Techie

DNS optimization is a technique by which you optimize (i.e. you reduce) the time required for any browser to find your website.

Just as a self reminder, and because I don't fancy too much looking into the Drupal core for debugging, here is a short explanation of how the Drupal 7 bootstrap mechanism works. First of all, a bootstrap mechanism is a mechanism by which you work progressively your way through the full loading of a system, step by step, starting with the loading of simple elements that will allow you to load more complex elements. The Linux system also has a bootstrap mechanism (as do most OSes).

Just a small procedure as a self-reminder (I seem to have to use it just seldom enough to forget it each time - thanks Marvil):

• define the new hostname on the 127.0.0.1 localhost line (after localhost) in /etc/hosts
• set the new name in /etc/hostname
• issue a "hostname -F /etc/hostname
• done

For some reason, it might be very difficult to find information on how to renew a self-signed certificate. This is a nice (and short) explanation: http://linux.togaware.com/survivor/Renew_SSL.html. Please note that a .pem file is in fact (as you can guess from the small guide) a combined .key and .crt. In short and only for the purpose of not loosing this reference (as has happened many times before with sites referenced on this blog), here is the procedure (just adapt to your case, i.e.

The manual is perfect for that... http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/PruningDeadBranches All you have to do is:

hg heads

Identify the branch you want to close (get the revision number, let's say 951)

hg update -C 951 hg commit --close-branch -m "This version never worked" hg update -C default

Done!

Recently I've had to fix a very strange cPanel installation of Chamilo. For some reason small files could be uploaded but not large files.

To reset a mailman admin password on Debian, the easiest way is to locate the mailman's proper bin directory (use dpkg -L mailman), generally: /usr/lib/mailman/bin There, you'll find an executable script called change_pw. Use this one. If you want to change the password of all lists at once, use: sudo ./change_pw --all --password=newpassword Ref: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users@python.org/msg34242.html

Today we had a server stalled on "Loading kernel modules" at reboot (after adding 12GB of RAM, to 24GB total). The datacenter didn't know what to do and they put us on a 32-bit rescue mode console from which we couldn't (obviously) launch a 64bit chroot to update the kernel. The situation seemed pretty desperate. Our sysadmin, Jérôme, once again came to the rescue. Waiting for the datacenter to respond would have potentially increased reboot time up to 45 minutes. The only possible thing to do: replace initrd with a similar version (just in case the first one would have been damaged).

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