud looks a little like:

The cloud is open. Rackspace announced it’s open cloud on Wednesday. Essentially CloudServers is now running off Nova, part of Openstack. CloudFiles, which is an implementation of Swift, has been for a while now.

What I’m really enjoying about it, is we now have a whole suite of products to go with Servers and Files. Database as a Service (DBaaS) means you don’t have to run MySQL on your Server. The new mycloud.rackspace.com interface is really easy to use and clean. I recently had to setup a forum for someone and I was done setting up a server, dbaas and 2 dbs in 10 minutes.