Revell Without a Cause

The new Amazon AWS CLI tool coded in Python is far superior to the old Java implementation. The official docs can be found at https://github.com/aws/aws-cli but here’s a quick run down of how I install and configure: Installation

or if you’re not using a virtual environment

You can also use easy_install in the same way if you prefer Configure Environment Variables Add the following to your .bash_profile, .bashrc, or .profile:

The key ID and secret key are required, the default region means you do not need to specify the region for every command, and the default output, changes the output type; it is set to JSON by default, which is fine for scripting, but not the best for reading … Continue reading →

Word Jumping If you use a mac and tried the iTerm2 application, you may have noticed that the keybindings for word jumping and deletion are not set up correctly. Here’s how to fix that: From the iTerm2 menu select Preferences > Profiles and from the right select Keys. Now add the following key bindings by clicking (+) for each: Alt + Left Send Escape Sequence, Esc + b Alt + Right Send Escape Sequence, Esc + f Alt + Backspace Send Hex Code, 0×17 Split Terminals: Creating and Navigating I also like to bind keys to split the terminal vertically and horizontally and move focus between them. From the iTerm2 menu select Preferences > Profiles and from the right select Keys. Now add … Continue reading →

If you use Amazon Web Services or other cloud providers that make use of cloud-init, you may occasionally have reason to re-trigger the initial cloud-init run; usually because something didn’t work quite right the first time round. Rather than having to kill the cloud instance and booting a fresh one, you can try this simple trick to trigger cloud-init on reboot:

It sounds trivial; create an upstart script to start on boot, but this had me googling for a little while. I used x11vnc as the vnc server. The main issue was that x11vnc needed to bind to an Xauthority file. In order to get it running for graphical login, the Xauthority needed to be for the desktop manager (in this case, lightdm) . It took me a while to find the right location ( ⁄var ⁄run ⁄lightdm ⁄root ⁄); once I had found the answer, the script was easy. I created a file in the upstart init script directory,  ⁄etc⁄init ⁄x11vnc.conf

Lets take a look at what this does; lines 1 and 3 are self explanatory, line 5, ensures that the vnc server is started at … Continue reading →

I am a user of Voyage Linux, a lightweight Debian flavour designed for integrated and low-powered computers. I use it with an ALIX 3D3 board which uses a Compact Flash card for it’s main storage. One of Voyage’s features that makes it ideal is that it operates with a read-only filesystem (a good idea if using a CF card). This introduces some interesting challenges; what about logs? what about home directories and command history? Well Voyage attempts to resolve the first of these questions by mounting ⁄var⁄log as a tmpfs volume, which works ok but obviously useless if you restart or the box crashes. By default, home directories are stored on the main disk which makes them read-only; so no … Continue reading →