jchysk's questions

I've been running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS for about 6 months on a computer that has 3 180gb SSDs in EXT4 RAID5 configured through the motherboard's BIOS. The OS froze and computer had to be forced down. On boot after the BIOS it just hangs at a blank screen. I booted off a live CD and was unable to mount /dev/dm-0, the RAID, because of a "superblock could not be read" error.

My RAID is made up of drives /dev/sda, /dev/sdb/, and /dev/sdc. Running "fdisk -l" showed a "missing partition table" error on /dev/sdb. I also ran testdisk and it returned unrecoverable partition errors. I wasn't able to run anything on that drive individually because it was considered in use. I booted with just that drive plugged in and tried messing with it, but got superblock errors.

I tried recovering the superblock from each of the backups listed to no effect. I zeroed the entire /dev/sdb drive and when I booted it went to rebuild mode for that drive, but I'm still hanging on boot of the OS and unable to mount the RAID or see any of the data.

I imagine I've only made things worse by zeroing one of the drives, so before I get to a state where my data becomes unrecoverable, what can I do to either fix this superblock error or recover my data?

I'd like only my base domain www.domain.com to be rewritten to https://www.domain.com By default in my https block I have it reroute to http:// if it's not ~uri = "/" (base domain) or static content.

server {
  listen              443;
  set $ssltoggle 2;
  if ($uri ~ ^/(img|js|css|static)/) {
      set $ssltoggle 1;
  }
  if ($uri = '/') {
      set $ssltoggle 1;
  }
  if ($ssltoggle != 1) {
      rewrite ^(.*)$ http://$server_name$1 permanent;
  }
}

So in my http block I need to do the rewrite if it has to https:

server {
  listen              80;
  if ($uri = '/') {
      set $ssltoggle 1;
  }
  if ($ssltoggle = 1) {
      rewrite ^(.*)$ https://$server_name$1 permanent;
  }
}

If I don't have the $uri = '/' if-statement in the http block, then https works fine if I go directly to it, but I won't get redirected if I go to regular http which is expected. If I do put that in-statement in the http block then everything stops working within minutes. It might work for a few requests, but will always stop within a minute or so. In browsers I just get a blank page for all requests. If I restart nginx it continues to not work until I remove both if-statement blocks in both the https and http blocks and restart nginx. When I look in the error logs I don't see anything logged. When I look in the access log I see this message:

"-" 400 0 "-" "-"

which I assume means a 400 error. I don't understand why this doesn't work for me. My end goal is to have the base domain be https-only while all other pages default to http. How can I achieve this?

I have a regular instance that works fine when not behind a load balancer. I set up an ELB with 80 forwarding to 80 and 443 forwarding to 443 and sticky sessions. Afterward I receive this error when going to any https page.

The plain HTTP request was sent to HTTPS port

I handle the process of forcing https on certain pages in my nginx configuration. What do I need to do to get this working? I'm putting in a barebones version of my nginx config below.

http {

  include               mime.types;
  default_type          application/octet-stream;

  # Directories
  client_body_temp_path tmp/client_body/  2 2;
  fastcgi_temp_path     tmp/fastcgi/;
  proxy_temp_path       tmp/proxy/;
  uwsgi_temp_path       tmp/uwsgi/;

  server {
    listen              443;
    ssl                 on;
    ssl_certificate     ssl.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key ssl.key;

    server_name www.shirtsby.me;
    if ($host ~* ^www\.(.*)) {
        set $host_without_www $1;
        rewrite ^/(.*) $scheme://$host_without_www/$1 permanent;
    }

    location ~ ^/(images|img|thumbs|js|css)/  {
          root /app/public;
    }
    if ($uri ~ ^/(images|img|thumbs|js|css)/) {
        set $ssltoggle 1;
    }
    if ($uri ~ "/nonsecure") {
        set $ssltoggle 1;
    }
    if ($ssltoggle != 1) {
        rewrite ^(.*)$ http://$server_name$1 permanent;
    }

    location / {
      uwsgi_pass  unix:/site/sock/uwsgi.sock;
      include     uwsgi_params;
    }

  }

  server {
    listen      80;
    server_name www.shirtsby.me;
    if ($host ~* ^www\.(.*)) {
        set $host_without_www $1;
        rewrite ^/(.*) $scheme://$host_without_www/$1 permanent;
    }

    if ($uri ~ "/secure") {
        set $ssltoggle 1;
    }
    if ($ssltoggle = 1) {
        rewrite ^(.*)$ https://$server_name$1 permanent;
    }

    location ~ ^/(images|img|thumbs|js|css)/  {
          root /app/public;
    }

    location / {
      uwsgi_pass  unix:/home/ubuntu/site/sock/uwsgi.sock;
      include     uwsgi_params;
    }
  }
}

I have a load balancer that I created an auto-scaling-group and launch-config for. I created the auto-scaling-group with a min-size of 1 and max size of 20. I have a scaledown policy:

    as-put-scaling-policy SBMScaleDownPolicy --auto-scaling-group SBMAutoScaleGroup --adjustment=-1 --type ChangeInCapacity --cooldown 300

Then I set up an alarm:

    mon-put-metric-alarm SBMLowCPUAlarm --comparison-operator LessThanThreshold --evaluation-periods 1 --metric-name CPUUtilization --namespace "AWS/EC2" --period 600 --statistic Average --threshold 35 --alarm-actions arn:aws:autoscaling:us-east-1:policystuffhere:autoScalingGroupName/SBMAutoScaleGroup:policyName/SBMScaleDownPolicy --dimensions "AutoScalingGroupName=SBMAutoScaleGroup"

When average CPU usage over 10 minutes is under 35, in CloudFront the alarm shows up as "In Alarm State" but doesn't decrease the number of instances. Also, if there's only one instance running it'll spin up another to 2 even if a scale up alarm isn't hit. It seems like the default value is just set to 2 somehow. How can I change this?

There's a command in the AWS EC2 API called ec2-register or ec2reg which has an argument -s for snapshot ID. You are able to create an image from a snapshot. I'd like to be able to do this in Python (currently using boto), but it doesn't look like it's built in functionality within boto yet. Is there still a way using boto to create an image from a snapshot id? Also assume, architecture, kernel, and other attributes are available and S3 access if necessary. Thanks.

I'm moving an SSL crt and key from one server to a new one. The old one was on a box with cpanel and the new one is just a LAMP Ubuntu box. I've been following tutorials and instructions for hours without getting anywhere. I've created a VirtualHost file listening on 443. All the non-https pages work, as soon as I go to an https page it gives me a connection denied. I tried using digicert.com/help which reports "No certificates found". How exactly do I go about troubleshooting this?

I would like to have a load balancer for my site and have the site up to date. The load balancer will take the AMI I select and spin up more of those instances when processing power hits a certain level. The problem is the AMI may not be up to date so I'll have some instances up to date and others not. When I deploy I can deploy to all the instances under the load balancer without issue, but I would need to know whenever the load balancer spins up a new instance in order to trigger this deployment. Also there would be a block of time when the updates happen greatly decreasing its responsiveness. So I've come up with a plan.

My plan:

After deploy:

    identify one of the instances and
        get instance id
    identify volume of instance id
    ec2-create-snapshot vol-yyyyyyyy
        get snapshot volume id
    ec2reg -s snap-zzzzzzzz -a x86 -d Description -n imagename
        get image id
    as-delete-launch-config existinglaunchconfig
    as-create-launch-config mylaunchconfig --image-id IMAGEID --instance-type m1.small --key mykey --group mysecuritygroup
    as-update-auto-scaling-group --launch-configuration mylaunchconfig

Before I go and spend however many hours trying to figure this out and scripting it all, testing, and everything else, my question is: Will this work? Is there a better way? Is there a tutorial or post that anyone knows of that would speed up my efforts on this issue? Thanks.

When I RDP into a Windows Server EC2 Instance I'd like to be able to use multiple monitors. It doesn't have to be RDP, but I want to be able to have multiple monitors, not a spanned display. I've tried: Checking: Use all my monitors for the remote session mstsc.exe /multimon Adding "use multimon:i:1" in the RDP file Powerstrip install on the EC2 instance

Any way to do this?

EDIT: more information I'm trying to RDP from a Windows 7 machine into a Windows Server 2008 R2 Base default Amazon EC2 instance.