Since early April 2013 this blog has moved from a shared hosting environment to a VPS.

Since I keep forgetting the name of this monitoring tool, I decided to create an article so I can jog my memory more easily.

Since April 2012 we are using Whiskers to store information about our Plone and Django buildouts. But when I moved the setup behind SSL, the browser started to complain about unsafe content.

Last year I participated in a deployment knowledge sharing session and I started implementing changes at my company pretty soon after. The result is that we are using Puppet for some parts of our server configuration. We also added Munin to our monitoring toolset (and I used Puppet to deploy Munin and manage its configuration). But an important piece that was still missing in our setup was an overview of which packages we use in the buildouts of our clients and more specifically which version each client uses.

On June 16th Jan-Jaap Driessen from The Health Agency (THA) organised a meeting to share knowledge about using Puppet, zc.buildout, release management and how those are related. For the most part, Jan-Jaap showed us his setup. My impression in one word: wow! They are running a tight ship at THA!

Initially I was a bit sceptic about Fabric. After all, I’m already using buildout to manage projects. “How much better can it get?” After watching the video of the Django Deployment Workshop (held by Jacob Kaplan-Moss at PyCon 2010 Atlanta), I finally decided to see for myself what Fabric is all about.

While reading Plone 3 Intranets by Víctor Fernández de Alba, I discovered the “logreopen” command.

This is a short recap of how I managed to lock myself out of the root account of an Amazon EC2 Ubuntu instance and how I gained control again.