Backing up data on AWS EC2 Micro instances using the CrashPlan headless Linux client

I’ve been using a combination of scripts to do local backups on my Amazon EC2 micro instance I use to serve this website – AutoMySQL Backup and some cron jobs which ran rsync for various paths on a rotation. For example: This is frankly a pretty lazy way to do it. I’m not protected at …

Content providers still haven’t figured out physical vs digital pricing

iTunes and Amazon MP3 have been dominating music sales for years now, but there is plenty of evidence that providers have wildly different strategies when it comes to pricing. This is made all the more absurd by Amazon’s AutoRip functionality, where the lines between a digital & physical purchase are even more blurry. Exhibit A …

AWS micro instances for personal & learning use

Too much money, too much downtime. That sums up my experience with my web hosting company over the last couple years. My shared hosting account costs about $120/year, and sure didn’t feel like I was getting my money’s worth. Due to ridiculous email downtime and failing SSL certs I moved email services to Google apps …

SSH to an AWS EC2 server from an iPhone

The first round of SSH clients for the iPhone presented some problems when connecting to Amazon Web Services EC2 Linux server instances. EC2 instances require a private certificate key file to be used to authenticate to the server during an SSH session. This lead to some workarounds where one had to export the iPhone’s key …