Posts

• Jun 2, 2012

  Running JIRA on Amazon AWS EC2 Micro Instance

  JIRA is my favourite issue/bug tracker. With a $10 starter license for 10 users, it is perfect for small groups looking to use a fully-featured and powerful issue tracker. However, this huge Java application requires hosting somewhere unless you are willing to pay them $10/mth for their hosted solution.

  Fortunately, Amazon AWS EC2 offers a Micro Instance that can actually run JIRA. Unfortunately, JIRA will not work out-of-the-box and you will get the JIRA is Locked, core plugins not loaded errors.

  This is because the CPU scheduler in an EC2 micro instance will throttle down the CPU speed of the instance when it detects high CPU usage over a period of time. (This peculiar behaviour is documented by Amazon.) With a slower CPU, the various core plugins to take longer than the default 60 seconds to load, and thus timeout, leaving JIRA to disable them. With core plugins disabled, JIRA enters a locked state, refusing to start.

  The solution is simple—extend the plugin loading timeout to 300 seconds. This is governed by the undocumented -Datlassian.plugins.enable.wait=300 parameter.

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• Jun 2, 2012

  IPv6 on Amazon AWS EC2

  If you’re looking for instructions for non-Amazon EC2 instances, i.e. Xen, VPS, or physical servers, refer to my previous post instead.

  Ok here goes. Amazon doesn’t seem to have any plans to implement IPv6 internally for their EC2 instances. Their recommended workaround is to use their Elastic Load Balancer which offers a dual-stack address. However, there are limitations to what a load balancer can do as it cannot forward every type of traffic.

  So, to bring IPv6 connectivity to an EC2 instance, tunnelling must be used. Personally, I find Hurricane Electric’s Tunnel Broker service perfect for this situation.

  In this post, I’ll discuss the steps on how to set up HE’s Tunnel Broker service on your Ubuntu EC2 instance and to keep it up and running.

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• May 28, 2012

  Sydney Opera House 'Collapses' in Spectacular Light Show

  Very cool use of lighting to create visual effects. Cool part starts around the 3 minute mark.

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• May 28, 2012

  Inside Facebook Security

  The Verge:

  “Creating friction is the key to making users aware of what they’re actually doing,” Facebook Security and Safety team member Fred Wolens said, because a vast majority percent of “hacked” Facebook accounts don’t get hacked on Facebook.

  A fascinating look at how Facebook protects its users and their online accounts.

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