Month: August 2008

Persistent storage for Amazon EC2 with EBS

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Last week (20th August) Amazon Web Services released Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS). Amazon EBS provides block level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes are off-instance storage that persists independently from the life of an instance. Amazon Elastic Block Store provides highly available, highly reliable storage volumes that can be attached to a running Amazon EC2 instance and exposed as a device within the instance. Amazon EBS is particularly suited for applications that require a database, file system, or access to raw block level storage.

This is a follow up to my posting, http://blog.mohanjith.net/2008/02/amazon-ec2-with-rock-solid-persistent.html. The method described there is obsolete with the release of Amazon EBS. None the less you can place the jail file system inside the EBS block device and not worry about having to build AMIs from time to time.

Hope this information helps someone.

BlueProximity

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BlueProximity is a cool GNOME application that detects the proximity to a Bluetooth device to determine whether the user is in proximity. If the user is way the screen will be locked (or any command be run), when the user is in proximity the screen will be unlocked (or any command be run).

However if the screen is manually locked it will not be unlocked because the Bluetooth device is in proximity. Should the screen be locked because the Bluetooth device is away, you can manually unlock the screen.

Blueproximity allows you to secure your machine while not going through the inconvenience of locking the screen when you are leaving the machine and then unlocking it when you are back. BlueProximity, Leave it – it’s locked, come back – it’s back too…