Recent Posts by Rahoul Baruah

Topic: isitruby19.com / Search not working at all

Sorry about that – back up and running

Topic: Brightbox Help / MySQL Cluster Users

As it stands, at the moment, users of our shared clusters have a single MySQL account per Brightbox account. This is because the shared cluster uses the MySQL account name to figure out access permissions.

However, there is nothing stopping you from either running a local copy of MySQL on your Brightbox, or buying a dedicated MySQL service from us. As it is not shared, you can set up as many users as you like on these.

If you would like the dedicated service then just drop us a support ticket.

Cheers

Baz.

Topic: Bigwig/Warren and AMQP / Bug Report: Hash not being unpacked correctly

Bug report from Alberto:

Hi,

i have been playing around with RabbitMQ/Warren/Bunny for the last days, but i’ve encountered problems.

The simple examples for bunny seem to send properly but there is an error when receiving the messages.

The error occurs when the YAML filter is called to unpack the message. It calls YAML.load(msg) expecting msg to be the message payload in YAML, but msg is a Ruby hash with the keys header, delivery_details and payload…

Please have a look at this pastie for more info/debug output:
http://pastie.org/747011

Is this a known bug? Perhaps something in the bunny API has chaged so that it stopped working? I was surprised that the simple examples are not working. I am evaluating warren right now and it would like to know if it’s working fine for you and there are others using/maintaining it, etc.

I can investigate and patch the code. It’s more a matter of knowing if i’m going to be on my own with this or if there are others using it that would help too, etc.

Any feedback highly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Alberto

Topic: Brightbox Help / Creating a 2nd application

RailsEnv is a Passenger directive that tells Passenger which environment to start your application in. It is detailed here: http://www.modrails.com/documentation/Users%20g…

The default should be production, so you don’t really need it in there (assuming you want your application to run in the production environment). But, if you’re getting errors you then need to check your application’s logfile – /home/rails/my-app/current/log/production.log to see what is causing the 404.

Rahoul.

Topic: isitruby19.com / Forum bug still active?

This reply brought to you courtesy of a new deployment and Firefox 3.5.5

Topic: isitruby19.com / Automatically check compatibility of gems

We did think about this when we started the project – unfortunately we’ve been too busy to take it any further. It’s certainly something we plan on revisiting at some point however.

Topic: isitruby19.com / Forum bug still active?

No I wasn’t aware of that – I’ll file a ticket and we’ll get it looked at.

Topic: Passenger / Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2009.10 Packages for Ubuntu Hardy

I’ve got a few sites that aren’t 1.8.7 compatible (old versions of Rails, not worth my while to upgrade them).

How do I get the old 1.8.6 REE installed (especially if I’ve cough accidentally put 1.8.7 REE on that box)?

Topic: isitruby19.com / Gemcutter gems

No but they have started the process of merging Rubyforge and Gemcutter and gemcutter will become the canonical source of gems. So we are just waiting for that to be completed before making any changes.

Topic: Brightbox Help / limited number of mysql connections

Hi,

Most people use our shared MySQL cluster (sqlreadwrite.brightbox.net). Because it is shared, we limit the number of connections per user – to prevent one user from hogging all the resources. We grant extra connections based upon the Brightboxes you have – a 256 box has 5, a 512 has 10 and so on (these are listed here: http://www.brightbox.co.uk/rails-hosting-pricing) – so people with bigger boxes have more connections to play with.

Ordinarily a single mongrel or passenger process should only use a single connection. Occasionally passenger can keep extra connections open as it goes through a graceful restart (it holds old processes open till they are complete whilst simultaneously starting new ones) – however, this is pretty rare.

At present, the only way to get extra connections is to buy another box (or upgrade to a larger one). However, as an alternative, you could install a local copy of MySQL onto your own box (although you lose the failover that our cluster provides); as this is exclusive to you, you are free to use it how you wish. Another alternative is to buy one of our managed MySQL clusters – this effectively gets you the same as the shared cluster (failover, backups etc), but all to yourself.

Hope that helps,

Rahoul.

Topic: Brightbox Help / Wildcards and A record, please, help!

Hi,

All you need to do is point your A Record at your Brightbox’s IP address (which I can see you’ve already done).

Then configure Apache accordingly:

• if you want a single app to respond to all subdomains, then configure the application’s vhost to respond to *.mydomain.com
• if you want different apps to respond to different subdomains, then set up a vhost per application – on subdomain1.mydomain.com, subdomain2.mydomain.com etc

If you are using the Brightbox gem you can use the :domain and :domain_aliases properties to set these up. You will then need to do a `cap deploy:initial` (which makes the gem write an Apache vhost config for your app) and then you will need to reload Apache to make it pick up the new settings.

Hope that helps,

Rahoul.

Topic: Brightbox Help / Changed service rootfs?

Hi,

Sorry – one of our SANs crashed just now. Affected Brightboxes should now be restarting. More details here: http://status.brightbox.co.uk/2009/09/san3-crash/

Rahoul.

Topic: Passenger / passenger and mysql connection

With Passenger you can control the maximum number of Passenger processes – both per box (passenger_max_pool_size) and per application (passenger_max_instances_per_app). More details are here: http://www.modrails.com/documentation/Users%20g…

However, at the moment the gem does not fully support Passenger with Nginx – you will need to write your own Nginx configurations. It works perfectly on Apache though – details on switching are here: http://wiki.brightbox.co.uk/docs:gemv2:passenger

Cheers

Rahoul.

Topic: isitruby19.com / gems not found

Hi Bryan,

I’ve run an import and hobo is now on there. I’ve also automated the import, so any new Rubyforge gems should appear in the future.

Rahoul.

Topic: isitruby19.com / Remove feedback

Hi Delano,

Sorry – I missed your post and only spotted it today.

I’ve removed the “not working” comment.

Rahoul.

Topic: Brightbox Help / ferret server

Are you still having the aaf_configuration problem?

It looks like an internal property of the acts_as_ferret gem (see the source on acts_as_ferret here: http://actsasferret.rubyforge.org/classes/ActsA… – which suggests to me that the aaf gem isn’t installed correctly.

I would try using it as a plugin (or unpack the gem into vendor/plugins) and try another deploy.

Rahoul.

Topic: Brightbox Help / ferret server

Hi,

You are best off restarting after every deploy.

If you use acts_as_ferret it actually inserts some tasks into your deploy script for you: ferret:start, ferret:stop, ferret:restart. These are also hooked into your deploy script so that they are invoked at the right time, so in theory, it should handle it all for you. Take a look at vendor/plugins/acts_as_ferret/recipes/aaf_recipes.rb to see what it does.

Cheers

Rahoul.

Topic: isitruby19.com / Isitruby19 on Github

We have released the source code to Isitruby19 on Github – http://github.com/brightbox/isitruby19/tree/master

It was written in a bit of a hurry and is shamefully short on tests (we use RSpec and Cucumber), but feel free to fork it and have a play around. And if you come up with anything good, please let us know.

Enjoy!

Topic: isitruby19.com / Search not working [Solved]

Ooops – sorry about that. It was working – honest!

We’ll look into it and get it sorted.

Topic: Brightbox Help / Getting Started

I’d recommend developing your app locally – if I remember rightly, InstantRails includes a webserver so you can be sure that the app works as expected on your local machine.

Then it’s just a case of getting the app onto the server – which is where the Brightbox Gem comes in (it copies the code to the server and makes sure that the server is configured as expected).

Topic: General Discussion / How to implement recurring billing?

You’re right, ActiveMerchant alone does not handle Paypal recurring profiles. We’ve built our own system on top of ActiveMerchant to deal with monthly payments, but it’s not pretty and not something I’d be comfortable sharing – at least in its current, untidy, form.

However, if I were starting over I would probably look at adding a Payments Pro (UK) adapter to ServiceMerchant (http://servicemerchant.org/) – a ruby library that sits over ActiveMerchant to handle recurring stuff.

Topic: isitruby19.com / Invalid Gem: How to Remove?

I’ve removed the gem from the site and put a feature in our to-do list for checking 404s.

Topic: isitruby19.com / Invalid Gem: How to Remove?

Heh – that’s not something we anticipated (there’s always something). I’ll look at it tomorrow.

Topic: isitruby19.com / Metric to decide on compatibility?

Heh – I was just looking at the site and thinking we need to address this pretty soon. I’ve noticed a few (such as http://isitruby19.com/redcloth) where the initial reports are simply out of date now.

Topic: isitruby19.com / Delete my rating

Just deployed a new version that lets you delete your own comments for six hours. Sorry about the delay in getting this out – got distracted with other things.

Topic: isitruby19.com / Great, but needs one small fix

Hi,

Yeah – we record the gem version for precisely that reason – we just wanted to get it released before sorting out fancy displays. We’re looking at some sort of alternative views of the collated data (by commenter, by gem version etc) but we’re not sure where we want to take it yet.

Point taken about the Ruby version though.

Baz

Topic: isitruby19.com / Delete my rating

I reckon I know how I want to do this – I’ll get on it as soon as I get a couple of hours.

Topic: isitruby19.com / API is added

We’ve got RSS too:

curl http://isitruby19.com/rss

and for individual gems:

curl http://isitruby19.com/merb.rss

Topic: isitruby19.com / RSS feed for each gem?

RSS feed added – there’s a global one that lists comments as they come in and then a per-gem feed, so you can keep track of your favourites.

Topic: isitruby19.com / Welcome!

Alternative formats would be good – XML and JSON for an API and RSS (which I think was mentioned somewhere else)