In my ventures with this new web server (and to host a new web site, duh!), I just set up WordPress behind nginx. It's really a piece of cake.

What is privacy? "Get off my lawn!" a grandpa would say when law enforcers came on behalf of corporations to take away his land. But some generations later, people would probably say something that sounds more like "I don't need to hide anything, since I'm not doing anything wrong".

What has gone wrong between the generations?

Infographics are really nice to get an overview of a potentially big and/or complicated set of data. Here's a really nice (and easy to understand) infographic by Claudio Ferreira Filho about Debian's release timeline and number of developers vs. number of packages:

The sky is grey,
  The rain pours down hard on my head,
Oh, the cries of despair
  And CentOS 6.0 has a minimum requirement of 392Mb of RAM for text-based installs ...
WTF!

Well... enough with the sedentary life, I'm going Vagrant.

.. oh and by Vagrant I mean this project ;)

I've heard a lot of people talk about this project lately, and I read the feature list and found pretty it interesting. A very quick summary of the features would be that it can automatically create customized VirtualBox VMs and provision them with Chef/Puppet.

Today I'm leaving my home behind.

Like I mentioned in my post about hard disk noises, I recently bought a mini-itx board and built a really small computer.

The intent was to replace my more than 7 years-old desktop computer that was begining to misbehave, and to have the new thing replace my linksys router's DNS and DHCP services. The computer that I had before was mainly used as an Asterisk server and also as my SSH portal, and backups were pushed to an external usb disk plugged to it. The new one, I thought, should be doing all the same, plus host the services I mentioned above. The best thing would be for it to replace entirely the linksys router... but that would be for a second phase.

I've been working for some weeks now to optimize a client's MySQL databases. I consider myself an apprentice MySQL DBA (e.g. there's much room for me to improve :P ), and I've found the process to be difficult. Although there is a whole lot of information about what to do and how -- some blog posts out there are absolutely invaluable -- the settings are not always straightforward to understand, since they often have many impacts and to correctly modify them, you need to understand what they do and how they change things under the hood for MySQL.

After bumping table_cache and tmp_table_size / max_heap_table_size up, I was left with one weirdness: the table cache is marked as being nearly empty (good) but there were a lot of query cache prunes (bad). This situation actually makes the cache add latency for most cases (in other words, it slows down tremendously your database).

You're working all by yourself; with a team? How do you make sure that what you're doing is any good? And how do you make sure that what you do is well perceived by your colleagues and clients?

Those are not trivial questions. The answers will most likely depend on your working environment and your personality. But, there actually are tools that you can use to have an approximate qualitative measure of your work. You should be aiming at getting both client feedback and self-evaluation of your own (and/or your team's) work.

I've recently bought a mini-itx computer with two Western Digital 640Gb Scorpio blue 2.5" disks. I'll be talking about the hardware specs and buying experience in another post that should come soon enough (if I can get the last part shipped at last!), but for now I'll give a word about a weird issue with the disks.

I switched! No more Apache for this web site.

I've been wanting to try out nginx for quite some time now. I've heard a lot of good experiences from people I know that use it. And part of my job as a sysadmin is to make suggestions on which technology can be used for each situation, so it's always good to expand my knowledge pool.

What is this about

This post will look like a howto about configuring nginx to serve Drupal 7 sites, but I'll keep a lot of rough edges when the steps are straight forward. If there are any questions, I can answer them in the comments.