14May/130

Discover PHP bottlenecks with Xdebug or why my site is so slow

In this article you will learn about the possible use xdebug by system administrators of web-servers.

If you administer a web-server,  often face problems that ordinary users of the site called "slow" or "dead-slow" Of course, this is a very important issue that could have serious financial consequences for the website owner. This formulation is sufficient to begin the investigation.

Filed under: linux, php Continue reading
22Jan/130

Ubuntu 12.04 64bit – Office 2010 with Wine [SOLVED]

It works!!! It took me several hours to make it, but I do not regret time spent, I was so sick of running VirtualBox for MS Office.

Filed under: linux Continue reading
4Dec/120

Is your site or WordPress blog ready for IPv6?

You may have heard that current IP address space (4 billion of IPs)  is already fully assigned and there is no free ip addresses left. There is no big panic since ISP and hosting companies have some internal IP reserve. But this definitely leads to quicker deployment of IPv6 protocol.

The main issue is: IPv6 must be supported on both ends of connection: user-end and server-end. It is a classic chicken and egg problem, top few users use IPv6 ->  no IPv6 services exists and no services support IPv6 means, why should clients switch to it?

Since there is no IPv6 alternative, service owners must do a big first step and some of them did. Google, Amazon, Rackspace and many others added IPv6 as alternative to IPv4.

Is you site or blog ready to be accessible via IPv6? I think its time to think about it. I did a switch of my WordPress based blog hosted on Rackspace and here is the story...

Filed under: cloud, linux Continue reading
22Nov/120

Security in clouds – iptables and IPv6 issue

I have some servers on Rackspace cloud platform. Having full control over OS allows to make many useful testing, even if its virtualized  Recently while doing some server hardening work I discovered not an obviously thing with iptables. In fact some of my firewall rules where completely ignored!!

I am not the iptables newbie and was very surprised by such behavior. Find the story below...

Filed under: cloud, linux Continue reading
16Jan/120

Change Mysql root password – The Right Way

Sometime MySQL root password is lost, because of last admin did not leave you any notes on the server or you are given your client server to fix some database or script related errors where MySQL root password is required.

I always knew one way of resetting it, but recently came up with another which is The Right Way.

Filed under: linux, tricks, web Continue reading
29Nov/111

Nginx and Mercurial setup

Some weeks ago I switched to Nginx and quit Apache and was quite happy with it. I was so happy that completely forgot about my Mercurial repositories hosted on same server. This happen when I was in hurry and needed to push and pull some changes,  damn.

At first I quickly restored Apache, did all needed changes and switched back to Nginx. For sure, I did not like this way and explored how I can connect Mercurial directly to Nginx. I was quite surprised how easy it is and how flexible.

Filed under: linux, web Continue reading
16Nov/114

I quit Apache and moved to Nginx


Now this blog is riding on Nginx+php-fpm setup. You may have heard about quickly growing in popularity Russian made web-server. Several years earlier Nginx had a really narrow appliance on high loaded sites as balancer, front end, static content, etc.. Something too complex to be setup for simple site or blog.

Time changed things, community has grown, all sharp corners were smoothed. The PHP itself starting from version 5.3 has out-of-the-box support of FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) to communicate to Nginx in a very efficient manner. Ubuntu PPA repositories has all things already compiled and tons of docs are available on the Internet.

At first I though of this more like experiment, but after I tested it for a while and made some performance tests, I was surprised how well it performed on my tiny virtual server. It eats less memory and does more job.

I really like Apache web server, I've spend 10 years with it and still consider it the best one for many appliances. But from now on I have one more option to use for my projects.

Welcome to continue reading...

Filed under: linux, web Continue reading
1Oct/110

Recompile linux kernel on vacation

Sweetheart, just because you can recompile the server's Linux kernel from here doesn't mean you should :)

Filed under: fun, linux Continue reading
28Jun/112

What is the cloud – how to use

The word "cloud" became a buzz-word quite a while and Google search results for the word cloud is far away from real clouds in the sky. Although, many people and even web developers are quite away from understanding of what cloud is, how it works and how to take an advantage by using it. So clouds are really "cloudy".

Being a web developer this topic is in area of my interests for some time, but I always thought that clouds are for really big players. By big I assume million of clients, billions of page loads, terabytes of data, etc.. My mistake!

Recently I came across with Rackspace cloud and understood how wrong I was. It changed my understanding  into more practical way and I gave up my VPS and moved to the cloud.

Filed under: cloud, linux Continue reading
23May/111

Hardening linux server

If you consider yourself as Linux administrator this post might be useful for you. NSA published some nice papers with hardening Linux servers recommendations. NSA - National Security Agency - organization that is trusted. Latest version of 200 hundred pages guide in PDF for securing configuration of RHEL5. A very detailed manual, explaining general principles of secure system, including all necessary system changes, service configuration, network security, firewall, etc..

Filed under: linux Continue reading
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