Haecceity

Quick entry on how this blog is coming to you, should anyone happen to care.
It’s a Typo install off Typo’s Subversion trunk. This pulls in trunk of Rails via an svn:external.
Originally I was going to be super-brave and use the FCGI proxy module backported from Apache trunk, but I decided I’m not that brave, so I used some slightly less bleeding edge code.
I upgraded to Apache 2.2.2 and ensured I had mod_proxy_balancer , mod_proxy_http and mod_proxy loaded.
I then installed Mongrel and ran that in my typo checkout like so: mongrel_rails start -d -e production -p 3000; this brings up mongrel on port 3000 and sets Rails into production mode rather than the standard development mode.
Having checked that the install on the high port was working correctly, I then configured Apache to properly connect to it. First I set up a very small - I only have one server, but I wanted to play with the technology - balancer config:
<Proxy balancer://server>
BalancerMember http://server:3000
</Proxy>
I then set up a VirtualHost as usual, but added the following lines to force content onto the load balancer.
ProxyPass / balancer://server/
ProxyPassReverse / balancer://server/

I’ve already posted about this elsewhere, so those who’ve seen that can probably skip to the bottom of this post.

For everyone else, I’m leaving Claranet at the beginning of June to go and seek my fortunes in a brave new world. (eventually!)

Without the flowery language, this actually means I’m going to be working for Mochila, based in their New York office. Of course, this is all subject to the whims of the US Immigration Service, and up until October or November (in theory, anyway) I’m going to be splitting my time between working in London, San Francisco and New York.

I’m going to be a senior sysadmin, but this is a startup so I guess the job role will cover just about anything and everything, which should be fun!

I’m really looking forward to this - the chance to move to New York for a few years is really the icing on the cake - because the job’s going to cover a lot of my interests, including a lot of design and development work for test and deployment infrastructure.

I’ve decided that with the amount of changes my life will be going through in the next few months (of which more in a later post), I should really start blogging again.

I’ve gone looking for something with a pretty web front end, and since I refuse to install the Abomination on my server, Typo looked like a pretty good choice.

The titles are a nod to two of my favourite authors - Kim Stanley Robinson for “haecceity” and Ken Macleod for “biolog”, his take on blogs in Learning the World