New Site Design

Posted by emsearcy on

This week the Tag1 website got a new face.  Notable is the new logo in the upper-left, as well the matching theme.  Feel free to post your feedback as comments to this post.

This was my first go at Drupal theming (I started from an existing theme---not from scratch!) and it was fairly intuitive.  However, I ran into a some issues that my web design colleagues constantly gripe about, as well as ones I wasn't expecting.

Additional kernel modules on EC2

Posted by emsearcy on

Continuing my plans to set up an IPVS high-availability LAMP stack on EC2, I needed to add the kernel modules for IPVS. I have been using the CentOS machine images provided by RightScale, which have unneeded services disabled and, although they are set up to work with RightScale's software, work very well for general use. Unfortunately, the IPVS kernel modules are not among those pre-installed on the AMI.

Achieving high availability on EC2

Posted by emsearcy on

This last week I've had the fortune to have some spare time to play around with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). I'm pretty interested in the potential for scaling the LAMP stack by having a programmable cluster at the service of your box. A lot of the documentation I find seems to be by people either scaling via dynamic DNS additions when they add more nodes, or by using EC2 nodes as application servers used internally by their application.