MySQLTuner

I’ve decided to adjust the look of this blog to make it easier to read and faster to download. My old Mandigo theme was great, but it required each user to download about 200kb worth of content to see the blog. The new theme is about 30-40kb per download and it renders faster [...]

Most web developers expend a lot of energy optimizing queries, reducing the overhead of functions, and streamlining their application’s overall flow. However, many forget that one of the simplest adjustments is the compression of data as it leaves ... [More] the web server. Luckily, mod_deflate makes this easy, and the Apache documentation has a handy initial configuration [...] [Less]

After a quick review of the stats this evening, I found that this blog has made it to 500,000 sessions so far this year. Page views are just past 2.5 million! In 2007, there were over 65,000 sessions and over 427,000 million page views in 2007 as a final count. Here’s the exact numbers [...]

I’ve updated the blog to Wordpress 2.6.2 tonight. There are some relatively serious security concerns with some of the code in Wordpress 2.6.1, so I’d recommend upgrading at your earliest convenience. Slide on over to the Wordpress site and download it now.

I found a Plesk 8.3 server running RHEL 4 last month that was presenting errors when users attempted to send e-mail via SquirrelMail: ERROR: Email delivery error Server replied: 127 Can't execute command '/usr/sbin/sendmail -i -t ... [More] [email protected]'. The error was appearing because safe_mode was enabled and SquirrelMail was unable to drop e-mails into /usr/sbin/squirrelmail. After disabling safe_mode on [...] [Less]

MySQLTuner 0.9.9 is now available for download. There’s a new wiki for the script at wiki.mysqltuner.com. The new wiki contains links to downloads, changelogs, and other details. If you want to know when the latest releases are available, there are ... [More] multiple options: Follow RackerHacker on Twitter Sign up for the MySQLTuner mailing list Use the --checkversion option [...] [Less]

For a recent project, I needed to automatically provision VM’s for testing. I wanted to make the .vmx files on the fly with the exact configuration required, but I couldn’t find documentation for the options that are allowed in the .vmx files. Luckily, a fellow named Ulli Hankeln has made an impressive list [...]

I was working with a CentOS 5 x86_64 installation running VMWare server last week when I stumbled upon this error: Use of uninitialized value in string eq at /usr/lib64/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/VMware/VmPerl.pm line 114. You ... [More] can run the vmware-cmd application with this error (it’s not a fatal error) and keep going with your normal business. However, if you want [...] [Less]

I spoke with a customer last week who was curious about enabling encrypted partitions on a DAS connected to their server.  I wasn’t entirely sure if it was possible in RHEL 5 since I couldn’t remember if it was available in Fedora 6.  According to Red Hat’s release notes, it is possible.  Here’s an excerpt [...]

I’ve just upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.6.1.  If you haven’t upgraded yours, you may want to get started. You can review the changelog as well.