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Last year I saw some videos from Velocity 2011 that were really enlightening, and today I wanted to re-watch one of them. Of course, I hadn’t bookmarked them, or remembered which conference they were from. So after some searching and remembering, I found the video. “Look at Your Data” by John Rauser. It is an …

I’ve had a few requests to share my Nagios SMS notifications using Twilio. I’m almost embarrassed to share them, since they are so dead simple. There was another plugin out there to do the same, but it was a lot more advanced and more work to setup, so I wrote my own in PHP. In …

This is another wonderful setup that I’ve found myself using rather than the traditional Apache & mod_php setup. What is Nginx? Nginx (pronounced engine-x) is a fast, powerful, lightweight web server. I won’t go into the theory under-the-hood, but it’s focus is high concurrency with low memory usage. So while Apache is more robust in …

I’m deploying some new servers today, and I realized I hadn’t documented my steps on my blog. So here are a few posts detailing my setup process. What is Percona Server? Percona Server is a fork of MySQL Server. So what does that mean? For the past few years, MySQL has had some “interesting” developments …

I’ve been thinking about this idea for awhile, and I thought I would put a name to the thought. I brought up this idea while I was giving my “Real Life Scaling” presentation at the Utah Open Source Conference in 2009. Here is the problem I think most individuals in the web development face: Hopefully …

This last weekend I had a fun opportunity of restoring roughly 912 Million Rows to a database. 902 Million belonged to one single table (902,966,645 rows, to be exact). To give an idea of growth, the last time I blogged about this database we had about 40 million rows. This giant table, the “Scores” table, …

I have a couple of scripts that use the linux “mail” command to send results of cron jobs, backups, and such. The problem is I don’t want to setup more overhead than I need, nor do I want to setup non-secure services. So after asking the guys on the #uphpu channel, they recommended postfix. So …

Ok, so I need to confess, I haven’t been a good blogger. I’ve gone two months without writing a post, which is broke a 2 year streak. But, I’m going to post date these posts, since I can. How I’ve gone this long without setting up Nagios to monitor servers is beyond me. However, I …

Every time I go to set up VirtualBox and several VMs I always forget how I setup the networking for them. Once again, I went through the pain of trying to figure it all out, so I might as well document it for future use. The Problem When creating virtual machines, especially virtual linux servers, …

A Little Background It was the summer of 2008 when I attended the LT Pact conference that I first drank the “Cloud Kool-Aid.” As you can see from my notes, I was pretty excited about this whole concept. Excited enough, one client of mine signed up for Layered Tech’s grid layer (which is what they …