Amazon’s EC2 is rightly so the best thing since sliced bread. All of our hosted services at Vamosa run off EC2. Getting our Ubuntu instances provisioned these days is easily achieved using Capistrano, but when we were still get familiar with ‘cap’ it wasn’t always the case. Amazon EC2 uses private/public keys files for root user authentication but you want to use those credentials as infrequently as possible. As RubyOnRails users, we are used to setting up a deploy user which we use to run Apache 2 and Phusion Passenger under. We use that same deploy user to connect to our...

If you’re trying to get RubyOnRails connected to MySQL on Windows Vista as we have done recently at Vamosa, then keep in mind that the current latest versions of MySQL and the MySQL gem are incompatible with each other. At the time of writing, the current versions of MySQL is 5.1 and the MySQL gem is currently at version 2.7.3. We were unable to get this combination to work together and ended up reverting to MySQL 5.0 and MySQL gem 2.7.1. gem install -v "2.7.1" mysql I don’t think you’re missing anything substantial from either MySQL 5.1 or the 2.7.3...