MySQLTuner

One of the most interesting topics I've seen so far during my RHCA training at Rackspace this week is SystemTap. In short, SystemTap allows you to dig out a bunch of details about your running system relatively easily. It takes scripts, converts them ... [More] to C, builds a kernel module, and then runs the code within [...]Tap into your Linux system with SystemTap is a post from: Major Hayden's Racker Hacker blog.c0b6ad7e-f251-11df-b20b-4040336e00ef [Less]

The guide to redundant cloud hosting that I wrote recently will need some adjustments as I've fallen hard for the performance and reliability of DRBD and OCFS2. As a few of my sites were gaining in popularity, I noticed that GlusterFS simply couldn't ... [More] keep up. High I/O latency and broken replication threw a wrench into [...]Keep web servers in sync with DRBD and OCFS2 is a post from: Major Hayden's Racker Hacker blog.c0b6ad7e-f251-11df-b20b-4040336e00ef [Less]

For those of us in the United States, we celebrate Thanksgiving today. Although it means different things for different people, I consider it to be a good day to remember those who have helped us and count the blessings that we all take for granted. ... [More] Without a doubt, I'm most thankful for my family. They're [...]Happy Thanksgiving is a post from: Major Hayden's Racker Hacker blog.c0b6ad7e-f251-11df-b20b-4040336e00ef [Less]

The pv command is one that I really enjoy using but it's also one that I often forget about. You can't get a much more concise definition of what pv does than this one: pv allows a user to see the progress of data through a pipeline, by giving ... [More] information such as time elapsed, percentage [...]Monitor MySQL restore progress with pv is a post from: Major Hayden's Racker Hacker blog.c0b6ad7e-f251-11df-b20b-4040336e00ef [Less]

If you offer a web service that users query via scripts or other applications, you'll probably find that some people will begin to abuse the service. My icanhazip.com site is no exception. While many of the users have reasonable usage patterns, there ... [More] are some users that query the site more than once per second from [...]Throwing thoughtful "403 Forbidden" responses with apache is a post from: Major Hayden's Racker Hacker blog.c0b6ad7e-f251-11df-b20b-4040336e00ef [Less]

A recent blog post from Mixpanel inspired me to write a quick how-to for Fedora users on using OpenVPN to talk to instances privately in the Rackspace Cloud. The diagram at the right gives an idea of what this guide will allow you to accomplish. ... [More] Consider a situation where you want to talk to the [...]Accessing Rackspace Cloud Servers and Slicehost slices privately via OpenVPN is a post from: Major Hayden's Racker Hacker blog.c0b6ad7e-f251-11df-b20b-4040336e00ef [Less]

Last night's post about my charity drive for the Movember Foundation was the 400th post on my blog! I started posting on rackerhacker.com way back in the spring of 2007 shortly after I was hired by Rackspace in December of 2006. My main purpose for the blog at the beginning was to create a place [...]

This is a bit of an unusual post for my blog, but I wanted to reach out to you for charitable reasons. I'm currently trying to grow some facial hair (which is a feat in itself) with some folks from work for the Movember Foundation. I look a bit sillier than usual, but at least [...]

As my uptime reports have shown, and as some of you have reported, my blog's load time has increased steadily over the past few weeks. It turns out that one of my VM's was on a physical machine that had some trouble and I was reaching a point where GlusterFS's replicate functionality couldn't meet my [...]

On most systems, using Fedora's preupgrade package is the most reliable way to update to the next Fedora release. However, this isn't the case with Slicehost and Rackspace Cloud Servers. Here are the steps for an upgrade from Fedora 13 to Fedora 14 ... [More] via yum: yum -y upgrade wget http://mirror.rackspace.com/fedora/releases/14/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/fedora-release-14-1.noarch.rpm rpm -Uvh fedora-release-14-1.noarch.rpm yum -y [...] [Less]