nclements's dashboard

nclements replied on August 03, 2009 21:36 to the question "Update to JDK 1.6 automatically" in CohesiveFT:

Hello Nitai,

I've completed updating some of the packages and things look good. One thing you might want to do is rebuild your private bundle with the Sun Java JDK rather than the JRE. If you don't then you'll end up with both, though only one is going to be operational -- the other will be a waste of disk space.

Hope this gets you to the next level.

Thanks,

Nicholas

nclements replied on August 03, 2009 15:33 to the question "Update to JDK 1.6 automatically" in CohesiveFT:

Hello Nitai.

There are 2 ways to accomplish what you want -- the quick and easy way and the right way. The easy way is for you to create a new package as part of your installation, and have that make the changes. The right way -- and I'm working on this right now, and have been for the last couple of hours -- is to fix the packages so they do the right thing.

I'll keep you updated on the progress for the 2nd option.

Nicholas

nclements replied on August 03, 2009 00:04 to the question "Update to JDK 1.6 automatically" in CohesiveFT:

I just took a look at the build log for (what I think is) one of your recent VMs and it appears that our build environment has been overly productive -- you have both 1.5 and 1.6 on the machine.

Version 1.5 can be found in the usual Debian/Ubuntu location (and is found directly in the default path). 1.6 is to be found in /opt/java. What you can do is try the following:

• Change JAVA_HOME to /opt/java


• Add a link to /opt/java/bin/java into the default path.

Hopefully this helps.

Nicholas

nclements replied on June 30, 2009 12:38 to the question "How can I change keyboard layout ?" in CohesiveFT:

Hello,

Sorry to say but at this time we don't have a way to configure the keyboard layout at build time. It is one of the many items on our roadmap but I'm not sure of the timeframe.

One possibility, however, is you could create and upload your own packages that set things up the way you want at creation time. (I've not tried this to solve this particular problem so your mileage may vary.)

Thanks,

Nicholas

nclements replied on June 02, 2009 20:07 to the question "system updates hang when run through elastic server manager web gui" in CohesiveFT:

Clive, thanks. We've confirmed the problem and I've filed some bugfix tickets to get it fixed. It seems to be hanging on the background process while doing the apt-get install on a package, which is a newish problem.

I'm not sure of the timeframe on this fix (or on the installation of an alternative kernel), but we'll try to keep you posted.

In the meantime please do as you said -- run apt-get upgrade (or aptitude upgrade) to fix things.

Thanks again.

Nicholas

nclements replied on June 02, 2009 13:52 to the question "system updates hang when run through elastic server manager web gui" in CohesiveFT:

Thanks, this will help a lot.

As a heads-up, this might require an update to the Elastic Server Manager. However I should be able to send you a walkthrough on how to fix it manually if you like.

Nicholas

nclements replied on June 01, 2009 20:26 to the question "system updates hang when run through elastic server manager web gui" in CohesiveFT:

Can you be more specific? What updates are you seeing hanging? What files/versions? Thanks.

nclements replied on June 01, 2009 20:22 to the question "kernel requires features not on your cpu" in CohesiveFT:

We'll investigate further and see what we can do.

I would argue that it is an Ubuntu issue since they provide the kernels. We selected a kernel from their images based on their defaults. When you installed natively on your machine the install disks were able to run a bit of logic that identified certain specifics about your chipset, and an appropriate kernel was chosen. We don't have that luxury as we know little about the host hardware on which our VMs are to be run. But as I said, we'll see what we can do.

nclements replied on June 01, 2009 12:10 to the question "kernel requires features not on your cpu" in CohesiveFT:

Clive,

This is not a problem with the VM per se, but with the Ubuntu kernel shipped with the VM. All of our VMware VMs should work on versions of VMware Workstation (5.5 and above), Fusion (1.x and 2.x) and Server (ESX 3.5 and up), and should work on all the supported hardware.

We use a snapshot of Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) that was dated several months after the original release, but it apparently had the same problem on bare-metal machines. For instance, see here: https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/....

So the answer is yes, our VMs are intended to work on PIII, M series and older P4 series chipsets, if the host system works on them. However if the host system passes on information to the VM that would have caused the default install of the OS to not work then the VMs may not work.

Could you, perhaps, try Ubuntu 8.10? That may have better results for you.

Thanks.

Nicholas

nclements replied on May 30, 2009 01:18 to the question "Any plans to support VirtualBox VMs?" in CohesiveFT:

VirtualBox has a couple of versions. The OSE (Open Source Edition) is available under the GPL and is "...functionally equivalent to the full VirtualBox package, except for a few features that primarily target enterprise customers." (Quote from http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions)

However most commercial users are going to want the support that comes from buying a license from Sun.

nclements replied on May 29, 2009 19:53 to the question "Any plans to support VirtualBox VMs?" in CohesiveFT:

The original poster wanted free alternatives. Player and Server are free (with various limitations) but Fusion isn't.

nclements replied on May 27, 2009 00:29 to the question "Any plans on opensolaris support?" in CohesiveFT:

OpenSolaris is definitely on the roadmap. If you're really serious in wanting to help please contact us at [support] @ [cohesiveft.com] and we'll talk about it.

Thanks.

Nicholas

nclements replied on May 16, 2009 04:18 to the question "Security risk!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" in CohesiveFT:

Michael,

Hmm....I'll have to confirm this, but it's possible that the downloadable version of the AMI images is only available to users of the Personal account.

We don't actually embed a secret access key within the machine, so we don't have root access that way. We have plans to allow our users to optionally upload a different access key to allow for root access (because that's the EC2-preferred/recommended approach and other companies support or even enforce such a thing), but it's not in place yet, and I don't know the timetable.

Ultimately it comes down to a trust issue, much like an online merchant requesting (and often storing) your credit card. If you feel you can trust us (and we've had thousands of customers who felt they could) then great. If not we're more than willing to work with you as best we can within those limitations.

In the meantime I'll see what's up with the capability of downloading AMI images without needing to enter credentials. I'm certain it used to be possible.

Nicholas

nclements replied on May 16, 2009 02:54 to the question "Security risk!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" in CohesiveFT:

Hello,

I'm not exactly sure which part of access to EC2 you're referring to. Could you explain further?

I can see a couple of areas of possible concern: we optionally store your credentials (which allows us to deploy your VMs to EC2 or other supported cloud vendors) but that's not a requirement. We do allow you to handle the deployment manually by letting you download the image. At that point you're on your own.

If you do choose to allow us to store your credentials then they are fully encrypted and only used for deployment and management of your servers. However, as mentioned above, that's optional.

As for other potential security risks, we have some documentation and a forthcoming blog post for our paying (i.e. non-community) customers explaining how to secure not only the Elastic Servers, but also VMs in general.

Finally we don't actually have access to your EC2 servers unless we know their IP addresses (and not then if you lock them down per the aforementioned instructions).

Hopefully this answers some of your concerns. If not, please feel free to e-mail our support and we can answer any questions you may have.

Thanks.

Nicholas

nclements replied on May 04, 2009 19:03 to the question "Cant access EC2 instance using SSH" in CohesiveFT:

Looking at your account it appears that you have one built server and one running instance in EC2. We can't see much more than that except that the AMI ID for the running instance doesn't appear to match the ID for the build you show above.

Please go to your account at ElasticServer.com and take a look at the "Manage Running Instances" option.

To get there, login and go to this URL: https://elasticserver.com/ec2
Then find the "Manage Running Instances" link and click it.

You should see one instance running and one EC2 image. If the AMI ID matches then leave a message here and we'll see what we can do to help.
If (as I suspect) the image that's running is not from ElasticServer.com then the IDs won't match and we can't really help too much with the SSH problem.

nclements replied on May 01, 2009 16:40 to the question "How can I reset the Elastic Server password?" in CohesiveFT:

Hello.

There's a couple of different approaches you can take here.

If your machine is an EC2 image then you can just create a new instance of it. That, of course, destroys any changes you've made.

If you're using a local image (VMware, Parallels, etc.) then you can do something similar: uncompress the downloaded archive somewhere new and start again with a fresh image.

We're going to work on a command-line tool that will allow for you to reset the password. In the meantime if you want us to help walk you through the steps to do it manually then please send an e-mail to
support @ elasticserver.com
(remove the spaces).

Hope that helps. Thanks.

Nicholas

nclements replied on March 13, 2009 19:27 to the question "How can I change keyboard layout ?" in CohesiveFT:

Glad to know it works.

The reason it didn't work the first time is because of the missing (but apparently not required) console-common package. Somehow in my first test I installed that but didn't remember it to write it down. The second time I followed my instructions (above) and hit the same problems you did.

Anyway, thanks for the interest in Cohesive's Elastic Server.

Nicholas

nclements replied on March 13, 2009 17:28 to the question "How can I change keyboard layout ?" in CohesiveFT:

I think I missed one package requirement when I wrote the above response. Try adding:
      # apt-get install console-common

If that doesn't fix things immediately then try running:
      # install-keymap /usr/share/keymaps/i386/fr-pc.kmap.gz

(Note: this will modify console settings but not settings via SSH. Your SSH client should handle those appropriately.)

And hopefully that will get you running.

nclements replied on March 13, 2009 15:47 to the question "How can I change keyboard layout ?" in CohesiveFT:

Hello.

Thanks for your question.

Because of the desire to keep the Daisy VM small we've excluded a lot of standard packages so in order to get things working you'll have to add them. Fortunately you should be able to get things going with only 2 extra packages.

Here are the steps I took, logged in as root.

      # apt-get update
      # apt-get install console-data locales

I followed the prompts to have the system create the necessary locales information and to select the default choices.

To reconfigure (because mistakes can happen):
      # dpkg-reconfigure console-data
or:
      # dpkg-reconfigure locales

To set defaults for a specific user, put something similar to the following in the ~/.bash_profile file:
      export LANGUAGE=fr_FR.UTF-8
      export LANG=fr

Or to make it the default for all users, put the same lines in the /etc/profile file.

Doing this definitely modified my system -- it became difficult to use as I'm stuck with the US keyboard layout. Hopefully it will help you.

(Note: if you decide to use the Ubuntu systems instead then there's some differences you'll need to be aware of, but they're out of the scope of this answer.)

Thanks.

Nicholas

nclements replied on March 13, 2009 14:26 to the idea "Isn't it time for a Rails 2.2 bundle?" in CohesiveFT:

Scott,

Sent e-mail to your account introducing you to our Rails and bundling experts. They'll be more than willing to help you with your questions.

Thanks.

Nicholas