MySQLTuner

Users of PHPMyAdmin 3.x may find that the table indexes are automatically hidden at the bottom of the page. I find this to be a huge annoyance since table indexes are tremendously important to the structure of the table. If you don’t want to downgrade to PHPMyAdmin 2.x, just add the following line to the [...]

Mac users feel a little left out when it comes to VMWare Server clients. There’s one for Windows and Linux, but Mac users are out of luck. Sure, you can VNC into a Linux box, use X forwarding, or use RDC to access a Windows box, but a real Mac client would really [...]

Setting up new servers can be a pain if you’re not able to clone them from a server that is known to be working. Many VPS providers, like Slicehost, allow you to clone a system to a new system. Without that option, you can pull a list of RPM’s without their version number [...]

I recently tossed Ubuntu 8.10 on my Mac Mini at home to use it as a home theater PC (with Boxee). When I connected to my wireless network via NetworkManager, I entered my WPA2 passphrase, and then I was prompted to enter a password for gnome-keyring. I went back to the couch, SSH’ed [...]

I’m striving to keep the topics of this blog as technical as possible since that what most readers keep asking for. Tech talk is always something I enjoy, but one of my other big passions is customer service. It may sound trite, but I’m actually genuine about it. I started a new customer service [...]

I’ve been a bit slow on new posts lately for two main reasons. First, I’ve been working hard with my new position at Slicehost, (I’m still with Rackspace). Also, I’ve thrown out the old code for Boxcheck.com and I’m re-writing it from scratch. Most of you probably know that the first version of Boxcheck [...]

I’ve tested this Debian etch to lenny upgrade process a few times so far, and it seems to be working well. sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list [change 'etch' -> 'lenny'] sudo aptitude update sudo aptitude install apt dpkg aptitude sudo aptitude full-upgrade

Thanks to the simplicity of ruby as well as the twitter and httparty gems, I’ve whipped up some Twitter bots today. The three bots will alert you when there are Red Hat, Ubuntu, or Debian security advisories. I’d set one up for Fedora, but their feed is broken today. @redhaterrata - Red Hat Errata [...]

As much as some people might disagree, optimizing MySQL isn’t rocket science. There are some basic steps that every server administrator can follow to improve the performance of their MySQL server. I’ve outlined these steps in the flow chart included in this post. While it won’t include all situations, it will give ideas to [...]

Most linux distributions use some type of mechanism to gracefully stop daemons and unmount storage volumes during a reboot or shutdown. It’s most commonly done via scripts that will wait for each daemon to shut down gracefully before proceeding to the next daemon. As we know, sometimes servers misbehave due to things put them through, [...]