Mageia2 on EC2: Flying in a different direction

At $WORK, we make the claim that as a client's systems oversight service, we are "distribution agnostic" - meaning we'll help you out regardless of what Linux distribution you're running. Most of the time, we work with Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS or Amazon Linux. However, a client recently decided on running Mageia2 GNU/Linux on Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud, so I had to pick up the challenge.

Now as far as distributions go, it seems to me that Mageia is "ok" - a fork of Mandriva that has a nice community developed around it. Unfortunately, what hasn't developed in any interest in running it on EC2. There seems to be a few VPS providers that support it, but not any of the popular ones that I know of. Still, AWS EC2 has the capability of running your own Linux distribution and even your own kernel so I pushed up my sleeves and dug into getting it going. As there's a lot to this configuration, I will break this down over a few posts. Here is an outline:

1. Boarding procedures - performing a chroot install on a local Mageia system 
2. Stormy weather - recompiling the Linux kernel to get Mageia running on EC2
3. Cruising altitude - performing another chroot install for an EBS backed instance

I'll be posting sanitized code samples and links to the key documents that explain the steps.

EDIT 2/7/2013: I've put the code samples up on github.

Enabling Markdown on your apache webserver

At $WORK, we're toying with moving all documentation with Markdown and git. To do that I needed to be able to render it locally to preview before pushing to GitHub, Bitbucket or another yet-to-be-determined repository. This setup was rather quick, easy and painless. Here's the steps:

1. Install Text::Markdown as your converter. The perl-Text-Markdown RPM was in the repoforge repository:

sudo yum install perl-Text-Markdown

2. The package comes with a script that does all the heavy lifting. It just needs to be slightly tweaked to make it run as a CGI.

$ cp -p /usr/bin/Markdown.pl $CGIBIN/Markdown.cgi
$ cd $CGIBIN
$ vi Markdown.cgi
$ diff -U0 /usr/bin/Markdown.pl Markdown.cgi
--- /usr/bin/Markdown.pl        2011-02-10 11:50:20.000000000 -0500
+++ Markdown.cgi        2012-10-26 12:08:53.000000000 -0400
@@ -147 +147,2 @@
-print main(@ARGV) unless caller();
+print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
+print main($ENV{PATH_TRANSLATED}) unless caller();

3. Configure an apache handler to hand all Markdown-formatted files to your action.

Action markdown /cgi-bin/Markdown.cgi
AddHandler markdown .md

4. Gracefully restart apache

sudo apachectl graceful

Tips: This is for private previewing. Don't put this on your public webserver. If you do, you're asking for the wrath of the ancient CGI deities to descend upon your server and sunder it to ashes. If I was doing this for a public facing site, I'd use something that caches the opcode for the script (most likely in another programming language as well), caches the rendered page in memcache, etc. etc. You've been warned.

UPDATE: I've updated my renderer for Markdown.

Building RPMs cleanly

I recently found this script recently to build a solr rpm and I love how it simply solves so many problems with RPM packaging with a few defines. Here's my slightly modified version for building an apache package, which leaves the SOURCES directory untouched and keeps a log of the build so you can go back and review it later:

#!/bin/sh -x
rm -rf BUILD RPMS SRPMS tmp || true
mkdir -p BUILD RPMS SRPMS tmp

rpmbuild -bb --define="_topdir $PWD" --define="_tmppath $PWD/tmp" apache.spec 2>&1 | tee apache-build.txt

Log housekeeping with python

This week I was able to finally finish some python code I've been writing for $WORK - a script to rotate webserver logs directly to S3. This task was similar to something I'd done a long, LONG time ago (14 years since the first rev!) in a programming language far, far away. I had a much bigger chip on my shoulder then -  site analytics really isn't done with log parsing anymore, so I skipped the whole test for open filehandles and email notifications. Anywhere, here it is - enjoy!

https://github.com/dialt0ne/rotate-to-s3

Kudos to Justin for critiquing my python.