server

Minimize Amazon Cloudfront Costs With Octopress and S3

I learned an important tip that I thought I should share with others who are considering Octopress with publishing to S3/Cloudfront. If the S3 deployment line in your Rakefile includes the s3cmd option for “–cf-invalidate” you should be aware that this will drive up your costs quite a bit. (3 guesses how I know this) I had about a years worth of expected CF costs in my first month because I didn’t understand what that was doing.

System Rescue CD to the.. rescue!

![](http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5211/5421694137_c92bd1b195.jpg =160x) Here’s the scenario.. It’s 1 am and I have to shut down a critical linux server to relocate it in a rack to make room for new equipment. It should have been a 5 minute job.. but on powering up the server it refused to boot past printing the word ‘Grub‘ on the screen. This isn’t good.. this server is needed by a couple hundred thousand customers and rebuilding it wasn’t planned or scheduled.