Archive for the ‘cloud’ Category

The 90 day free trial of Azure that I started so that I could describe how to build OpenELEC in the cloud is coming to a close. As I sit here once again waiting for my machine to reboot I don’t think I’ll miss it much when it’s gone. I’ve already written about my issues […]


A few weeks back I wrote a howto that utilised the 90 day free trial on Azure to build OpenELEC for the Raspberry Pi. Days later my account was disabled as I’d exhausted the (rather low) limit for I/O within the trial. Since I’d only used 5-6p of extra stuff I went through the process […]


I was very frustrated last month when my trial subscription of Azure IaaS was disabled after a couple of days use (and I’m working on a post detailing how I later resurrected my server). The cause of that issue was that the free trial only bundled 1m IOPS (storage transactions). I’ve been watching my use of […]


After just 2.5 days of my 90 day trial my Azure account has been disabled: I *think* this has happened because I’ve exhausted the (paltry[1]) 20GB bandwidth allocation that comes with the trial, and that this happened because people were downloading OpenELEC builds/images from the web server I stood up in part 2 of my […]


In the first part of this howto I went through signing up for a cloud service, provisioning a VM, installing the build tools and kicking off a build. All being well you should end up with something like this: Azure can also give you a pretty chart of how busy the VM was during the build […]


When I got my Raspberry Pi pretty much the first thing I did with it was to put on OpenELEC, and excellent shrink wrapped package for XBMC. Initially I started compiling it myself on a local virtual machine (VM), but impatience got the better of me and I downloaded an image provided by somebody else. […]


This is a long overdue reply to Chris Hoff’s (@Beaker) ‘Building/Bolting Security In/On – A Pox On the Audit Paradox!‘, which was his response to my ‘Building security in – the audit paradox‘. Hopefully the ding dong between Chris and I will continue, as it’s making me think harder, and hence it’s sharpening up my […]


My friend Randy Bias very kindly came in and did a web conference presentation at work this week on his views of cloud computing (which are well summarised in a post he did at the end of last year). Inevitably the topic of security came up, and Randy, drawing on his past experience in the […]


Over the past few weeks I’ve been kicking the tyres on two new(ish) entrants to the IaaS space. Both services are still in beta. Savvis Virtual Private Datacenter I first came across this back in June at the Cloud Computing World Forum, and I signed up straight away for a trial. Sadly there was some kind […]


My friend Randy posted a few days ago on Grid, Cloud, HPC … What’s the Diff?. I started to make a comment on the blog, but it was getting too long so I moved it here. Randy does a good job of pinning down both performance and scalability, but in my experience productivity trumps both. This […]