Wednesday, October 24, 2012

AWS & VPC - OpenVPN setup with private subnets...

I have finally battled the beast of getting Openvpn set up on VPC to access both public AND private subnets. There is one thing not mentioned in any of the tutorials I found that is critical. When you install OpenVPN, and it is configured for NAT, it will use a private subnet for the vpn clients on 5.5.16.0/20, which you must add a route for under VPC-> route tables -> new -> destination -> 5.5.16.0/20 -> associate (enter your subnet ID) Now when clients VPN in with openVPN, they can contact everyone on both subnets. Don't forget to allow the traffic in using the security groups both inbound and outbound as well, such as ICMP ping, so you can test communications properly (and whatever services you need). helpful links: Using from linux: http://openvpn.net/index.php/access-server/docs/admin-guides/182-how-to-connect-to-access-server-with-linux-clients.html video tutorial (great, except the route part is missing) http://dbsgkhvbz3k7m.cloudfront.net/AmazonVPC/AmazonVPC.html happy routing!

Thursday, October 18, 2012

SpringOne2GX Wrap up

Great conference this year, it was very good to see some familiar faces and finally meet more in person. I hope my talks where useful to everyone! The big takeaway I got is Grails is moving to be more client capable and more social with the new platform core event bus technology as well as more mobile (jquery-mobile-scaffolding). Less and less are MVC types of systems being relevant with such rich Javascript and HTML5 capabilities of browsers. Users expectations are changing to rich client interfaces, single page apps, and quick deployments as well. Plugins are more important that ever, and user plugin contributions are one of the big things that make Grails so great. Also if weren't for all of the advancements with Groovy and Spring libraries Grails wouldn't be what it is today. Another thing I like about the Grails, Groovy, and Spring teams is every is so friendly, helpful, and willing to chat with everyone - that makes it feel like a big family even to outsiders to Springsource. Of course Jay Zimmerman is the master of these conferences, everything was so well done, professional, and smooth. I've uploaded sample apps to my github account at https://github.com/rvanderwerf and if you look in the doc folders it will include PDFs of my slides as well. During the conference I release a new version of the struts1 plugin to work with Grails2 th made numerous improvements to the GVPS (Grails Video Pseudo Streamer) plugin as well. You can go to http://www.grails.org/plugin/gvps to see the latest version. Special thanks and shoutouts goes out to Burt Beckwith, Sebastian Blanc, Soren Glasius, Peter Ledbrook, Colin Harrington, Cedric Champeau, Luke Daley, Graeme Rocher, Jeff Brown, Stefan Ambruster, Guillaume Laforge, Jay Zimmerman and everyone else who shared drinks and conversation. I especially want to thank those who attended my talks. I hope to see everybody next year, wherever it is at! Also according to Peter Ledbrook and S0ren Glasius, everytime someone calls Grails 'Groovy on Grails', a puppy dies ;)

Sunday, October 14, 2012

SpringOne2GX

Heading out to speak at SpringOne2GX in DC today. I'll be giving 2 talks, 'Streaming Video in Grails' (Using the formerly 'grails-video' plugin now called 'gvps'(Grails Video Pseudo Streaming Plugin). I'll go over the plugin, how ffmpeg, and basic streaming works, flowplayer and jw-flv integrations, and a little about quartz to help distribute video processing load. The second talk is 'Clustering Grails 2 with Terracotta' which is a dive into what you need to do and how to figure a total clustering solution with Grails 2 that uses Ehcache, HTTP Session Clustering, and Quartz. I'll give examples of each, and demo a Grails 2 app that uses all of these at once at the end. Of value you will find a library compatibility matrix of what you need to add to your BuildConfig to make everything work. There are so many great speakers and topics I'm going to have a hard time choosing what talks I will attend myself!