Category Archives: Offtopic

It is a well known fact… if you wanna master a craft, you need to spend at least 10k hours practicing. Guitars aint no different… with practice comes mastery. With time… you don’t need to look where your fingers are. You just know it. You feel the position of your fingers in the fretboard.

It’s rock and roll, in its purest essence…

If you were looking for a new wallpaper, you’ve come to the right place. As you may know, several scenes of the new Star Trek “Into Darkness” movie were shot in the NIF… (National Ignition Facility).

The movie itself plays a twist over the original Star Trek Series, since… in the previous movie, we’ve seen an alteration in the flow of events, which led to a way different outcome.

If you haven’t gone to the cinema yet, i suggest you check it out. Seriously speaking!

Equivalent to SVN Externals, GIT offers a nice feature called “Modules”. Long short story, you get to link an external project, inside your own project.
What do you make out of this?. Well, suppose you’re using a 3rd party library. You can update everything with just a command line pull. No need to download and merge, by hand.

Sounds nice, right?. It’s done this way:

Afterwards, we need to recursively update the submodules. Which will, in turn, clone the ‘some-framework’ repository:

This humble wordpress blog is running on an AWS micro instance. We’ve got somewhere around 1k visitors each month, which is pretty awesome. But… to my surprise, the whole system is using over 14 million I/O operations.

I suspected there was something wrong with this… so i proceeded to do a small research.
By means of the application ‘iotop’, i managed to spot the I/O hog: apache!.

Specifically, i ran iotop with the following parameters:

I ran a quick search on google, and found this post.  (Thank you George, for sharing your solution!).

Long short story, Apache’s APC plugin was using a memory mapped file, and it was writing… almost all the time.
The solution?. Edit your /etc/php.d/apc.ini file, and make sure that the mmap_file_mask parameter is se to use Shared Memory, as follows:

That should fix it!

I’ve recently lantean.co to AWS EC2. Amazon offers a free EC2 instance for a year…. so i decided to give it a shot.

The main reason i had to migrate to a self managed hosting is simple. Shared Hostings don’t allow you to fine tune several settings, such as the PHP Memory, and you might event not be able to login using ssh. What did i need to do?. It’s simple… let’s see…

Setting up the Environment

1. Signup at Amazon Web Services. You’ll need a credit card.
2. Create a new EC2 instance. Select ‘Micro’ as the type.
3. Select the Amazon AMI. (I don’t trust 3rd party images!).
4. Follow the wizard, and generate the SSH private / public keys.
5. Setup the firewall, so only IP’s in your C class can connect through SSH, and everyone can hit the port 80.
6. Connect to your box!
   ssh -i certificate.pem ec2-user@[elastic-ip]
7. Setup a password for your root user
   su passwd
8. Install Apache
   yum install httpd
   service httpd start
   chkconfig httpd on
9. Install PHP
   yum instlal php php-mysql
10. Install mySQL
    yum install mysql-server
    service mysqld start
    chkconfig mysqld on
11. Secure mySQL
    mysql_secure_installation
12. Install APC
    yum install php-pecl-alc

Setting up Apache

Assuming we’re not gonna host just a single website, but a couple of them… we’re gonna need to setup Virtual Hosts. With VirtualHosts you can serve as many domains as you need, using a single apache installation. Steps!

1. Log into your instance and type… (replace domain.com with your own domain):
   su
   mkdir -p /var/www/domain.com/public_html
   mkdir /etc/httpd/conf.d/domain.com.conf
   nano /etc/httpd/conf.d/domain.com.conf/httpd.conf
   Add the following lines:
   
         <VirtualHost *:80>
             ServerAdmin your-mail@domain.com
             DocumentRoot /var/www/domain.com/public_html
             ServerName www.domain.com
             ServerAlias *.domain.com
             ErrorLog /var/www/domain.com/error.log
             CustomLog /var/www/domain.com/requests.log combined
         </VirtualHost>
2. Enable htaccess in your virtual hosts:
   nano /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
   AllowOverride All
3. Enable logrotate:
   nano /etc/logrotate.conf
   Add the following lines:
   
      /var/log/httpd/*log
      /var/www/*/*log
      {
          size 5M
          missingok
          notifempty
          sharedscripts
          delaycompress
          postrotate
         /sbin/service httpd reload > /dev/null 2>/dev/null || true
          endscript
      }

Setting up mySQL

At last!. Let’s see how to create a mySQL database, add a new user, and how to import your mySQL dump, using nothing but bash.

1. Create a new database and a new user
   mysql -u root -p     << You will be asked for your mySQL root-password!
   create database wordpress;
   create user 'wordpress'@'localhost' identified by 'password';
   grant all privileges on wordpress.* to wordpress@localhost;
   flush privileges;
2. Import a database dump
   mysql -p -u wordpress wordpress < database_dump.sql

 
I hope you found this short guide helpful!