Resize AWS EC2 EBS drives on the fly with zero downtime

Running out of hard drive space is a bane of every system administrator. Shutting down the server to add another drive then relaunching, or maybe you are lucky enough to have hot swappable hard drives making the process less painful. Well in the cloud on Amazon AWS you no longer need to shutdown or reimage your instance to expand your hard drives. If you are already using EBS backed instances, you now have the ability to modify your volumes on the fly.

This is how you resize your EBS drives on the fly on a EC2 instance. If you are using instance storage you cannot do this obviously, it only works on EBS backed instances.
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Amazon AWS costs have improved 55-100% since 2009

I previously wrote an article in 2009 about how much you might expect to pay for hosting your server/services using Amazon AWS EC2 and S3. The conclusion was that it would cost you approximately $920/year up to over $10K/year depending on the instance type you chose to run to host your server on Amazon.

Over the course of time the cost of hosting on Amazon Web Services has come down dramatically and their service offerings have increased 5 fold from what they had. Let’s take a look at what you will pay now versus 2009 for the comparable setups. For the sake of simplicity I am going to use current 4th generation on demand pricing but there are a few cases where it might be cheaper to use 3rd generation over 4th. There are very few good reasons to still be using first generation servers though. It should also be pointed out that Amazon also launched spot instances which are an even cheaper way to run an ec2 instance albeit not necessarily as reliable.
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How to use a Windows .bat file to delete files on a schedule

This is how you delete files of a certain age using a scheduled task to execute a .bat file. These instructions mainly apply to Windows Server 2012 R2, but they are applicable to most newer (and older) versions of Windows. This is similar to the post I made many years ago but with some additions mainly around the commands you need to find files that are older than a certain date and then deleting them. It also focuses on Server 2012 R2 versus the older 2008.

The first thing we want to do is create the batch file that we will use to delete the files older than X days. To do this we will need to use the forfiles command in Windows. This is a very handy command for batch files IMO. Here is a run down of the forfiles command and how to use it:
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WinSCP program for Mac

WinSCP is a great program for Windows that will give you a GUI interface to manage files on a remote server when all you can use to connect is SSH. Having grown fond of this program a colleague was sad to find there was no version for MAC. After playing with several different options, they ended up settling on using the FireFTP extension for Firefox and connecting via SFTP to the remote server. To setup FireFTP to use SFTP on the MAC you need to do a few things first.
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Good Routine for Spyware and Viruses Removal

Here is a list of things you can do to help diagnose and fix problems associated with viruses and spyware.  Hopefully you have been running an anti virus program and have been keeping it updated, if not then these steps can probably help fix a spyware/virus problem.

1. Go into Add/Remove programs, and remove all unwanted entries, and toolbars.  If you are not sure what something is, google it.
2. Go into MSConfig (got to RUN and type: msconfig)>, go to startup tab, remove all unwanted and suspicious entries.
3. Download Ad-Aware free edition (DO NOT INSTALL YET)
4. Download Spybot S&D. (DO NOT INSTALL YET)
5. Download Hijackthis (DO NOT INSTALL YET)
6. Download ccleaner (DO NOT INSTALL YET)
7. After all of these are downloaded, turn off  the System Restore feature then reboot into safe mode (hit F8 before the Windows screen). Read the rest of this entry »