It’s been a few weeks now since Media Temple launched their new (ve) Server and I’ve been testing it out for a few days now. I’m actually hosting my blog there to experience some real traffic load and my first impressions are awesome! I started off with the simplest 512 MB server and transferred a few websites to the new platform. I’m not too used to the Ubuntu Linux...
Cloud Tips: Amazon EC2 & Rejected Email
A few weeks ago I’ve setup my email in the /etc/aliases for user root (and the others) and started to actually read my root email from time to time (I wonder why I never did that before). Anyways, what bugged me straight away is that I had some rejected emails that were not being delivered, yielding the following errors (I removed some numbers): Deferred: 450 4.7.1 : Helo command rejected:...
Cloud Tips: Automatic Backups to S3
In a previous post about backing up EC2 MySQL to an Amazon S3 bucket we covered dumping MySQL datasets, compressing them and uploading to S3. After a few weeks test-driving the shell script, I came up with a new version that checks, fixes and optimizes all tables before generating the dump. This is pretty important as mysqldump will fail on whatever step would cause an error (data corruption...
FTP Breaking on FEAT (vsftpd on Fedora Core 8)
It’s been a while since I connected to my Amazon EC2 running Fedora Core 8 via FTP and for no reason I tried connecting there today and badaboom! Strange though, it worked fine about a month ago, I was able to upload and download files, but this time I got a little crash. On one version of FileZilla FTP client I received a simple “Unable to connect” error. On a newer version I...
Linux Shell: Host to IP in Bulk
I’m very busy this week setting up a new router here at the office, but I do find some interesting stuff that might be somehow useful to you. Like this shell script I wrote a few hours ago that reads a text file with different hosts on each line (google.com, yahoo.com, etc) and returns a new file with their resolved, i.e. ip addresses on each line. I’m not sure where you’d want...
Cloud Tips: Backing Up MySQL on Amazon EC2 to S3
Now that I’m all set up in the Amazon cloud I’m starting to think about backups. Elastic Block Storage (EBS) on Amazon is great and the Snapshots (backups) can be generated with a few clicks from the Management Console, but, for a few reasons I’d like to set up my own backup scripts and here’s why: Amazon EBS snapshots are cool, but there might be a situation where...
Multiple Sites Driven By One WordPress Installation Part II: Please Be Careful, You Really Might Mess Up ;)
This is just a little update on what I’ve been doing and what I have acheived so far. So, what we have: two different hosts – example.org and example-two.org both on one webserver right next to eachother, let’s say in the /home/username/www (we’ll just call it www further on) directory. The apache vhosts are configured correctly, the document roots are set...
Working With Amazon EC2: Tips & Tricks
It’s been a while now since I’ve been hosting on Amazon Web Services and I’d just like to point out some issues I had and quick ways of solving them. We’re gonna talk about setting up a server that would serve not only you, but your clients too, cause $100/mo is quite expensive, isn’t it? So let’s begin and keep this as straightforward as possible. If you...
Foller.me: MySQL Tweaking & Optimization
As I mentioned in the interview with @enked on his website Chidimar.com, I had serious problems with MySQL database optimization on the Foller.me project. The current public stable version (beta-1) is using the MyISAM engine and it’s not holding much data – profiles, locations, geo points for the followers geography. In the new version (currently dev-1 and hopefully beta-2 in a few...
Linux Dummy: Unscheduled Maintenance
If anyone of you have tried to access the blog yesterday night, you might have noticed that nothing was working. Sorry! I’ll say it straight, it’s completely my fault. Yesterday evening I decided to set up a cron job for automatic backups on my VPS – a full MySQL dump and a compressed archive of the www directory. So I got a couple of error messages stating that I don’t...