Linux on Justin Carmony

Siege with User Authentication

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:33:02 +0000

If you want to stress test your application, the quickest and best way to do so is with siege. From the siege website:

Siege is an http load testing and benchmarking utility. It was designed to let web developers measure their code under duress, to see how it will stand up to load on the internet. Siege supports basic authentication, cookies, HTTP and HTTPS protocols. It lets its user hit a web server with a configurable number of simulated web browsers. Those browsers place the server “under siege.”

Setting Up Nginx & PHP-FPM on Ubuntu 10.04

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 03:50:59 +0000

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 supporting many different features, nginx focuses on handling the important features very quickly. I still use Apache internally for our SVN & Trac web server. Heck, even at this time I’m using Apache to host this blog. However, Dating DNA, Clipish, CEVO, Alienware Arena, and some other high traffic sites/apis use nginx.

Preparing a VMWare Ubuntu Guest OS

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 07:11:09 +0000

I forget these steps all the time, so I figured I should record them here.

A lot of times VMWare will auto-install the VMWare tools for you when you first setup your VM. However, many times after setting it up I’ll do updates, and updates to the kernel will be applied, knocking out the VMWare Tools changes. These tools are used for things like file sharing between the guest and host.

Working with Middle-Scale Websites

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 00:02:40 +0000

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 at some point, your website gets a lot of traffic. Yay, you’ve reached your goal of getting good traffic, but it is soon followed by issues with performance and load. I like to call these the growing pains of a website. So as a web developer, I suddenly have the epiphany of “Hey, I need to scale my website!” What follows next is the biggest mistake a web developer can make:

Simple Trick: History Command

Tue, 31 May 2011 21:05:08 +0000

So today I quickly installed Redis on a server, and I wanted to keep a copy of all the commands I had used to do so. I knew there was a better way than hitting the up arrow each time to copy and paste each command in reverse order. So after some Googling, I found out about the history command. So I was able to type the command “history” and it showed me the last two thousand or so commands I had used. I was able to copy and paste that into a wiki, and was good to go. You could also search your history by piping the history command to grep. Cool stuff I don’t want to forget.

Sharing Sessions Across Multiple Servers With Memcache

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 08:52:15 +0000

These last few days have been full of quickly implementing things I’ve only read about, but hadn’t done for myself.

One situation was looking at splitting web traffic across multiple servers. In our case, we had only 2% of our website that would spike and increase our load by %1000 percent (I’m not joking) for a short period of time. So instead of doing traditional load balancing, we opted for routing specific functions to a custom subdomain that would run on another server. That way if the thousands of crazy video game players (you know who you are), slam the servers trying to get a cool skin for their online avatar, it would only take down that one section.

Setting up SSH Key Authentication Between Servers

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 19:52:05 +0000

I always forget how to do this, so I have to look it up each time. This will make it easier the next time. It is so simple, just I always forget.

First, I need to generate my ssh pub and private keys on the host server: ssh-keygen

Second, I need to copy the pub key to the remote server: ssh-copy-id -i id_rsa.pub user@server.local

Then, that it! Now that I wrote it down, I won’t forget it… I hope.

Setting up Nagios for Servers

Tue, 04 May 2010 21:17:20 +0000

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 was tired of my clients and so finding out a server was offline before me. So I threw up a 256MB virtual server on Slicehost, since I don’t have any servers with them at the moment, in case a data center went offline.

Data Backups - There Are No Excuses

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 00:04:48 +0000

Today I just had the terrible experience of having a database lose data, need to restore, only to not have a recent backup. If you haven’t had this experience before, please, take this serious. My wife was home for lunch as it happened, and she watched as the blood drained from my face. It only took a few seconds for the loss to happen, and immediately I knew exactly what the repercussions where. The immediate second thought that passes through your brain is “Where are my backups?” That is when I realized I didn’t have my nightly backups set up on this server. I quickly checked the file date on the last known backup I had.

Recursively Add New Files to SVN

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:51:33 +0000

One great thing about running Windows is TortoiseSVN. I makes managing my SVN so easy. One of the problems I’ve ran into on other systems was I had been working for several hours. I would have dozens of new files and with TortoiseSVN it would show me a list of all the new files and I could hit “select all” and commit. However, on Mac I haven’t found an SVN client that I like, so I just use the terminal commands. There are also times, like when managing a WordPress installation, that WordPress and its plug-ins could auto update. I wanted to be able to add all the new files on the linux server back into the svn.

XAMPP for Mac - My Frustrations & Solutions

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 23:15:34 +0000

These last few days I’ve been trying to get XAMPP to work on my MacBook Pro these last couple of days and it has been frustrating! It seemed I kept running into more and more problems. For those who don’t know, XAMPP is tool for developers to run a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) on your machine locally. I’ve been running it on my Windows machines for years, and I have been running my production servers on Linux.

My Honest Attempt With Linux Desktop

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 04:07:00 +0000

After the last uphpu meeting a few of us went to Applebees like always. We were talking about a lot of stuff and one of the big subjects was Linux Desktop. Kevin Carter, the presenter, was sporting off Kubuntu with the new KDE 4.2. This year I’ve made a goal to improve my Linux skills and I thought if I switched to using Linux as my main work enviroment. So Sunday night I started to try to install Kubuntu 8.10. I’m sorry to say, but after 24 hours, I wasn’t able to stick with it.

Consumer Linux - When & How

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:15:28 +0000

I’ve been reading several responses about the news story of a girl who “dropped out of school” because of Ubuntu. I’ve read several responses, including Aaron Toponce’s response, and it got me thinking about a topic that has been on my mind for awhile.

You can read the story yourself and the follow-up backlash from the Ubuntu Community. I was extremely sad, but not at all surprised, of the backlash that this woman got. I’m sure the negative response is from a relatively small percent of the community that is just extremely loud. I also think the title of the story is a little misleading and that it can be taken as bias. However, the root of the problem lies in this: a woman thought she was buying a consumer product, when in fact, it wasn’t.

Father Sued Over Freedom of Speech

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:22:31 +0000

I thought I would step in and write about the total non-sense that has been going on with the Linspire/Freespire debacle. Today I just found out my father, Kevin Carmony and ex-CEO of Linspire, is being sued by Michael Robertson over “… cybersquatting, trademark infringement, and unfair competition…” for “$100,000 and other damages.” You can read the entire post on Kevin’s blog. He summarizes the real intent behind this lawsuit well:

The lawsuit even states, “Although the FREESPIRE mark was recently assigned as part of an asset purchase, [Robertson] expressly reserved all rights in and to all claims against Carmony arising from the freespire.com domain name and website.” Now, why would Robertson want to carve out that one thing to hang on to? He’s no longer involved with Freespire, so why does he care? Is he desperate for money? With Robertson’s companies struggling and laying employees off, does anyone really believe this is the most important thing Robertson should be concerning himself with? His motives are pretty transparent–to suppress freedom of expression that is critical of Robertson.

Ubuntu Desktop Terminal - Su

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:30:08 +0000

This is just a quick reference for myself. When I want to “su to root” in Ubuntu’s terminal I need to do the follow:

sudo su [enter password]

LT Pact '08 - Overview of Experience

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:52:45 +0000

I just left the last session of the LT Pact ‘08 conference and it has been fun. I’ve learned a lot and there were a lot of common themes among the conference. I’ll briefly touch on the themes and over the next week or so I’ll be writing more in-depth on each one. Besides, I need to enjoy Las Vegas while I’m here and not just blog.

Virtualization & Cloud Computing

Virtualization is the future of server hosting. It won’t be optimal for all scenarios of course, but there are so many advantages to virtualization that they can’t be passed up:

LT PACT 2008 - Day 1

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 06:31:52 +0000

Whew, today was a good day. I took a lot of notes and over the next few days I’ll be blogging on the different topics. Hopefully you’ll enjoy.

How to tell what Linux OS you're running

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 22:01:23 +0000

I deal with many different servers and it is hard to keep track of which is running which Distro of linux. Here is the quick way to tell:

uname -a

uname –help

You can’t believe how hard it was to find that out.