MySQLTuner

If you have Excel files that need to be imported into MySQL, you can import them easily with PHP. First, you will need to download some prerequisites: PHPExcelReader - http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpexcelreader/ Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer - ... [More] http://pear.php.net/package/Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer Once you’ve downloaded both items, upload them to your server. Your directory listing on your server should have two directories: Excel (from PHPExcelReader) [...] [Less]

If you have a Plesk server where short mail names are enabled, upgrading to Plesk 8.4 can cause some issues. Valid logins may be rejected, and they’ll appear in your /usr/local/psa/var/log/maillog as “no such user”. You can correct the issue by switching to long mail names (click Server -> Mail in Plesk), or [...]

As I get started with ruby, one of the things I’ve noticed is that ruby’s documentation could be a bit better.  However, I discovered that this four line ruby script will give your documentation for your server’s installed gems: 1 2 3 4 ... [More] #!/usr/bin/env ruby require "rubygems/server" options = {:gemdir => Gem.dir, :port => 4242, :daemon => true} Gem::Server::run(options) Thanks to Daniel for the [...] [Less]

After running sar on my new slice from SliceHost*, I noticed a new column called steal. It’s generally very low on my virtual machine, and I’ve never seen it creep over 1-2%. IBM’s definition of steal time is actually pretty good: Steal time is the percentage of time a virtual CPU waits for a real CPU [...]

I know I usually talk about Linux server related topics on this blog, but I’m pretty proud of what I’ve figured out this morning on my Mac. As you know, the iPhone can really only fully sync with one machine, and if you want to connect it to a new Mac that you’ve purchased, [...]

Although the idea of putting something from Microsoft on a Linux box might sound awful at first, you may find a reason to use Microsoft TrueType fonts on a Linux server. If you’re using GD to render an image, these fonts may come in handy. If you have an RPM-based linux distribution, you can use [...]

I found a server last week that was having severe issues with disk I/O to the point where most operations were taking many minutes to complete. The server wasn’t under much load, but a quick run of dmesg threw quite a bit of these lines out onto the screen: EXT3-fs warning (device sda5): ext3_dx_add_entry: [...]

This blog is now hosted on the Mosso cloud infrastructure. It will allow me to provide faster page loads and scale on demand. If you’re not already hosting your applications at Mosso, I’d recommend checking them out soon!

Some of you may have already noticed from my Twitter feed, but I’ve started a complete re-write of pleskhacker.com in an easier-to-use format. The old site was done in Dokuwiki, and I found that it didn’t scale too well. The new site uses Wordpress, and the performance is already improving. Another improvement to the [...]

After working with some RHEL 5 servers fairly regularly, I noticed a reduction in Apache 2.2 performance when many connections were made to the server. There were messages like these streaming into the access_log as well: 127.0.0.1 - - ... [More] [21/Aug/2008:12:00:10 -0400] “GET / HTTP/1.0″ 200 2269 “-” “Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) (internal dummy connection)” 127.0.0.1 - - [...] [Less]