Simon Willison’s Weblog

How to secure an Ubuntu server using Tailscale and UFW. This is the Tailscale tutorial I’ve always wanted: it explains in detail how you can run an Ubuntu server (from any cloud provider) such that only devices on your personal Tailscale network can access it.

# 26th February 2021, 8:31 pm / tailscale, ubuntu, security, dogsheep

Setting up Munin on Ubuntu. Useful guide to setting up my favourite graphing/monitoring tool for personal projects.

# 1st September 2010, 2:05 pm / munin, ops, sysadmin, ubuntu, recovered

Running Processes. I’ve been searching for a good solution to this problem (“run this program, and restart it if it falls over”) for years. I’m currently using god which works pretty well, but according to this article I should be learning upstart instead. It never ceases to amaze me how difficult this is, and how obtuse the tools are.

# 2nd March 2010, 9:55 am / god, unix, linux, ubuntu, upstart, processes

Why toppcloud will not be agnostic. Ian Bicking’s toppcloud aims to offer deployment with the ease of use of AppEngine against a standard, open source Ubuntu + Python 2.6 + mod_wsgi + Varnish stack. Here he explains why he’s not going to vary the required components: keeping everything completely standardised means everyone gets the same bugs (and the same fixes).

# 12th February 2010, 9:21 am / ian-bicking, deployment, django, python, modwsgi, wsgi, ubuntu, varnish, toppcloud, appengine

last.fm for television. Dale Lane’s neat hack to visualise his television watching habits. An Ubuntu / vdx home theatre stores TV events in SQLite, and graphs are generated using Python and Open Flash Chart 2. The really clever bit: the back-end captures nearby bluetooth IDs’ allowing events to be filtered by the people watching based on the presence of their mobile phones.

# 7th January 2010, 7:28 pm / dalelane, tv, ubuntu, vdx, sqlite, python, graphs, visualisation, lifetracking

MySQL, Python and MacOS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). I gave up on compiling things when I upgraded to Snow Leopard—I’m back to running Ubuntu in a VMWare instance, mounted over Samba so I can still use TextMate.

# 25th September 2009, 10:14 pm / ubuntu, vmware, snowleopard, samba, textmate, python, mysql, osx

Ubuntu brings advanced Screen features to the masses. Ubuntu 9.04’s screen-profiles package adds a taskbar to screen and emulates the gnome panel. You can even add a widget showing the cost of your current EC2 session.

# 28th April 2009, 9:52 pm / screen, ubuntu, ec2, linux

Installing CouchDB from source on OS X. So far I’ve just been playing with it in an Ubuntu virtual machine.

# 17th April 2009, 4:22 pm / osx, couchdb, building, ubuntu

Development virtual machines on OS X using VMWare and Ubuntu. Bradley Wright provides detailed instructions for getting the JeOS (VM optimised) flavour of Ubuntu running with VMWare tools so you don’t need to run samba just to share your desktop.

# 24th March 2009, 2:31 pm / vmwarefusion, vmware, virtualisation, ubuntu, jeos, bradley-wright

Introducing the Karmic Koala, our mascot for Ubuntu 9.10 (via) Ubuntu 9.10 will have a strong focus on cloud computing, including tools for easily creating EC2 AMIs and Eucalyptus, an open-source system for running an EC2-compatible cloud in your own data centre.

# 21st February 2009, 5:19 pm / ubuntu, ec2, cloud-computing, eucalyptus, mark-shuttleworth, linux, karmickoala

The Django and Ubuntu Intrepid Almanac. Will Larson’s impressively comprehensive guide to configuring and securing an Ubuntu VPS from scratch to run Django, using PostgreSQL and Apache/mod_wsgi behind nginx.

# 14th February 2009, 3:42 pm / apache, modwsgi, postgresql, nginx, django, ubuntu, vps, sysadmin, will-larson

Ubuntu and Debian AMIs for Amazon EC2. Exactly what it says on the tin.

# 8th December 2008, 6:04 pm / amazonec2, ec2, ubuntu, debian, linux, amis

Ubuntu JeOS 7.10 released. JeOS = “Just enough Operating System”—a minimal Ubuntu image designed for creating “virtual applications” that are embedded in a VMWare (or similar) virtual machine.

# 18th November 2007, 12:22 am / virtualisation, ubuntu, linux, jeos, vmware

Ubuntu -- python-django. Sweet, Django 0.96 is packaged for Ubuntu Gutsy.

# 11th August 2007, 8:47 am / django, python, ubuntu, gutsy

Python, Mac OS X, and Readline. This worked for me, though you need to already have gcc and svn installed. It’s crap like this that made me switch to Ubuntu on Parallels for most of my Python development.

# 30th June 2007, 10:24 pm / osx, python, rant, ubuntu, parallels, readline

Dell to Offer Ubuntu. That right there is why I find Flex more interesting than Silverlight.

# 1st May 2007, 6:39 pm / dell, ubuntu, flash, flex, silverlight, linux

Full Java Stack In Ubuntu. JDK6, Glassfish, NetBeans and Java DB are all available in the Multiverse repository for Ubuntu 7.04.

# 20th April 2007, 12:37 am / ubuntu, java, simon-phipps

Ubuntu Screencasts. Fantastic resource—exactly what Ubuntu (and desktop Linux in general) needs.

# 15th January 2007, 1:41 am / ubuntu, screencasts, linux

Ubuntu sugar cookies (via) Different coloured dough is used to bake the Ubuntu logo in to the cookies themselves, kind of like making sushi rolls.

# 11th January 2007, 2:49 pm / cooking, cookies, ubuntu