Get a quick list of all AWS instances using JQ and AWS Cli

Today I needed to get a quick list of all my AWS instances, and rather then try to copy and paste from the aweful AWS web UI I figured I would go the manly route and do this using the CLI tools.

Keep Route53 Health check source IP's up to date

Using AWS Cli & JQ to ensure your route53 health check security groups are always up to date

Dynamic Access Control Allow Origin header in HAProxy

Supporting dynamic Access-Control-Allow-Origin based on the requesting Origin header

IPSEC VPN for connection multiple AWS VPC's

Getting a VPN working to connect multiple regions is actually pretty simple. I’ll lay out the step’s I used to get this working and hopefully it helps someone else.

Showing restarts in Graphite using uptime

Currently we use CollectD’s uptime plugin to track system uptime. We then use Curl-Json along with Jolokia to get key metrics from our Java application server. One of these metrics is the JVM uptime, which, which we’ll discuss in this post. So here are the facts.

Ohai, Vagrant and eth1... Making them work in harmony

Unfortunately Vagrant deployments always have the NAT adapter on eth0, which can cause headaches at times, especially when doing a multiVM deployment! Most of the time you end up having to modify the recipe to make things work. In my humble opinion these changes kind of defeat the purpose of testing in Vagrant to begin with. So what to do ? We’ll you can use an Ohai plugin and override the node.ipaddress value ! So what we’ll do is make eth1 pretend to be eth0 !

Creating a release RPM

Here is an example of a release RPM we used for a project

Using SOX to batch convert audio files

The Plain old telephone service (POTS) we are all used to is almost a hundred years old so when it comes to audio codecs you get pretty much the bottom of the barrel. When doing IVR you will want to make sure you convert all your media to the lowest common denominator, which is generally 8bit, 8Khz Mono. Doing this w/ SOX is pretty simple

Using Nagios to monitor Tropo

So I will start by saying that Tropo maintains a very redundant, and fault tollerent network, however we do understand that people still need to do their due dilligance and implement monitoring just to be safe. So yesterday we had a developer that wanted do just this, they wanted to monitor Tropo’s SBC’s to ensure they were responding to requests as expected. The only problem here is that Tropo’s SBC’s don’t implelment OPTIONS and all the plugins for Nagios seem to use OPTIONS in their tests, however one seems to allow you to specify the response code for a passing test. This plugin is the NagiosSIP plugin, and via the -c ( SIP_CODE) flag we can set a 501 ( SIP/501 Not Implemented) as a passing test, since a 501 would signify a responding SBC. Check out below for an example of just what I mean:

Installing Asterisk 10.3 on OSX Lion

So I had a need to install Asterisk the other day on my laptop and doing the atypical: