Examples of our work
Below is a few examples of work we’ve undertaken for some smaller customers.
Burton McCall
Burton McCall have a number of remote offices and warehouses around the UK. We’ve supported a Linux based mail server for them since 2006. This includes :
- Deployment of a 2 node Postfix cluster using DRBD for resilience / failover.
- Developed a minimal Postfix policy daemon for SMTP connection time rejection (based on the SMTP sender, SMTP recipient and client IP address) which includes SPF and DNS Blacklist checks.
- Development of custom SpamAssassin rules
- Provided telephone/email support as necessary for their end users
- Integration of Amavis into their Mail server, along with a support interface allowing IT support personnel to track emails and release those quarantined if necessary in response to support requests.
RedFern Media
RedFern approached us in mid-2012; they have no internal expertise in Linux administration and needed assistance with a Linux server they have hosted with 1and1.
We’ve :
- Introduced backup jobs
- Improved server performance (MySQL and Apache tuning) and reliability (resolving a VM bug/Linux kernel issue)
- Added remote monitoring of the server
- Restored from backups after 1&1 damaged the filesystem when deploying additional storage to the VM.
AXLR8
Axlr8 have been a customer for a number of years, we provide :
- Linux server support
- Exim support and integration with bespoke mail archiving application (mailtracker, mostly python)
- Setup of FTP file uploading portal (Virtual hosting ftp)
- Support for a custom mail archiving solution (components: Cassandra, Exim, Python, PHP, Perl)
Anorak.co.uk
The anorak.co.uk site has a relatively high level of traffic (averaging ~100 requests/second). It’s hosted from a single Linux server.
We’ve :
- Added backup jobs
- Added Munin graphing to give a visual respresentation of server load / resource usage
- Introduced Varnish to improve the scalability of the server – this helps it cope with spikes in traffic associated with new articles being read/seen on Twitter/Facebook etc.
- Optimised some underlying WordPress database tables (e.g. migrating to InnoDB to improve performance (reduce locking))
- Rewritten some underlying WordPress plugins so statistics are accurately recorded even if a static HTML page is being served to the client.
- Performed performance tuning of MySQL and improved the queries which were being run (e.g. through creation / addition of indexes on tables or improving the caching of repetitive or expensive queries)
- Added the server onto our Nagios monitoring setup, which checks disk/load/http availability
- Configured kernel I/O schedular to resolve issue with ProLiant RAID controller.
