San Francisco Ruby on Rails Meetup Tomorrow Night

Tomorrow evening is the Inaugural San Francisco Ruby on Rails Meetup so come out and meet your fellow SF Rubyists. Jonathan Siegel, founder of RightScale, RightSignature, and RightCart will be speaking. Be sure to sign up if you'd like to come. Pizza and Beer to be had by all!

MiniFB Ruby Gem for Facebook Now Supports Facebook Graph API

Our lightweight gem for interacting with Facebook, mini_fb, has been updated for use with the new Facebook Graph API. This also includes support for the new Oauth authentication and of course you can still use the old API if you must.

If you want to get started quickly, you can check out our demo application on github at http://github.com/appoxy/mini_fb_demo.

Shiny New Version of SimpleDeployr Released

SimpleDeployr Version 2 is now available with many exciting new features and a major facelift. You can read more at the SimpleDeployr blog.

Client Update: Plaster Networks Launches Intelligent Powerline Networking Device

Plaster Networks just launched their brand new product offering ethernet over powerlines as well as remote diagnostics and network management through a central website. The beauty of the product is in it's simplicity, you just plug in a PLN3 Adapter (pictured right) to a wall socket and connect it to your Internet router. Then you plug in other adapters anywhere you need an ethernet connection and bam, you're networked. They use your existing electrical cabling to create an instant LAN and it works great. We've actually got these adapters all over our office for desktop computers, Xbox 360 and even to extend our wireless range by plugging in wireless routers to a PLN3 adapters on opposite sides of the office.

The big differentiator between the Plaster Networks Adapters and the competition is the a special processor chip that adds a ton of extra functionality and smarts to the adapter. Every customer can access a site where they can see get full visibility into their network performance, find ways to diagnose performance issues, and communicate with the adapters to do things like changing network configurations and what not. Very cool stuff. 


And did I mention it's way faster than wireless?


You can get more information and purchase their products here.

Here is the press release:


PLASTER NETWORKS DEBUTS INTELLIGENT POWERLINE SOLUTION FOR IN-HOME
MULTIMEDIA NETWORKING

Menlo Park, California - October 20, 2009 - Today, Plaster Networks
(www.plasternetworks.com) announced availability of a new networking
solution for delivering music, videos, and other multimedia content using
existing electrical wiring within the home. In response to the growth of
streaming video, IPTV, and over-the-top (OTT) applications, Plaster Networks
offers a reliable alternative to wireless networks, and is more
cost-effective than installing Ethernet cables in the walls.

Plaster Networks delivers the first solution that combines intelligent
powerline adapters with a web-based service for remotely managing and
configuring the home network. The Plaster Networks solution also includes
powerline isolators that can filter unwanted noise, improving network
reliability and performance.

"Home networks are quickly transitioning from computer applications such as
web surfing and e-mail to broadband entertainment applications including
video, music, and online gaming," said Jeff Scroggin, CEO of Plaster
Networks. "By integrating advanced management and configuration into the
Plaster Networks PLN3 adapters, our goal is to make powerline networking a
reliable solution that delivers uninterrupted broadband connectivity within
existing homes, without the expense of installing dedicated network cables."

Combined with Plaster Networks Service, the company's PLN3 powerline
adapters allow users to see the throughput capacity of their powerline
network instantly through a standard browser. The Service provides an easy
way to verify the status of the network. And in many cases the Service can
help identify where to install Plaster Networks isolators to optimize
performance.

Based on the HomePlug AV standard, Plaster Networks PLN3 powerline adapters
deliver up to 200Mbps PHY rates (with equivalent Ethernet rates reaching
100Mbps). HomePlug AV provides a convenient and cost effective method of
distributing multimedia content in the home without new wires.

"Plaster Networks brings a new level of functionality to powerline
networking by combining Intellon's 6400 IC HomePlug AV Chipset Solution with
a dedicated network processor for management and diagnostics," said Rick E.
Furtney, President and COO of Intellon Corporation. "We are delighted that
Plaster Networks selected our latest HomePlug AV chipset for this innovative
solution for delivering a reliable broadband network within the home."

Plaster Networks PLN3 Ethernet adapters are available in the U.S. through
the Plaster Networks website (www.plasternetworks.com) at $149.95 for a set
of two. For a limited time, Plaster Networks is offering one year's free
subscription to Plaster Networks Service (including software updates).

About the company: Plaster Networks enables simple, reliable networking over
existing wiring. The company develops advanced hardware and software
technologies for low-cost, high speed powerline networks in the home or
small office. Plaster Networks was founded by Paul Baran, a Silicon Valley
entrepreneur widely known as the inventor of packet switching, the
foundation technology for the Internet. For more information, please visit
www.plasternetworks.com.

We're Going to Aloha on Rails

Appoxy will be in Waikiki, Hawaii next week for the Aloha on Rails conference. If you're going to be there and would like to meet up with us, please let us know. We love talking shop with fellow Rails folk and if you want to know more about using Ruby on Rails with Amazon, that's our specialty. You can probably find us at the conference during the day and Duke's at night (and day).

Aloha!

How to Rotate Your Ruby on Rails Log Files

Nobody wants a disk to fill up when you least expect it so here is a simple step by step for rotating your Phusion Passenger log files.

1. Create a file called /etc/logrotate.d/passenger

And put the following contents in it.

/home/myapp/log/*.log {
daily
missingok
rotate 30
compress
delaycompress
sharedscripts
postrotate
touch /home/myapp/tmp/restart.txt
endscript
}

Now your logs will get rotated daily with the previous day being compressed into it's own file. The compressed files will sit around for 30 days then be deleted. After the rotation is done, postrotate, it will touch /home/myapp/tmp/restart.txt to restart passenger.

2. Test it

Run: logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.d/passenger

After running, you should see an archived log file and a fresh new active one taking the original files place. Also, Passenger will restart so it can log to the new file.

Ruby Interface to AWS Elastic Load Balancing Service

The AWS group is hard at work. They responded to the market demand with a load balancing service called, true to form, Elastic Load Balancing.

It's really slick - but generating soap or rest commands from scratch isn't all that fun, so we upgraded our Appoxy-aws gem and added an interface to the ELB service.

Now, using Capistrano, we simply use one command:

cap appoxy:launch_instance

To launch an EC2 instance, provision the system, deploy our code, and (with the new ELB interface), automatically attach the server to our load balancer.... viola, more capacity, testing server, staging server, redundancy, you name it.

Central to this strategy is provisioning and deploying almost everything using Capistrano. Building a full AMI sounds nice, but rebuilding an AMI after a gem update isn't very efficient.

Here's appoxy-aws: http://github.com/appoxy/aws/tree/master

Also if you want our Ubunty Jaunty clean AMI with Ruby 1.9 search for: ami-51769738

Finally, thanks again to RightScale for building the RightAws libraries that made appoxy-aws possible.

Cheers,

Chad

Installing Ruby 1.9, Apache2, Rails, and Phusion Passenger on new Ubuntu EC2 Instance

Here's the step by step for getting Ruby on Rails running on a sparkling fresh new Amazon EC2 Instance.

1) Launch EC2 Instance

I won't explain this, but pick the latest Ubuntu AMI. The rest of this assumes you're ssh'd into the new isntance.

2) Install Ruby 1.9

Update: This link is better and will stay more up to date for installing ruby.

• apt-get update
• apt-get upgrade
• apt-get install zlibc zlib-bin zlib1g zlib1g-dbg zlib1g-dev libopenssl-ruby1.9 libssl-dev subversion git-core apache2 apache2-prefork-dev libapr1-dev
• Install ruby
• download ruby 1.9 from: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/
• tar -zxvf ruby1.9....tgz
• cd ruby1.9....
• ./configure && make && make install
• ruby -v
• to check that installed properly
• cd ext/openssl
• ruby extconf.rb && make && make install
• This installs openssl support for ruby

3) Now get Rails up and running

• gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
• gem install rails sqlite3-ruby passenger
• passenger-install-apache2-module
• follow instructions
• it will give you a few lines you have to add to: /etc/apache2/apache2.conf (bottom is fine)
• Get your Rails app on server somewhere
• If you have an existing app, upload it to the server (eg: /home/myapp would work fine)
• Now if you don't have a rails app ready to go, lets quickly make one
• cd /home
• rails first_rails
• nano -w /etc/apache2/sites-available/first_rails
• Assuming you have some.domain.com pointed to the server (this can replace the Apache default site as well):
  
  
  
  • 
    
    ServerName www.yourhost.com # delete this line if replacing root
    DocumentRoot /home/rails/public
    Allow from all
    # RailsEnv development
    RailsDefaultUser root
    
    
  
  
• a2ensite first_rails
• adds site to sites-enabled
• /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

That's it.

If you want your app under a sub directory of a different virtual host, see the instructions here:http://www.modrails.com/documentation/Users%20guide.html#_deploying_a_ruby_on_rails_application

Troubleshooting

• If you get: no such file to load rbconfig.rb
• be sure all 1.8 stuff is removed
• apt-get remove libruby1.8 rubygems

And lastly, get the latest awesome gems for web development:

gem install uuidtools appoxy-aws right_http_connection appoxy-simple_record appoxy-local_cache quetzall-cloud_cache

And you should probably setup logrotate to keep your log files under control, but that will come in another post.