Ubuntu on Justin Carmony

Ubuntu 12.04, PHP 5.4, Apache2, and ppa:ondrej/php5

Thu, 01 Aug 2013 02:06:49 +0000

Okay, wow, what a doozy. I guess this is a lesson in why you want to be careful of the PPAs you use on your Ubuntu servers.

Summary

The very popular ppa:ondrej/php5, a Personal Package Archive for Ubuntu 12.04, upgraded from PHP 5.4 to PHP 5.5. This would require a newer version of Apache (v 2.4). If you upgraded Apache from 2.2 to 2.4, you would likely run into apache configuration issues.

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.

Setting Up Percona Server 5.5 on Ubuntu 10.04

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 18:43:25 +0000

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 from the business stand point. Being bought by Sun, which was then sold to Oracle, and a lot of “drama” surrounding all of that. In turn, what seems to have happened is MySQL’s development stalled or slowed down as it took a back seat to the legal sides of things.

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.

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.

Restoring Large MySQL Dump - 900 Million Rows

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 03:05:12 +0000

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, is has a very small schema: two ints, a tiny int, and a DECIMAL(5,2).

Problem

Our current backup system uses mysqldump. It dumps a 25 GB sql dump file, which compresses to about 2.5GB using gzip. The last time we needed to restore a backup it was only about 9GB, and it took several hours.

Sending Email from non-email Ubuntu Server

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 19:22:11 +0000

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 for a Ubuntu 10.04 server, just run the following commands:

aptitude install postfix #when prompted, select Internet Site aptitude install mailutils

Server Monitoring with Wormly

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 00:06:57 +0000

I know I’ve been behind in my posts, so I quickly wanted to catch up with a few I’ve been meaning to post. The first is my recommendation for a service called Wormly. Now, I’ve tried to run my own Nagios servers and such, and they work, but here is why I like Wormly.

First, is simple and easy to use. The interface is great, and covers all the basics.
Second, downtime and server health monitoring in one package. I’ve always thought these two should go together, but it wasn’t that easy to do on my own with the tools I had. With Wormly, its super easy to set up. You just install a small one-file PHP script.
Third, its cost effective. If you are monitoring hundreds of servers, you would probably want to roll your own to integrate it with your own deployment systems. However, if you have just a handful, or even just a few dozen, it is very cost effective.

The bottom line is there is no reason not to have a server monitoring tool in place, and Wormly has been a great tool. We’ve used it to monitor Dating DNA’s and Clipish’s servers for several months, and it is worth every penny. I highly recommend it.

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.

VirtualBox Networking Setup

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 06:32:43 +0000

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, I want them to be able to do the following things:

Connect to the Internet
Connect over SSH from my Host Machine to the Guest Machine
Have the servers connect to each other on a private internal network

Out of the box, a VM is configured for #1, however it cannot do #2 and #3. There are some solutions that do some archaic port forwarding by issuing special commands from the Terminal. This is just painful, and if you just want one port to work, that’s manageable, but what if you want ssh, ftp, myql, http, https, etc? Any on multiple VMs? What a nightmare! What is painful is when googling for a solution, almost every “answer” is this crazy port forwarding method. There is a much cleaner, better way!

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.

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]