Built to Spill: Further Forays into Managed Application Hosting

Posted on September 14, 2018 by Reverend

 

 
 
 
 
 
View this post on Instagram
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

Where will you spend eternity?

A post shared by Jim Groom (@jim.groom) on

Later today Reclaim Hosting will be unveiling a makeover of our website that Lauren Brumfield executed quite deftly. I’ll let her discuss the particulars given we’re also rolling out a couple of new products and services alongside the redesign, and I did want to take a moment to talk about our continued exploration of new possibilities. Providing managed hosting for specific applications is something we’ve already ventured into at Reclaim Hosting with WordPress Multisite, and given how well that has gone we’re at it again with managed hosting for Pressbooks (NB: link will be live shortly). We have gotten several requests to run this application on our shared hosting servers, and while we have tried to do this for folks, the dependencies for features like exporting books to formats such as PDF, EPUB, etc. make it difficult to provide a consistent environment across our fleet of shared hosting servers.

That said, when good folks like Chris Lott come knocking and asking if we can do anything we figure it’s time to take a deeper look and see if we can offer Pressbooks as a managed application. A couple of weeks later it turns out we can provide a service that is cost effective and gets you most of what PressbooksEDU packages offer. For $125 per month you get an account with 100GB of storage, the option to automatically install Pressbooks, preinstalled dependencies and export formats, 30 days of backups, and pre-packaged plugins and themes provided by BC Campus.

As a result of having moved to Digital Ocean, we already have a number of shared hosting server in rotation through Digital Ocean that we can scale seamlessly if need be. So this semester we setup a shared hosting server in Digital Ocean’s Toronto data center dedicated to Pressbooks, namely Built to Spill. The server has all the requisite dependencies and what’s slick about it is that Tim Owens made it possible to automate the setup at the point of sign-up, so by the time you get into your cPanel account Pressbooks can be all setup and ready to go.

The server’s namesake marks a trend of recent server names such as Fugazi, Pavement, Bikini Kill, and Unwound–recognizing the post-punk bands of the 1990s that became one of the more successful stalwarts of independent music over the coming decades was this Boise, Idaho-based band that formed way back in 1992 Even after signing with Warner Brothers in 1995. Listening to their albums it is noticeable that band did not give up much creatively upon signing, and they went on to release 6 studio albums with Warner before parting ways last year.  The band’s magnum opus Perfect from Now On (1997) and the more polished follow-up Keep it Like a Secret (1999) are probably their best known albums, and they range from deep philosophical musings on the unfathomable nature of time in “Randy Describes Eternity”:

To creative, angst-driven John Hughes-movie themed gems like “Carry the Zero”:

Doug Martsch has been the only consistent member of the band since 1992, and he planned on changing the line-up with every album they recorded. And while that did not pan out, the band ha changed members regularly since the early 90s, keeping it a fairly dynamic, “self-cleaning” experiment in alt-rock that is still going strong. I discovered Martsch’s unique vocals and peripatetic guitar riffs when he collaborated with Calvin Johnson and Steve Fisk to form the Halo Benders, and their 1994 album God Don’t Make No Junk remains one of my very favorite of the 90s. I’ve remained a fan of Martsch tireless work ever since. So it’s official, Reclaim is going to be perfect from now on 🙂

Posted in reclaim | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Blogging at Scale with Google Sheets

Posted on September 11, 2018 by Reverend

When you go directly from several weeks of work travel into the beginning of the semester rush at Reclaim Hosting, the bava.blog necessarily gets neglected. But that changes now!

Back on August 22nd Tim and I sat down with John Stewart to talk about his ingenius work to use Google Sheets to enable near on 1000 students in University of Oklahoma’s biggest lecture classroom to blog at scale. Pretty brilliant to use Google Sheets as a kind of  WordPress Multisite stand-in wherein Google manages scaling the infrastructure for you. In this, the 8th episode of Reclaim Today, we discuss this experiment in detail, and I was really enthusiastic because it felt like a really creative and useful way to imagine getting a class using a simple form to blog up and running with very little financial overhead. Fast cheap, and out-of-control: edtech at its best.

You can read the first and second of the three post series John promised, and the video was recorded on location at Reclaim Video and comes in at a very manageable 23 minutes with a couple of the best looking ed-techs this side of proprietary. Here is the synopsis in case you need a more objective reason to watch:

Jim and Tim sit down with John Stewart of the University of Oklahoma to discuss a recent solution he blogged about in which he’s using Google Spreadsheets and APIs to drive a fast and scalable blogging infrastructure to support a course with 1,000 students.

And if you come away with nothing else, it should be mad kudos for John Stewart for a really creative, relatively light-weight  solution to a potentially expensive and resource intensive problem, the term innovation gets thrown around way too loosely but it makes resonates for me in this case.

Posted in blogging, google, reclaim, Reclaim Today | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Life and Death of the Blog

Posted on August 16, 2018 by Reverend

On the heels of a transatlantic journey I sat down with Tim Owens to discuss the fate of academic blogging in the wake of Harvard University’s  announcement of their shuttering their blogging system. This is our seventh episode of Reclaim Today, so we are start to track some mileage with this. The discussion was far-ranging, and I really do enjoy chatting with Tim about this stuff, but I think my “hot take” was that the shutting down of Harvard Blogs is less about the death of academic blogging platforms as it is the passage of the idea of blogging from the margin to the center. The idea that fueled the vision of the blog in the early aughts has come to how we expect the web to work now:reverse chronological, stream-driven, news-based, etc. And with WordPress driving 30% of websites, I think there is more than enough data to support this claim.

But some of the interesting questions Harvard’s statement about the closing of the system brings up a range of topics around archiving this work, the role of academic blogs in forging digital identities, questions of ownership and copyright, etc. We covered a bunch of these and more, and it made for yet another top quality production from the amazing folks at Reclaim Hosting, namely me.

Posted in blogging, reclaim, Reclaim Today | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

bavaduke

Posted on August 10, 2018 by Reverend

Well this past week has been a quiet one on the blog because half of Reclaim Hosting was traveling or vacationing which meant more time atop the support wall defending against the Winter of our clients’ discontent. To add to what has turned out to be a crazy week has been a new member of the bava tribe. Introducing bavaduke:

 

The Bavaduke during his morning walk

A post shared by Jim Groom (@jim.groom) on

I’ve dreamed of having a big, shaggy dog for a while now, and as things happen Duca (which was immediately Americanized to Duke because Duca is too uppity in Italian and then soon after augmented with the suffix bava which is both a family name and Italian for drool—not to mention the ode to another storied canine Marmaduke) was looking for a home after what is a bit of a murky 3-year backstory. There were Südtirolean hunters involved, as well as Veronese Rifugio owners—essentially a lotta ins and outs and whatnot. But he is with us now, and I have woken up around 5 or 6 AM every morning to feed him and go on 2-3 hour hikes in the surrounding mountains. I marvel at his ability to retrieve balls in the thick of the forest. Italian Spinones are renowned hunting dogs, and this shines through when he gets on the scent of a ball thrown in the thicket. He circles and circles constantly until pinpointing his target with nose-driven radar.

I’m completely in love. This dog is thebomb.com. Awesome with the kids, a solid hiking companion, and after just 5 days he has quickly become part of the family.

Not to mention he reminds me of the portrait of the green spagetti monster from season 1 of True Detective, which I recently re-watched for the third time. It’s destiny!

 

The hairy wood beast has arrived

A post shared by Jim Groom (@jim.groom) on

Posted in family, fun | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Reclaim’s Dedicated to Virtual Infrastructure

Posted on August 6, 2018 by Reverend

Tim and I did a Reclaim Today show to celebrate the fact our infrastructure is now entirely hosted on virtual servers, and predominantly Digital Ocean at this point. We talked a bit about where we’ve been, where we are, and where we are going in terms of infrastructure, and I love the idea of capturing some of this more formally as it happens. The final to dedicated server migrations this weekend (Joy Division and Beat Happening) turned out to be more cumbersome than we imagined, but that’s behind us and we are now closer than ever to the Lawnmower Man infrastructure we’ve been dreaming of! I guess the next step is serverless, to quote an awesome post by Tony Hirst—want to get him on an episode of Reclaim Today this week to talk about BinderHub and more. So, it feels to me that Reclaim Today is kinda finding it stride, and like anything it’s all about laying the bricks and doing the work.

Posted in reclaim, Reclaim Today | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Zeit Here, Zeit Now: Watching the WWW Wake Up to Container Hosting

Posted on August 4, 2018 by Reverend

It was a pretty busy week at Reclaim Hosting, and I am up early on a Saturday morning working on the final migrations of our shared hosting infrastructure to Digital Ocean. Bye, bye ReliableSite! It has been a very productive summer when it comes to infrastructure, and folks are still reclaiming and domaining so no complaints from the bava. We also continue to make headway on Reclaim Today, our live video show highlighting stuff we’re interested in, working  on, dreaming about, etc. Yesterday’s episode was a 25 minute discussion about Now (which I keep calling Zeit Now because the domain is zeit.co/now) which is a hosting environment that makes it dead simple to host Docker containers on the web. We used the episode as an occasion to work through Now, and talk about our own dreams for container-based hosting at Reclaim. I discovered Now thanks to the following Tweet from ed-tech’s mole from the future, Tony Hirst:

I then played with it briefly, but was fumbling around with Docker on my desktop and ran into issues get a Shiny server running. I abandoned the project, but this episode allowed me to get a clearer understanding of what Now can do, how it differs from Cloudron, and what it could mean from faculty, researchers, edtech, and students who want to spin up container -based apps on the quick.  I also liked this episode a lot because I think it encapsulates pretty well how Tim and I have been working together these last 7 or 8 years. It’s been such a fun and funny relationship in so many ways, and capturing some of that on Reclaim Today seems to be just one of many reasons it feels so good.

Posted in reclaim, Reclaim Today | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Land of 1000 SPLOTs

Posted on August 3, 2018 by Reverend

So, Reclaim Today is a thing. Tim Owens moves so fast it is hard for the rest of us to keep up, but there are officially four episodes of our live video show, and I’ve been in half of them 🙂 The one I was part of earlier this week, Episode 3: Land of 1000 SPLOTs, was a lot of fun. Tim and I discussed SPLOTs with Alan Levine for about 40 minutes or so, and it was a discussion that reinforced—at least for me—the power of small, distributed EdTech. While folks fret about LMS marketshare, Reclaim Hosting wants to provide as many simple, small teaching tools as possible that are easily installed and cheaply hosted. We are starting this with a few of Alan’s personal portfolio SPLOTs built on top of WordPress—specifically the Big Picture Calling Card and Highlights Calling Card:

You’ll notice above they have their own unique installation icons, and once installed they look so pretty:

All this means we can start to expand the number of applications (and not just WordPress-based apps) from the broader community. It’s exciting, and the amazing work the folks at Coventry University are doing with SPLOTs really points the way forward. I could go on about the possibilities forever, but then you would never watch the video.

Posted in reclaim, Reclaim Today | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Fixquotas

Posted on July 31, 2018 by Reverend

Used the fixquotas cPanel script  this morning will working support. This comes in handy when the list of cPanel accounts showing storage quotas for each account gets corrupted. This script repairs them. I found the script while repairing Coventry’s server two weeks ago, so when I got the question this morning I knew the answer directly. It’s really simple, just run the following command from root and you are golden:

/scripts/fixquotas

Posted in sysadmin | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Bava’s Odyssey

Posted on July 31, 2018 by Reverend

https://twitter.com/Dr_Giallo/status/1024238383772647424

I learned on Twitter that today is Mario Bava’s birthday. This blog has been inspired by this Italian film director in more ways than one, and I figured his birthday represents as good an opportunity as any to share a recent discovery I made thanks to Antonella. While sharing the 1968 Italian TV series Odissea with the kids, she noted that the special effects* as well as the entire episode about the cyclops Polyphemus was directed by Bava. The series itself is interesting. It was the very first color program on Italian TV (appropriate that Bava would be involved) and was produced by the legendary Dino De Laurentis, who Bava would work with again when he was hired to save Danger: Diabolik. Odissea was enormously popular all over Europe with more than 16 million viewers. 

You can see Bava’s classic usage of colorful light within the darkness of Polyphemus’ cave, and the sets (as well as the various apparitions in other episodes) reminded me of Bava’s Hercules in the Haunted World (1961). But possibly the most insane scene was when Polyphemus snatches up, crushes, and then eats one of Odysseus’s crew members. It is truly chilling without being overtly gory. You can watch the scene above, but essentially Polyphemus not only crushes the poor bastard, but smashes him against a rock before tearing him apart, cooking him in the fire, and eating him like a piece of chicken. The beauty of this is that much of this is done while the cyclops has his back to the camera. Bava uses shadow, light, and suggestion to create the cringing effects—it’s awesome. In fact, watching the series in Italian inspired me to pick up the Odyssey again and work my way through that foundational narrative. So, anyway, just a quick post to share the magic that is Mario Bava in honor of what would have been his 104th birthday—so close to 106 🙂

  • Carlo Rimbaldi (the designer of E.T.) worked alongside Bava on the special effects for this series.
Posted in Italy, TV | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Whoowns or Whoowens?

Posted on July 31, 2018 by Reverend

One of the cPanel scripts I’ve found really useful as of late is the whoowns script that let’s you know which account owns a specific domain. Let me provide a quick scenario.  You have an issue with a domain and you can’t figure out which account in lives in, which could mean it’s an addon domain that wasn’t registered through us, etc. Tracking it down can be a pain. You can figure out what server it is on by using a command like nslookup (nameserver lookeup) that will tell you the hostname and identify the server:

nslookup themissingdomain.tld

The above command will return something like beathap.reclaimhosting.com.  Which means the account is on the Beathap server, but given it is not the primary domain of an account it is not going to appear in the list of all cPanel account. And this is where I would get stuck.

But using whoowns will tell you the account owner, just log in via terminal and use the following command:

/scripts/whoowns themissingdomain.tld
themissi

That will tell you the account that domain lives in which means problem solved. A simple, useful script.

So, when extolling its virtues in Slack I wrote /scripts/whoowens —and soon after Tim had some fun and wrote his own script. So, when you run /script/whoowens on any of Reclaim’s servers you get the following:

That’s geeky and it’s awesome. Hosting humor #4life.

Posted in fun, reclaim, sysadmin | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment