My EC2 instances are setup to have only the operating system and program files on the root volume, with all other data (logs, mail, etc.) on a second EBS volume. This leads to a very stable root volume, which sees … Continue reading
Consider the scenario of a PHP script which can be run for a period of time, stopped, and continue its task later on. A common necessity for such a script may be to detect when the script is terminated, and … Continue reading
Having recently switched to a setup with only nginx (and no apache), I found myself wanting to run some tests. As nice as siege is, I rather like ApacheBench (ab). However, I really didn’t want to install all of Apache … Continue reading
One of my favourite chemistry demonstrations is the combustion of hydrogen in a balloon. It has all the qualities desirable in a flashy experiment, and the actual execution is exceptionally easy – the difficulty, however, comes down to obtaining the … Continue reading
SCP offers a number of advantages over FTP, not the least of which include no setup (you don’t need an FTP server) and increased security. However, when setting up a server, it can be rather inconvenient to be unable to … Continue reading
If no customizations are desired, a far simpler way to get the RPM, than that outlined below, is to use the nginx repository, available from nginx’s download page. After deciding to change my server stack today (based on Amazon’s Linux), … Continue reading
Having recently been asked about calorie usage, and following an unsuccessful online search for a table of PAR values, I have reproduced, below, one I had in my physiology notes from a few years ago. Using PAR allows a much … Continue reading
Update (Oct 1, 2011): The release notes for the newest version of Amazon’s Linux (2011.09) state that “PHP scripts have the option of using PHP-FPM.” PHP-FPM is now included in the amzn-main repository, and can be installed via yum install … Continue reading
I am currently working on setting up a small high availability server cluster on Amazon’s EC2 cloud. Such a setup requires several underlying technologies to work together. Common among these are a distributed file system, a load balancer, and some … Continue reading
Following the significant disruption of EBS volumes in April, the importance of backups was once again brought to the forefront. Amazon’s method of generating EBS backups is the ‘snapshot’ – a differential backup stored in S3. While Amazon provides tools … Continue reading
Having not used Windows 7 much (and having skipped over Vista), I was rather surprised to discover that I was unable to locate files that were saved by a particular program. In this case, the program saved the files in … Continue reading
The only ftp server the amzn repository has is vsftpd. While, as the name suggests, vsftpd is supposed to be ‘very secure’ many other ftp servers have a comparable track record for security. Of these, pure-ftpd is easily configured and … Continue reading
Update: the complementary article to this one, on Rotating EBS snapshots has now been posted. After the recent failure of EBS volumes on Amazon’s cloud, backup is quite likely something to be considering. If, during the aforementioned incident, recent snapshots … Continue reading
With the ever increasing volume of SPAM being transmitted, many email services look toward more elaborate ways to authenticate email. Beyond the obvious – content – two commonly used methods (perhaps with some variations), include sender policy framework (SPF), and … Continue reading