So Edgecast has announced a new product today, a separate CDN just for e-commerce sites.
As Telecom Ramblings puts it:
The new network is based on their existing CDN technology, but built on an entirely separate network infrastructure tuned specifically for the site acceleration and transaction needs of online retail sites. In other words, it’s aimed at enterprises tired of sharing a least-common-demoninator fast lane with everything from cute cat videos to gaming updates to whatever it is kids listen to these days.
Am I the only one who reads this as a lack of confidence in their core CDN product or are they trying to differentiate themselves from other CDNs? To me a CDN should be able to handle any traffic that you throw at it and if you are getting slow downs then it’s time to find a new CDN.
I would rather my CDN put more time and money into their core product than branching off and building a completely separate network. What’s next, a sports CDN? News CDN? Porn CDN?
If anyone is looking for a tutor for their child in Auckland, check out 121 tutors. They do an awesome job of matching the right tutor to your child’s needs and learning style.
Recently I have seen “kraken-crawler/0.2.0″ hitting my site. This is a bot used by Kontera (advertising company) to “better understand and analyze your site’s content” (according to their support staff).
Apparently the crawler adheres to robots.txt so you can block it by adding:
User-agent: kraken-crawler/*
Disallow: /
The URL to their crawler info is broken so it’s hard to get an idea of what this is used for. If you are also seeing this bot, hopefully this helps you.
s3fs requires fuse 2.8.4, but on RHEL the latest version is 2.8.3, so fuse needs to be installed from source code.
yum remove fuse fuse* fuse-devel
yum install gcc libstdc++-devel gcc-c++ curl curl* curl-devel libxml2 libxml2* libxml2-devel openssl-devel mailcap
wget “https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/fuse/fuse-2.X/2.8.4/fuse-2.8.4.tar.gz?r=&ts=1299709935&use_mirror=cdnetworks-us-1″
tar -xzf fuse-2.8.4.tar.gz
cd fuse-2.8.4/
./configure –prefix=/usr
make
make install
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/lib64/pkgconfig/
ldconfig
modprobe fuse
pkg-config –modversion fuse
cd ../
wget http://s3fs.googlecode.com/files/s3fs-1.63.tar.gz
tar -xzf s3fs-1.63.tar.gz
cd s3fs-1.63
./configure –prefix=/usr
make
make install
If when reinstalling s3fs you get this error:
No package ‘fuse’ found
You need to re-run this before compiling s3fs
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/lib64/pkgconfig/
ldconfig
modprobe fuse
pkg-config –modversion fuse
Microsoft have finally released IE10 for Windows 7. It seems their download page (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/internet-explorer/downloads/ie-10/worldwide-languages) is getting pretty hammered. Looking at the requests on the page it seems that everything is held up with a request to ajax.microsoft.com. The page loads the template header, but no more. Surely in the day and age a company like Microsoft would load their ajax async and prevent a single script from taking down the page.
Update: it seems this is a problem with the latest build of Firefox’s Aurora. Twitter is experiencing a similar problem with one of their scripts, so there may be a problem with Firefox’s script engine.
Amazon have released their new application management tool OpsWorks. This uses Chef to deploy and maintain instances on AWS. While it looks neat and I’m sure it will work for startups it’s not something I could trust. I still like to get my hands dirty with server deployment and I try to use bare metal rather than virtual instances where possible. Also, from what I’m reading this tool is still very much a “beta” and is quite buggy.
The tool itself is not revolutionary, there are many other systems out there that do a similar thing. What is interesting though is that Amazon is offering this, once again improving the tools available without the need to use a 3rd party. Will this kill off competition or prompt the current providers to lift their game?
OpsWorks has brought up an interesting question. Now that AWS is using Chef and they have thousands of developers/sites using them, will Chef become the defacto standard and will other configuration management systems die out? There is a rumour that Amazon might offer Puppet support along side Chef, but that’s just a rumour for now.
Personally I think Chef will increase in popularity due to OpsWorks, but I don’t think Puppet et al will die away. Each system has their own merits and devs/ops will use whatever suits them and their environment.
There’s always been a problem with Oracle provided MySQL rpms and older Centos/RHEL MySQL rpms. The former provides “MySQL” and the latter provides “mysql”, so a lot of the packages in Centos/RHEL require “mysql” which creates some conflicts.
A quick way to fix this is to use rpmrebuild -e -p and change the “requires” from “mysql” to “MySQL”. Hopefully in the future Centos/RHEL will be standardized with the Oracle naming convention or Oracle packages be “backwardly” compatible.
We just provisioned a new server with Sandy Bridge and 4 SSDs in RAID 5 configuration. The server it was replacing was seriously under powered so this is a timely replacement. I ran hdparm on both servers to compare:
Old Server:
dag:/home# hdparm -Tt /dev/sda6
/dev/sda6:
Timing cached reads: 6678 MB in 2.00 seconds = 3341.64 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 186 MB in 3.03 seconds = 61.38 MB/sec
New Server:
root@dagnew:/home# hdparm -Tt /dev/sda6
/dev/sda6:
Timing cached reads: 25048 MB in 2.00 seconds = 12539.88 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 1956 MB in 3.00 seconds = 651.75 MB/sec
I’ll be rolling out more of these when other servers are up for replacement.
It seems that the latest versions of vbulletin are very broken in PHP 5.4 even though they state that “vBulletin 4.x requires PHP 5.2.0 or greater and MySQL 4.1.0 or greater”
Most of the problems are from E_STRICT which is part of E_ALL in PHP 5.4, but vBulletin and Internet Brands (who own vBulletin) seem very slow to fix these problems. They even denied that it was a problem with vBulletin when I originally reported some of the errors in June 2012 stating “Closing this issue because it appears to be unrelated to vBulletin code.”
They have since reopened the issue and it has been rolled up in a PHP 5.4 check task, but seems quite slow being that PHP 5.4 was released nearly a year ago and PHP 5.5 is due out soon.
So to get vBulletin working without errors on my sites I have to modify and fix all of these problems. I wish I could contribute back to vBulletin or to its users so that this effort is not duplicated, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to do it (hosting files on here would violate copyright).
I recently had a database server fail during a large DELETE query, this caused some problems with innodb’s ibdata1. The index of this data file was different to what MySQL expected. As this wasn’t one of our main servers I hadn’t tuned innodb and all the innodb data was in the single ibdata1 file. The only way for me to start MySQL was to add this to my.cnf:
innodb_force_recovery = 4
This forced MySQL to ignore all innodb errors and I used mysqldump to extract all the data from the innodb tables. Innodb tables were found using the following query:
SELECT table_schema, table_name
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES
WHERE engine = ‘innodb’;
I stopped MySQL server again, removed the innodb_force_recovery, deleted the ibdata1 file and tuned innodb. I also made sure I added this to my.cnf:
innodb_file_per_table = 1
innodb_log_files_in_group = 2
All tables were loaded from the mysqldump backup files and everything is all happy again.
While converting my cvs repositories to git I needed to copy all the changed files from my working directory into a temp directory and then into my git working dir. This was the solution that I came up with:
cvs -qn update -d 2>/dev/null | grep '^[M|\?|P] ' | awk '{print $2}' > files.list
while read file; do cp -r -f --parents "$file" /tmp/dest/; done < files.list
Basically, cvs -qn update -d does a mock update (doesn’t change files), piped to grep to only list the changed files, use awk to exclude the M, P, ? etc, output to a file.
Loop over the lines in the new file using the cp –parents to preserve directory structure
When trying to build an rpm for apr-utils on my CentOS 6.2 box I got a nasty error when the rpm was running test:
testmemcache : |/bin/sh: line 2: 14322 Segmentation fault LD_LIBRARY_PATH=”`echo “../crypto/.libs:../dbm/.lib s:../dbd/.libs:../ldap/.libs:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH” | sed -e ‘s/::*$//’`” ./$prog
Programs failed: testall
make: *** [check] Error 139
+ exit 1
error: Bad exit status from /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.OQddG8 (%check)
This relates to this bug: https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=52705
Thanks to Peter Poeml for releasing a patch for this, which I’ve put into an updated apr-util.spec
I have been building a lot of custom RPMs lately and I found this great resource which lists all of the macros that can be used in the spec files and what they equate to.
http://www.zarb.org/~jasonc/macros.php
I recently changed to using the unix command line for cvs and changed all my cvs roots to :ext: instead of :ssh: (tortoise prefers ssh).
When I made the change, anytime I updated cvs I got this error:
/CVSROOTccess /cvsroot
No such file or directory
This makes no sense. Luckily, after searching around I found this is a problem with DOS line breaks screwing with unix cvs. Running the following fixes the problem:
dos2unix `find . -name Root`
dos2unix `find . -name Entries`
dos2unix `find . -name Repository`
It’s interesting that not only does netsol not list any information what-so-ever on their knowledge base about DNSSEC, their support staff have no idea what it is either.
Come on network solutions, sort it out otherwise I may have to move my domains to a registrar that does support DNSSEC.
There is a way to stream music to your airport express from VLC (means you don’t have to install iTunes).
Under preferences > all > stream output enter this in the “Default stream output chain”:
#transcode{acodec=alac,channels=2,samplerate=44100}:raop{host=<ip address of aiport express>,volume=175}
I had a problem where df and du disagreed with the amount of disk usage. The cause was processes holding on to unlinked files. Running the following identified the processes:
ls -ld /proc/*/fd/* 2>&1 | fgrep ‘(deleted)’
I killed the processes and df is now showing the correct information.
I just found out that dreamhost supports ipv6 (has done since March ’11). Just go to manage domains in the control panel and click “Add IP” next to each of your domains.
Now if only our enterprise hosting at Verio/NTT supported ipv6!
It seems that most browsers are focused on speeding up javascript execution now as most websites are heavy with ajax and complex js.
With Firefox releasing their pre-beta “dev” version Aurora this morning I decided to run all the current browsers through sunspider to see if any progress has been made.
Chrome-dev: 294ms
Aurora (FF dev): 324ms
Firefox 4: 348ms
IE9: 251ms
IE10 preview 1: 254ms
So it would seem that Firefox has sped up their js engine, but has a little way to go to catch up to the other browsers.
We found that Google had indexed a site that shouldn’t be indexed so I setup a robots.txt file to deny all crawlers and locked down the site with http auth. I also put in a request to have the urls removed from the index and cache.
When I did this Google returned ~2,400 results when doing a “site:www.site.com”. A few days later it was returning ~54,000. Today it is returning ~133,000.
I’m not sure how Google managed to mix up “remove my site” with “index it more”. Maybe this is just part of the removal process?
Update: Google is now up to 217,000 results for this site. Maybe removing your site from the index is good for SEO?
Found a small command to run through code directories and change the CVS path, handy if you’re changing CVS username or path.
find . -name ‘Root’ -exec perl -pi -e ‘s/OLD_URL/NEW_URL/’ {} \;
Redhat likes to run old packages with backported patches, but sometimes it’s nice to have the latest version that includes new features. Unfortunately the unzip from RHEL yum can’t unzip files > 4GB. I found the src rpm and compiled binaries that work with RHEL 5.6 (may work with older).
unzip-6.0-1.i386.rpm
unzip-6.0-1.x86_64.rpm
I had a problem where Googlebot was indexing a development site, so we locked it down using apache basic http auth. Now Googlebot was being served with a 401 when accessing the site, but because it had no stored robots.txt it was persistently trying to crawl the site.
Using the following allows anyone to access robots.txt but denies access to the rest of the site:
<Directory “/home/username/www”>
AuthUserFile /home/username/.htpasswd
AuthName “Client Access”
AuthType Basic
require valid-use
<Files “robots.txt”>
AuthType Basic
satisfy any
</Files>
</Directory>
Eventually Googlebot will get the hint and stop indexing the site and we can remove existing content using webmaster tools.
I’ve been having problems recently with it overheating. It’s not much fun when trying to code on the couch with a boiling hot mac on your lap.
I found a program called smcfancontrol which seems to take care of that. It’s now under 50oC and coding it now more fun!