don-benjamin.co.uk

Finally making time to set up my own site. I’ve gone for a blog as a couple of colleagues have suggested this to me, it seemed simple to set up, and it should hopefully allow me to put up content bit by bit without having to worry too much about the overall structure. Also I’ve never played with WordPress before and this seemed like a good way to get started.

We’ll see how this goes in the long run but it should be a good place to collect my thoughts in the short term and if necessary I can transfer the content out to a more structured or more technically impressive site when I have the time to put one together.

Technologies used are:

• WordPress
• LAMP
• Ubuntu Linux
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud virtual server

The only bit that’s particularly technically interesting is Amazon EC2 which seems to be working fine so far. At the moment I’m not pushing it too hard, just running a single system and only putting my own data on there so that there’s not too much to lose while I work out the issues I’m likely to hit with it.

The only issue I’ve had so far is that every reboot results in a new virtual machine, including freshly installed OS and fresh IP address. Having the hard-drive reset is not too much of an issue, just need to set up a snapshot with all my users/software installed and configure it to backup properly and to restore from that backup at boot time.  The IP address is a bit of an issue though when mixed with DNS, not sure how to work round that one, so far my plan is simply not to reboot but I’m not sure how long I can keep that up for.