Railscamp Server

[Ben Hoskings]

Hi all,

I'm setting up the Railscamp server this weekend, so if you have any particular requests, then now's the time to let me know.

I'm not making any guarantees that I'll actually set up everything that's requested — after all, being offline is part of the beauty of railscamp, so a minimalist server is key :)

The machine runs ubuntu server. The main stuff will be similar to last time for those that were there, the meat of which is:

- twetter, for offline twittering

- fake gravatar, for offline vanity and voyeurism

- a vhosting nginx/passenger stack that you can deploy to by bugging me, or if I have time to invent something cool, without bugging me :)

- git hosting (more to come on this)

- full gem mirrors (i.e. rubyforge and gemcutter)

- lots of rdocs, hosted via railsapi

- some mirrored software, like Xcode, Tweetie, TextMate, etc

I'm a Mac guy, so bear in mind if you're using Linux (or Windows, if anyone still is these days) that I may well not have included something you'll want — let me know :)

I've had a request already for a ubuntu mirror, which sounds like a good idea — I'll probably pull just karmic, but if there's enough demand I can also pull jaunty.

So, what have I forgotten?

Ben

[Ben Hoskings]

One bit I forgot: the gem mirror will include github as well (thanks Pat).

2009/11/6 Ben Hoskings <b...@hoskings.net>

[Dr Nic Williams]

gemcutter

It has rake tasks to clone all gems afaik.

--
Dr Nic Williams
Mocra - Premier iPhone and Ruby on Rails Consultants
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skype - nicwilliams
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[Ben Hoskings]

Good idea, I think that's definitely worth setting up.

2009/11/6 Dr Nic Williams <dr...@mocra.com>

[Lachie]

will we need a haxxed non ssl tweetie again?

:lachie
http://plus2.com.au
http://smartbomb.com.au
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lachie/

[Andrew Grimm]

You can download a June 2008 copy (same as last time) of the English
Wikipedia at either http://static.wikipedia.org/downloads/2008-06/en/
or from a torrent (according to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_database#Static_HTML_tree_dumps_for_mirroring_or_CD_distribution
).

Someone's working on a portable (static) edition of Stack Overflow
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/20823/stack-overflow-portable-edition
, but unless someone can add an (even dumb) search capability it
probably won't be much use.

Andrew

[Ben Hoskings]

Probably — Tweetie doesn't seem to have an option to disable SSL yet.

I still have the app bundle from last time, but I'll contact @atebits about an updated copy.

Ben

2009/11/6 Lachie <lac...@gmail.com>

[Ben Hoskings]

I'd planned to drop those sort of things this time, and stick with the core of what we need — code-related stuff. After all, the server isn't intended to be an internet mirror, just the bare minimum of what we need in order to be able to hack without saying "oh man, if I only had an internet connection".

If there's demand for those things then I'll add them, but they don't seem useful to me.

Ben

2009/11/6 Andrew Grimm <andrew....@gmail.com>

[Bodaniel Jeanes]

I still have it from last year if you don't want to download it all again ben. It was like 7GB and took almost 24 hours to extract!

[Ben Hoskings]

On second thought, I'll keep wikipedia.. that 7z archive took 36 hours to extract, so let's make use of it, eh? :)

2009/11/6 Ben Hoskings <b...@hoskings.net>

[Ben Hoskings]

Cheers, yeah I've still got the extracted copy. All it needs is a vhost.

2009/11/6 Bodaniel Jeanes <m...@bjeanes.com>

[Lachie]

On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 1:59 PM, Ben Hoskings <b...@hoskings.net> wrote:
> I'd planned to drop those sort of things this time, and stick with the core
> of what we need — code-related stuff. After all, the server isn't intended
> to be an internet mirror, just the bare minimum of what we need in order to
> be able to hack without saying "oh man, if I only had an internet
> connection".
> If there's demand for those things then I'll add them, but they don't seem
> useful to me.
> Ben

I'd agree with that

and lets face it, people have tethers, dongers, dongles and dags these
days. Purist "No Internet" wasn't what it now is.

[Ben Hoskings]

2009/11/6 Lachie <lac...@gmail.com>

On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 1:59 PM, Ben Hoskings <b...@hoskings.net> wrote:
> I'd planned to drop those sort of things this time, and stick with the core
> of what we need — code-related stuff. After all, the server isn't intended
> to be an internet mirror, just the bare minimum of what we need in order to
> be able to hack without saying "oh man, if I only had an internet
> connection".
> If there's demand for those things then I'll add them, but they don't seem
> useful to me.
> Ben

I'd agree with that

and lets face it, people have tethers, dongers, dongles and dags these
days. Purist "No Internet" wasn't what it now is.

Yeah, it has to be self-policed now :) 

[Josh Price]

> - a vhosting nginx/passenger stack that you can deploy to by bugging
> me, or if I have time to invent something cool, without bugging me :)

Whatever happened with bivouac? If I recall correctly it was intended
to be a heroku clone.

Josh

[Ben Hoskings]

Cheers, I'd forgotten about bivouac. I'll look into it tomorrow. :)

Ben

2009/11/6 Josh Price <jos...@gmail.com>

[Phil Oye]

On 06/11/2009, at 12:45 PM, Ben Hoskings <b...@hoskings.net> wrote:

> git hosting (more to come on this)

Why not just use bananajour?

Cheers,
p.

[Bodaniel Jeanes]

> git hosting (more to come on this)

Why not just use bananajour?

Because when the host decides to go to bed or close their laptop to go play drinking games, there goes the upstream.  

[Clifford Heath]

On 06/11/2009, at 3:36 AM, Ben Hoskings wrote:
> Yeah, it has to be self-policed now :)

I suppose a radio geek might bring a 3G jammer (and then the ACCC).
Hmm, not the best idea I suppose.

Clifford Heath.

[Clifford Heath]

If you have enough grunt and can persuade Mike Bailey,
you might get a freeware slicehost clone running (as we
do at RapidMango).

Clifford Heath.

[Martin Stannard]

Hey Ben,

bivouac is at http://github.com/martinstannard/bivouac

Not much has been done to it since last camp, but it will still serve
basic sinatra apps just fine.

cheers,

Martin


2009/11/6 Ben Hoskings <b...@hoskings.net>:

[Clifford Heath]

On 06/11/2009, at 2:49 AM, Andrew Grimm wrote:
> You can download a June 2008 copy (same as last time) of the English
> Wikipedia at either http://static.wikipedia.org/downloads/2008-06/en/
> or from a torrent (according to
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_database#Static_HTML_tree_dumps_for_mirroring_or_CD_distribution
> ).
>
> Someone's working on a portable (static) edition of Stack Overflow
> http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/20823/stack-overflow-portable-edition
> , but unless someone can add an (even dumb) search capability it
> probably won't be much use.

Maybe someone could just snapshot Google Maps and StreetView while
they're at it? ;-) Seriously though, is there anything about the API
that could
usefully be mocked? I'd like to do a tutorial on "programming Google
Maps
with JQuery"...

Would love a tutorial introduction to RaphaelJS also.

Clifford Heath (in Devon)

[David Lee]

darwinports mirror? eh, nevermind.

--
cheers,
David Lee

[Hugh Evans]

I'll gitjour homebrew ;)

Hugh

[Andrew Grimm]

Rather than mocking google maps for the real world, you could equally
do something fictional like Google Middle Earth.

Will the guides to haskell be there?

Andrew

[Paul O'Keeffe]

Rob Nielsen, who had been doing most of the recent hacking on twetter, showed me how to sort out the Tweetie SSL problems without needing a different version. I'll ask him what he did.

Cheers, Paul.

Columina

Business Technology Coaching

Sustainable Software Development

[Hugh Evans]

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 9:08 AM, Hugh Evans <hu...@artpop.com.au> wrote:

I'll gitjour homebrew ;)

To make that work though I guess I'll have to download all the different source files, get them up on the server, make a railscamp branch of homebrew and modify the formulas to point to our server. People can switch back to master when the camp is over.

I'll give it a go.

Hugh

[Ben Hoskings]

2009/11/10 Hugh Evans <hu...@artpop.com.au>

There's probably a better way than modifying homebrew. Keep in mind that I hack DNS, so we can host files on any domain you want.

I'd probably write a script to pull all the source tarballs down into a common parent dir, then vhost that dir with a domain alias for each of the domains. Might be a little messy, but it means homebrew installs should transparently work.

I'd be keen to hack on something like that, I reckon it would be really useful.

Ben

[Ben Hoskings]

On 10/11/2009, at 9:25 AM, Andrew Grimm <andrew....@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Will the guides to haskell be there?

Yep, I can include those no worries.

Any site that's static and not massive is really easy to mirror, so
just list 'em, wget and vhost 'em. :)

Ben

[Ryan Bigg]

2009/11/10 Ben Hoskings <b...@hoskings.net>

I think http://www.imagemagick.org/ may be helpful. 

Ben

--
Ryan Bigg

[Nick Partridge]

I don't know if this falls under the umbrella of 'rdocs', but as a rails-nub I find http://guides.rubyonrails.org pretty handy.

Would be good to grab the guides for 2.3 and 3.0.pre, assuming they've been updated.

I think they're built from the source, but not sure.

[Ryan Bigg]

The source for the guides has changed a fair bit since when they were last updated (April, I think) so I think it's best if you grab them from the site as well as having the source to the updated versions handy.

2009/11/10 Nick Partridge <nkp...@gmail.com>

--
Ryan Bigg

[Michael Morris]

Wouldn't it be easier to *have* an internet connection and just whitelist the required sites? (github, gemcutter etc etc) - everything else is not available... For speed/bandwidth issues - cache away

[Dan Cheail]

>> Yeah, it has to be self-policed now :)
>
> I suppose a radio geek might bring a 3G jammer (and then the ACCC).
> Hmm, not the best idea I suppose.

It's Mornington. Geography does a better job at jamming 3G signals
than any bit of hardware ;)

- Dan

[Will Marshall]

<snip>

So, what have I forgotten?

A mirror of the internet would be lovely. If you're short on disk space, .com, .org, .au and .co.nz would do at a pinch.

[Korny Sietsma]

Don't forget twitter!

Actually, what we need is a local fake twitter server, for in-camp
twittering... and then of course a script to automatically push all
tweets out to 'real' twitter at the end. Just to annoy all the folks
who aren't there.

On a (slightly) more serious note, will the server have wifi access
for phone geeking? Not that I'm likely to want to git pull on my
phone, but it'd be nice to at least be able to connect to local web
servers and the like!

- Korny

--
Kornelis Sietsma korny at my surname dot com
kornys on twitter/fb/gtalk/gwave www.sietsma.com/korny
"Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part
that wonders what the part that isn't thinking
isn't thinking of"

[Ryan Bigg]

2009/11/11 Korny Sietsma <ko...@sietsma.com>

Don't forget twitter!

Actually, what we need is a local fake twitter server, for in-camp
twittering... and then of course a script to automatically push all
tweets out to 'real' twitter at the end.  Just to annoy all the folks
who aren't there.

There will be a local fake twitter server as usual. It won't push all the tweets out. That's too conference-y.

 

On a (slightly) more serious note, will the server have wifi access
for phone geeking?  Not that I'm likely to want to git pull on my
phone, but it'd be nice to at least be able to connect to local web
servers and the like!

Yes there's a wireless network, you should be able to connect to it... I think this is what you're asking. 

- Korny

On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 12:51 PM, Will Marshall
<willrj....@gmail.com> wrote:
> <snip>
>
> So, what have I forgotten?
>
> A mirror of the internet would be lovely. If you're short on disk space,
> .com, .org, .au and .co.nz would do at a pinch.
> >
>



--

Kornelis Sietsma  korny at my surname dot com
kornys on twitter/fb/gtalk/gwave www.sietsma.com/korny
"Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part
that wonders what the part that isn't thinking
isn't thinking of"

--
Ryan Bigg

[Ben Hoskings]

Actually, what we need is a local fake twitter server

Already done. :)

On a (slightly) more serious note, will the server have wifi access
for phone geeking?

Yep, we'll have a full wifi mesh courtesy of NodeCity.

- Ben

[Korny Sietsma]

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 3:18 PM, Ryan Bigg <radarl...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes there's a wireless network, you should be able to connect to it... I
> think this is what you're asking.

Yep, cool - I kind of assumed that, but it wasn't mentioned anywhere
that I saw. I've just found though that Android doesn't do
Bonjour/Zeroconf (well, it may work in Android 1.6 - seems that
Android 1.5 and earlier have issues with multicast networking) which
may be a pain.

- Korny

[Andrew Grimm]

What's phone geeking?

Andrew

[Ben Hoskings]

2009/11/11 Korny Sietsma <ko...@sietsma.com>

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 3:18 PM, Ryan Bigg <radarl...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes there's a wireless network, you should be able to connect to it... I
> think this is what you're asking.

I've just found though that Android doesn't do Bonjour/Zeroconf

The RC network will fully support mDNS/bonjour/etc, in fact I expect a lot of people to be sharing code around using bananajour, and I'm looking forward to queueing up some tracks on dukejour :)

[Ryan Bigg]

Do you have any special networking issues planned for this Railscamp? Unexpected outages? Inability to scale? One of the core switches releasing the magic smoke that powers it? Or is this all secret until the camp? It won't be a Railscamp if we don't have network issues! :)

2009/11/11 Ben Hoskings <b...@hoskings.net>

--
Ryan Bigg

[Ben Hoskings]

2009/11/11 Ben Hoskings <b...@hoskings.net>

Sorry, I think I might have misunderstood. To clarify—I'm hosting DNS and the mesh will serve DHCP, so you won't need bonjour in order to use the services on the network, like twitter or http://wiki.

[Ben Hoskings]

2009/11/11 Ryan Bigg <radarl...@gmail.com>

Do you have any special networking issues planned for this Railscamp? Unexpected outages? Inability to scale? One of the core switches releasing the magic smoke that powers it? Or is this all secret until the camp? It won't be a Railscamp if we don't have network issues! :)

The one issue we had last time was VMware failing at memory management, and it's been taken out of the mix, so I'm expecting clear sailing.

Course, if nothing goes wrong at first, I'm sure someone will be available to fix that, with a DoS or something :)

[Ryan Bigg]

2009/11/11 Ben Hoskings <b...@hoskings.net>

If you'd like I can go around power-cycling the switches at random points in time ;) 

--
Ryan Bigg

[Clifford Heath]

What about the sources that RVM uses for download?

I've had problems getting 1.9.1 and 1.9.2 versions working,
as they chuck exceptions somewhere in ActiveSupport, so
would like some help with that.

I'd also like to get ActiveFacts up on JRuby and IronRuby.
I already have a working JRuby I think.

Can any IronRuby folk (Mark R?) let me know what I should
grab before RC?

Clifford Heath, Data Constellation.

[Ben Hoskings]

2009/11/12 Clifford Heath <cliffor...@gmail.com>

What about the sources that RVM uses for download?

Good idea, I'll pull whatever ruby sources RVM needs.

 

I'd also like to get ActiveFacts up on JRuby and IronRuby.
I already have a working JRuby I think.

Are there any jruby tools worth pulling, other than those already in homebrew?

[Korny Sietsma]

people, like say me, who haven't done much rails for a long time
(though I'm starting on some short-term Rails work today, yay!) who
are more likely to tinker with code on their shiny new Android phone,
than do anything that actually merits the term "railscamp" :)

I can't even get Ruby running on Android yet - Ruboto seems like
mostly a proof-of-concept, and the Android Scripting Environment,
which does JRuby these days, only does it on Android 1.6 and later, so
I have to wait for HTC to update my OS. Sigh.

- Korny

[Ben Hoskings]

2009/11/12 Korny Sietsma <ko...@sietsma.com>

people, like say me, who haven't done much rails for a long time
(though I'm starting on some short-term Rails work today, yay!) who
are more likely to tinker with code on their shiny new Android phone,
than do anything that actually merits the term "railscamp" :)

Sounds good :)

As with everything else, let me know if there are any particular Android resources that would be helpful to have mirrored, and I'll look into making them available on the server.

[David Lee]

As an aside, we should take the opportunity to steal^H^H^H^H back up each other's music (and if you're inclined, other media) collections - so make sure you bring that terabyte enclosure everyone.

cheers,
David Lee

[Korny Sietsma]

Android is mostly just the SDK, which is a self-contained zip file /
tarball - I have the OSX version, you could mirror the Windows/Linux
versions if anyone was interested, but I'd wait for someone else to
put their hands up first :)
http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

- Korny

[Tim Lucas]

On 12/11/2009, at 9:15 AM, Korny Sietsma <ko...@sietsma.com> wrote:

> people, like say me, who haven't done much rails for a long time
> (though I'm starting on some short-term Rails work today, yay!) who
> are more likely to tinker with code on their shiny new Android phone,
> than do anything that actually merits the term "railscamp" :)

Not a whole lot of Rails coding gets done at Railscamp though, so
don't worry! First it was Camping, then Sinatra, not to mention iPhone
dev, game dev, crossword dev, jukebox apps... anything fun that
tickles your fancy! Grab a bunch of people and jus start a random
project.

The Railscamp cocktail mix usually looks something like: 2 parts
hacking; 2 parts drinking, sharing and gasbagging; and 1 part
werewolfing and guitar heroing.

-- tim

[Korny Sietsma]

I haven't tried homebrew (and not sure I want to tinker with my mac to
that level right now) so I don't know what it has for jruby - but
generally as long as the jruby version of the major gems are mirrored,
that's all I'd think you need.

Though a mirror of the jruby wiki could be handy - not sure I can see
how to mirror a kenai.com wiki though...
http://kenai.com/projects/jruby/pages/Home

- but don't get it on my account; I'm mostly tinkering with Android
geekery at the moment, and while I'd love to do ruby/jruby/duby on
Android, at the moment they're all kind of theoretical. (I *might*
play with duby, but that seems to have about 3 pages of docs, so
mirroring them is probably pointless)

- Korny

[Ben Hoskings]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 6:54 PM, Korny Sietsma <ko...@sietsma.com> wrote:

I haven't tried homebrew (and not sure I want to tinker with my mac to
that level right now) so I don't know what it has for jruby - but
generally as long as the jruby version of the major gems are mirrored,
that's all I'd think you need.

Fair enough. For the record though, everything homebrew installs is within /usr/local, so it's quite neatly contained and easily removed (much like fink or macports).

Either way, I've put that stuff on the list; mirroring is generally a single-command job.

- Ben

[Lachie]

or indeed anywhere... I decided to put mine in ~/homebrew :)

> >
>

[Hugh Evans]

I use rvm for my rubies: http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/ and homebrew for everything else.

RVM installs everything into ~/.rvm so again it's nice and contained.

Hugh

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 7:18 PM, Ben Hoskings <b...@hoskings.net> wrote:

[Lincoln Stoll]

On 17/11/2009, at 8:54 AM, Korny Sietsma wrote:
> I haven't tried homebrew (and not sure I want to tinker with my mac to
> that level right now) so I don't know what it has for jruby - but
> generally as long as the jruby version of the major gems are mirrored,
> that's all I'd think you need.

JRuby uses the same gems as 'normal' ruby, so the existing mirror will cover that.

[Lachie]

don't you have to run some kind of syntax bloating script over them
first boomtish?

[Ben Hoskings]

Hi all,

The railscamp server's power supply shorted today, and fried part of the logic board: http://skitch.com/benhoskings/n869f/photo

If you think about it, the timing's actually pretty good — better today than on Friday when I fire it up at Lord Somers. :)

I've got new hardware sorted out (hat tip to Gareth) and rebuilding the core server is quick with babushka. I'm gonna have less time for mirroring websites and things like that though, so if there's anything you're requested that you particularly want, you should sort it out yourself.

Doing it live,

ben_h

[Lachie]

What is this "babush-ka" of which you speak?

Do you have a pamphlet?

[chendo]

babushka.me

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[Lachie]

http:://rollseyes.me

[chendo]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=babushka

[Glen Maddern]

http://trolling.is.lol

Glen Maddern
0423 118 405

[Lachie]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_rolling#Eye-rolling

[Lachie]

c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue_in_cheek

[chendo]

Trolls Trolling Trolls - Encyclopedia Dramatica

[chendo]

Previous link is probably NSFW

[Bodaniel Jeanes]

Unless you work at Mocra. Then it's always safe.

[Lachie]

Can I just make it clear that I was actually flirting with ben_h.

On Wednesday, November 18, 2009, Bodaniel Jeanes <m...@bjeanes.com> wrote:
> Unless you work at Mocra. Then it's always safe.
>
> On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 4:34 PM, chendo <che...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Previous link is probably NSFW
>
> On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 4:34 PM, chendo <che...@gmail.com> wrote:
>

> Trolls Trolling Trolls - Encyclopedia Dramatica <http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Trolls_Trolling_Trolls>

--
:lachie
http://plus2.com.au
http://smartbomb.com.au
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lachie/

[Lachlan Hardy]

> Can I just make it clear that I was actually flirting with ben_h.

I wish you hadn't.

[Andrew Grimm]

Hit number 20? That's too much work!

Andrew

[George]

On Nov 18, 5:26 pm, Ben Hoskings <b...@hoskings.net> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> The railscamp server's power supply shorted today, and fried part of the
> logic board:http://skitch.com/benhoskings/n869f/photo
>

Any chance of getting the magical smoke back in?? :-D

Best of luck with the replacement hardware.

Regards


George

[Ben Hoskings]

New hardware is doing the job — most of the basics are all done already. :)

Ben

[Ben Hoskings]

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 9:22 PM, Ben Hoskings <b...@hoskings.net> wrote:

New hardware is doing the job — most of the basics are all done already. :)

Just a quick one — I'm taking wiki.railscamps.org offline now, since we're running it on the railscamp server for the weekend, and leaving it online would leave us with two versions of the database. :)

- ben_h