Bitch Ass Code

Universe, I need your help! Here’s my situation:

• I’m in Canada
• My customers want to pay with Amex cards
• Paypal seems to have it in for me

In Canada, when you try pay a merchant holding a “Paypal Website Payments Pro” account…they can only accept Visa and Mastercard. This is so frustrating.

What makes it worse? I went to Paypal for support, here’s what I get…

Paypal support...looks great!

Ok…lets just click one of those links…

what the?

ALL THE LINKS DO THIS! At least call the product “Website Payments fail” so i don’t get all excited next time.

Has anyone in the world managed to solve this problem?

Lots of people on Hacker News like to write articles about why they do things (Apparently 136,434) and while I’m getting a little sick of it…

I figure its time I get on board with the trend!!

I’m thinking of writing an article, either pick from one of my pre-selected topics or suggest your own by commenting. I promise to write it, get it polished and edited by a professional writer for your reading pleasure.

• Why I don’t punch people in the face
• Why I don’t drink from toilets
• Why I don’t own a horse
• Why I don’t light friends on fire
• Why I don’t jump out of windows
• Why I don’t walk around naked
• Why I don’t pee on strangers
• Why I don’t throw money at strangers with the intent of hurting them with large coins

Looking forward to your input.

Sometimes I feel a little crazy. Today is one of those days.

About 3 years ago now I moved from Australia to Canada. The reasons for the move were probably not that smart (A girl, not the one I’m with today…) and at the time I felt that I was giving up a lot of things which i had worked very hard to get. This all made me a little sour (“a little” might be an understatement). Today I’m flying to Mexico for 5 days, and then headed to California for another 6 where we’ll be staying with some of my partners family in LA, only to end the trip with some “business” in the Bay area which involves meeting up with some very talented people who I’m very lucky to be working with.

Why do I feel crazy? I feel crazy because before I moved to Canada I felt like things were looking good for me in Australia. I was running a small business, we were making a small profit and I we were getting well known for the work we did. I was 22. When I moved, all that went away and I took up a job for 50k / year as a Junior Project Manager and lived in a basement apartment. It was a pretty significant pay cut, not to mention loss of freedom. It felt like a huge step backwards.

When I look back at the last few years I realize there is no way in the world I could have ever got to where I am today if I had not moved. Don’t get me wrong living in Australia, the amazing education of TAFE (seriously, I’m not Joking…TAFE is great despite what some would say) and work I did while self employed prepared me for what I’m doing today, however Australia is pretty behind, compared to the opportunity in the IT industry that I’ve seen since I left.

Today I’m 25 back on the self employment path. In my last job I made the title of Director, something I thought I wouldn’t be able to do given my age (Truth is I do try hide my age a lot, its normally a surprise to people when they find it out). The big thing this promotion told me was that I would never be happy until I was back in the creators seat. Its not about money. So, i resigned and started up a company. Now I have a great business partner, a great product (Plug: Verelo website monitoring) that is only getting better every day, and more people interested in working with us than ever before. I’m back to enjoying the freedom of self employment but this time all the more aware of the discipline, from past experience, that it will take to keep things on track.

So again, why do I feel crazy? Simply because this is not what I expected. You turn one corner, look down the path and go “uh this looks bad” only to keep walking and find there is something worth looking for at the end. Whats the moral to the story? I guess you could say its “take risks” and “be persistent”. Risks that open up doors are always good, and if you don’t see something through to the end you’re wasting everyone’s time (including your own).

“The problem with the Internet startup craze isn’t that too many people are starting companies; it’s that too many people aren’t sticking with it.” Steve Jobs

This is a super short post but i just wanted to share it because i’m currently doing a DNS migration and finding that validating all CNAME and A records for our domain isnt super easy. Here is how i ended up doing it (You should re-use this PHP!):

//name servers to compare against
$nameservers = array();
array_push($nameservers,"ns1.origionalnameserver.com");
array_push($nameservers,"ns2.origionalnameserver.com");
array_push($nameservers,"ns1.destinationnameserver.com");
array_push($nameservers,"ns2.destinationnameserver.com");

//hosts to compare
$hosts = array(
"hostname1.com",
"hostname2.com",
"hostname3.com",
"hostname4.com"
);

//do the compare and echo out the results
foreach($hosts as $host)
{
//get the results for each name server given the current host
$results = array();
foreach($nameservers as $ns)
{
$result = getDNS($host,$ns);
array_push($results,strtolower($result));
//echo "LOG: $host $ns - $result\n";
}

//see if all the results match
$allmatch = true;
$compare_result = $results[0];
foreach($results as $result)
{
if($result != $compare_result)
$allmatch = false;
}

//check to see if everything matched or not
if(!$allmatch)
{
echo "WARN: $host does not match on all nameservers\n";
$count = 0;
foreach($results as $result)
{
echo "[".$nameservers[$count]."] $result\n";
++$count;
}
}
else
{
echo "INFO: $host OK\n";
}
}

//getdns function to get host name given a name server
function getDNS($host,$ns)
{
$string = '';
exec("dig @$ns +short $host 2>&1", $output, $retval);
if ($retval != 0)
{
return "ERROR_NO_RESULT";
}
else
{
$x=0;
while ($x < (sizeof($output)))
{
$string.= $output[$x];
$x++;
}
}

if (empty($string))
{
return "ERROR_NO_RESULT";
}
else if($string[strlen($string)-1] == '.')
{
$string = substr($string, 0, -1);
}

return $string;
}

So recently at work we’ve been looking to migrate a few services that are hosted on legacy infrastructure over to a much better set of servers at Amazon AWS. Along the way we hit a few issues, i wanted to share my experience with you so people never have to worry about these issues again…

Issue 1:
When using Amazon AWS Elastic Load balancers you get provided with a host name for the load balancer (not an IP – this is key). This is all good and well but DNS RFC 1034 states that the origin of a domain has to be a A record, but Amazon gave us a host name, so thats a CNAME? Our current DNS provider did not support host names as A records, so this isnt good.

Solution:
Use Route53 at Amazon. Amazon allows you to use their Route53 DNS service and create A records with an “AliasTarget”. These basically setup some crazy round robin DNS setup. There are a few steps to this:

1. Create the HostedZone using the Route53 API. Here is the XML required to create the hostedzone for my domain bitchasscode.com

<CreateHostedZoneRequest xmlns="https://route53.amazonaws.com/doc/2010-10-01/">
 <Name>bitchasscode.com.</Name>
 <CallerReference>dns_migration_amcgrath_20111018</CallerReference>
 <HostedZoneConfig>
 <Comment>Migrate an existing domain to Route 53</Comment>
 </HostedZoneConfig>
</CreateHostedZoneRequest>

2. Create the individual A records and Cnames for the domain using the Route53 API:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ChangeResourceRecordSetsRequest xmlns="https://route53.amazonaws.com/doc/2011-05-05/">
 <ChangeBatch>
 <Comment>Create record for bitchasscode.com.</Comment>
 <Changes>

 <Change>
 <Action>CREATE</Action>
 <ResourceRecordSet>
 <Name>www.bitchasscode.com.</Name>
 <Type>CNAME</Type>
 <TTL>300</TTL>
 <ResourceRecords>
 <ResourceRecord>
 <Value>bitchasscode.com<Value>
 </ResourceRecord>
 </ResourceRecords>
 </ResourceRecordSet>
 </Change>
 <Change>
 <Action>CREATE</Action>
 <ResourceRecordSet>
 <Name>bitchasscode.com.</Name>
 <Type>A</Type>
 <AliasTarget>
 <HostedZoneId>YOUR LOAD BALANCERS HOSTED ZONE ID</HostedZoneId>
 <DNSName>DNS NAME OF THE LOAD BALANCER</DNSName>
 </AliasTarget>
 </ResourceRecordSet>
 </Change>
</Changes>

</ChangeBatch>

</ChangeResourceRecordSetsRequest>

This is a key step, becsause this is what lets you have a “hostname” as a A record. Sexy stuff…

3. Test your setup, it worked fine for me, however honestly its a real pain in the ass to do all of this. This created a new issue for me, i didnt really trust what I just did…so i started thinking about creating a UI for Route53 so i could easily view my edits.

Issue 2:
There is no UI for route53 provided by Amazon.

Solution:
Use Interstate53 as your UI, you just need to provide an AWS API key & secret…then you’re done!

Honestly i dont know a lot about Interstate53, other than its very amazing. I tried a few other services which didnt do the job for me:

• nsRoute (Doesnt do Alias records to ELB’s properly)
• dns30 (Doesnt do Alias records to ELB’s properly)
• easydns (They wanted me to signup, pay or something – too hard, i gave up after i couldnt work out how to get an account.)

Interstate53 were super easy to get going with (just provide an api key and secret), there is no registration or anything and their UI is great. It works perfectly with Alias records going to ELB’s and then you’re cooking!

Recently I’ve run into so many poorly setup systems, and what makes me sad is that people paid for them to do this. If you wrote any code recently and you’re trying to get people to pay for it, do them (and yourself) a credit by at least doing the following:

• GET A LOAD BALANCER
  They are very simple to setup, services like Amazon AWS and Rackspace provide these for around $20 / month; they are not expensive. If you have your reputation on the line they are worth the spend! Even if you only have 1 machine behind the load balancer, if you dont use one from the start in order to introduce one later when things get serious you need to make a DNS change. This is a big issue because you probably want it to happen quickly.  Add the load balancer in from the start! You can always add more servers behind it and with sticky sessions as an option, you dont even need to make code changes to your app!
• DISABLE SSH ACCESS FROM THE ENTIRE WORLD
  At Amazon this is very simple, create a custom security group and whitelist only the IP’s you want to have access via SSH.
• DO NOT USE MYSQL WITH ROOT
  Always create custom usernames for applications. Its nice to tell the difference between your app, and someone using the root account.
• ALWAYS USE PASSWORDS WITH MYSQL
  I came across a case yesterday where people were using root with no password
• ONLY GIVE MYSQL ACCESS TO PEOPLE WHO NEED IT
  Again back to the security groups, dont let anyone get access to your machine on port 3306! Only white-list servers which need access to your database. Sadly the same case i ran into yesterday using root and no password also had their instance open to the entire world. Major no no!
• KNOW YOUR HOSTING PROVIDER
  Companies like Amazon provide some amazing tools that if used properly can result in some great results. If you’re at Amazon try use things like RDS (Rather than installing MYSQL on an EC2 instance), take advantage of different availability zones (dont put every machine behind your load balancer in the same zone), know how to secure your site using tools like “Security Groups”, and understand how to enable monitoring.
• Finally…MONITOR YOUR SERVICE
  At Amazon CloudWatch is your friend, use it! Its cheap ($3/month) and very useful…if you want to get an email when the number of unhealthy servers in a load balanced group increases, this service can tell you! Tie that baby in with companies like PagerDuty and hey presto, every time a server goes out of service you get a phone call.

If you use the tools you are provided with properly, your life is easy. If you dont someone like me will jump on your machine, drop your database, sit back and laugh because you’re not monitoring it and you dont have a clue it happened until the customer calls to yell at you.

Fix your shit, or i’ll take your customers money and keep it for myself!