Category Archives: System

ll4D: the LXD(LXC)-LAMP environment For Development

There are plenty of tools for development, but I really wanted to take advantage of LXD for web development, so I ended up writing ll4d: the LXD(LXC)-LAMP environment For Development environment.

There are probably better ways to do this, and highly optimized juju charms to build something much better. But for my persona use case, this script is just perfect. It takes just 48 seconds to build everything and it has 100% all the functionality I need.

It is a very simple script, which works as follows:

  • Sets up a basic LXC/LXD environment
  • Creates a container with a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) server
  • Creates a fancy symbolic link from the apache root directory at the LAMP container to somewhere in your home or desktop. This allows you to work on your code using your visual tools and view the result on the fly
  • Create a simple website to test Apache, PHP and MySQL

Here is an screenshot of a working environment. You work from a directory directly under your home, access the LAMP server for working with configurations and MySQL databases and access the server on at the given IP.

Screenshot of a work environment with ll4d.

Screenshot of a work environment with ll4d.

ll4d is available on my github repository: https://github.com/julenl/ll4d

The few instructions on how to download and exectute it, can be found at the README file.

I hope you find it useful… if you don’t, you can remove it completely in 3 simple steps:

./ll4d.sh –clean
rm -rf ll4d*
sudo aptitude purge lxd

 

OS-X Mavericks for Scientific Computing

My Macbook Pro (Early 2011) running Snow Leopard was starting to get a little slow, so I decided to upgrade it with a 250Gb SSD, and use the opportunity of an empty disk to give a chance to OS-X Mavericks.
In this post, I am going to explain step by step how did I set up my laptop with Mavericks and some extra tools for enabling scientific computing and computational chemistry tasks.
Continue reading →

checkpc: checking the PCs on your local network

Sometimes, specially in small computational groups, it is usual that the people uses the workstations for running calculations, and in case of a “trusted” network, were all the colleagues can log-in to each other’s computers, it is sometimes also the case, that everybody calculates everywhere. But at the moment of submitting a calculation, if your own PC is already busy, how do I find a computer in my network, which is not running anything at the moment?

You could ssh to each host and run <it>top</it> or something like that, but that is really slow when you have a lot of computers, and you have vs. to repeat the task very often.

The solution: “checkpc”
checkpc is a python script which can scan a whole network of computers and return the load of all PCs within it in less than 3 seconds. Continue reading →