Posted on in System Administration
I use Pingdom's free service to monitor slaptijack.com. Apparently,
late Friday night, oom-killer decided that the server needed more memory and
took out the MySQL server. To make matters worse, I missed the alarm from Pingdom,
and slaptijack.com was down for pretty much all of Saturday. The fact …
Posted on in System Administration
Ever so often, something changes on the network, and you find that your
.ssh/known_hosts file has gotten out of date. Usually this happens after an
upgrade or device change. You'll get the rather ominous warning that
REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!
If you are confident that someone isn't doing …
Posted on in system_administration
While updating the TCP tuning parameters on one of my OS X 10.11 servers, I noticed that my existing OS X TCP Performance Tuning page had gotten out of date. The page was nearly eight years old, so it is no surprise that happened. I updated the page in …
Posted on in System Administration
I have written previously regarding using
Redis for Magento session storage.
You can get the same benefits of using Redis for session storage (reduced disk
I/O, automatic key eviction) for any PHP application by making a quick change to
a couple of settings in your php.ini. I assume …
Posted on in System Administration
Although I do not use Exim myself, I have clients that do. Recently, we noticed that it was taking more than 20 seconds for their SMTP banner to display when initiating checks from the monitoring server. Connecting to the server locally (on any interface IP address) did not suffer the …
Posted on in System Administration
If you have ever used any tool to optimize a web page, you know that compressing
the return traffic to the client is a
big win. In nginx, this is done with
the gzip module. The
easiest thing to do is add gzip on; to the http stanza in your …
Posted on in System Administration
Naturally, I ran into this problem in the middle of the night when the client was asleep and I had no access to the Magento administrative interface. The short story is that after running a re-index of the site, the home page began returning a 404 error status. A bit …
Posted on in System Administration
I ran into this issue while trying to install wine-devel on my Mid 2012 MacBook
Pro running El Capitan and MacPorts 2.3.4. As the install progressed, here is the
error I got:
Error: org.macports.build for port glib2 returned: command execution failed
Please see the log file …Posted on in System Administration
It is well-documented that I am a heavy Google user. I use Gmail and Google Docs for just about everything. Additionally, I have used an Android phone since I got the HTC Dream (AKA T-Mobile G1) when it first came out.
However, I have been using OS X full-time since …
Posted on in System Administration
Out of the box, Magento has four methods available for storing session data: filesystem, database, memcached, and tmpfs. The default method is to store session information in the filesystem. I believe that storing sessions in Redis is actually superior to all of the aforementioned methods. Each of the four default …
Posted on in System Administration
Posted on in System Administration
I recently ran into an issue on a Wordpress site running behind an nginx web
server. The site was frequently being attacked by a botnet hitting /xmlrpc.php
so rapidly, it would eventually force the FastCGI processes behind nginx to
consume all available CPU. Naturally, this would cause all legitimate …
Posted on in System Administration
Great!
Once again, Apple has made a change in how DNS is handled in Mac OS X. Originally,
Yosemite (10.10) had replaced mDNSResponder with discoveryd. This meant that
all of those who had made a change to force mDNSResponder to always append
search domains to DNS lookups had to …
Posted on in System Administration
If you have a directory that you want to keep clean, tmpreaper is a great way
to remove files based on how old they are. The other day, I had a directory that
looked like this:
x@x:~/dump$ ls -l
-rw-r--r-- 1 x x 212268169 Mar 15 01:02 …Posted on in System Administration
We run several (read: hundreds) of servers that are still running Debian 6 (Squeeze).
A few months ago, we started seeing the following errors coming from the daily
apt cronjob: "WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!" When
running apt-get update the following errors dump out:
$ apt-get update
W: GPG …
