Tech Crunch

Let's say you got confused by a misleading fake-RAID feature on an HP Blade server and you decided to ignore that the Ubuntu installer was telling you it found 2 disks while it was supposed (if it was actual hardware RAID) to be detecting only one. And let's say you are lucky to have 3 disks, and you only one to use two as the RAID array (and they do not contain your operating system, i.e. the / partition). You might wonder: "And now what? S**** you, HP!" (that last bit is if you left panic get you, of course).

Why re-invent the wheel? This post gives ample details: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/find-linux-distribution-name-version-number/ cat /etc/*-release o lsb_release -a

Just as a self reminder, this blog post explains why php-cgi might hang/stop silently when your load increases, and how to fix it, where it explains (in short) that fast-cgi should have the parameter PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS should equal 1000 or more (this can be done in /etc/default/php-fastcgi on my Ubuntu server).   Also worth a look is this page which has nothing to do with fast-cgi but describes how to increase th

Yesterday w had a funny (I say that now that I've been able to relax a little) situation on one of our hosted servers. The server's RAM usage went bang to the ceiling in a matter of minutes, and it was then practically impossible to get it back (had to hard-kill Apache and the monit process that was restarting it). What happened?

Just a self-reminder, in the vcl_recv section (before sending request to the backend), check the url you want to always serve from cache and tell it to return(lookup);

  if (req.url ~ "request_server.php$") { return(lookup); }

Reload Varnish and get ready for a massive fall of your load if this bloody request_server.php was overloading your site uselessly...

I'm a happy user of a Lenovo W500 but I had a very hard time getting anything more than 1h30 battery time, even with a brand new 9-cell battery (this one got me just 1h45 when using low screen brightness and minimum CPU). Then through a conversation with a friend and colleague, he suggested I disable the ATI graphics card and use the motherboard's... This means disabling it in the system's BIOS (not inside whatever operating system you use). Since I tried that, I get up to 4h45 on my 9-cell (with the minimum energy usage configuration in Ubuntu 10.10 64bit).

Due to a licensing issue, the PHP bindings for Xapian were removed from Debian Squeeze.

Edit: as of July 2014, there is a recent article discussing the use of php5-memcache instead of php5-memcache to store sessions on this blog. There are many posts around on the web about using memcached to store sessions data on high-availability servers, but few actually cover the whole topic and there are some elements that I thought might be of interest in the form of a quick recap. Memcached allows you to store frequently-used data in memory (RAM).

One of our customers has Apache logs (Xampp-based) full of this line:

[Tue Mar 02 16:21:41 2010] [info] [client 172.20.99.16] (OS 10054)Une connexion existante a dû être fermée par l'hôte distant.  : core_output_filter: writing data to the network

Sometimes (OS10053) is used as a variant, but the Apache error seems to be the same (core_output_filter: writing data to the network) Apparently, the error is widespread and only occurs on Windows operating system (that's where OS10054 error code comes from) and a few useful references for this are:

• http://httpd.apac