I have used the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file with OpenSSH for ages. However, I always treated it as just a dumb list of keys, where I would dump my public key whenever I needed access to a new account or host.

But today I learned from this blog entry that there is a bit more to it. Details are available from `man 8 sshd'.

Basically, each key can be prefixed by a list of options which restrict the kind of access granted to a connection attempt providing the given key.

Of particular interest is the command="/usr/local/bin/foobar" option. This makes sshd run the given command on connect, disabling the normal login shell or direct execution of commands supplied by the remote user. There are also a few further options for disabling port forwarding, …

Following a link from the High Scalability blog, I found this really great article about scalability practices, as told by Randy Shoup at eBay. Randy is very good at explaining some of the more technical aspects in more or less plain English, and it even helped me find some wording I was looking for to help me explain the notion (and benefits) of functional partitioning. He also covers ideas that apply directly to your application code, your database architecture (including a little insight into their sharding strategy), and more. Even more about eBay’s architecture can be found here.

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Spinn3r is a licensed weblog crawler used by search engines, weblog analytic companies, and generally anyone who needs access to high quality weblog data.

We crawl the entire blogosphere in realtime, remove spam, rank, and classifying blogs, and provide this information to our customers.

Spinn3r is rare in the startup world in that we’re actually profitable. We’ve proven our business model which gives us a significant advantage in future product design and expanding our current customer base and feature set.

We’ve also been smart and haven’t raised a dime of external VC funding which gives us a lot …

SourceForge announces quarterly earnings. Linux server growth strong, says analyst firm. Talend adds support for MaxDB. (and more)

SourceForge Reports Third Quarter Fiscal 2008 Results, SourceForge (Press Release)

Worldwide Server Market Shows Resiliency with Solid First Quarter Results, According to IDC, IDC (Press Release)

Talend Announces Data Integration for MaxDB, Talend (Press Release)

How everyone wins with open source software, Linux.com, Lisa Hoover (Article)

…

If you are working with MySQL as a DBA or developer, I'd like to encourage you to consider taking the MySQL Magazine Survey, which was compiled by Keith Murphy and Mark Schoonover.

The survey takes around 10-15 minutes to complete and runs until June 16th. The results will be published in the summer issue of MySQL Magazine, due on July 15th. The questions cover a broad range of topics, from details about your MySQL experience and job description over connectors and languages to operating systems and MySQL versions.

Thanks in advantage for your support and input! The results of this survey will be interesting for us as well.

Startups are pretty fascinating. I work for a startup, and one of my good friends works for another startup. I’ve also worked for 2 other startups, one during the first “bubble”, and another one a few years later. Oh my, how the world of web startups has changed in that time!

1999: You must have funding

The first startup I was ever involved in was a web startup. It was an online retailer. They were starting from nothing. My friend (a former coworker from an earlier job) had saved for years to get this idea off the ground. He was able to get a few servers, some PCs for the developers he hired, and he got the cheapest office space in all of NYC (but it still managed to be a really cool space, in a way that only NYC can pull off), and he hosted every single service required to run the web site in-house. If I recall correctly, he had a web and database server on one machine, and I believe the primary DNS server was on an old …

From May 28th-31st, the annual LinuxTag will take place in Berlin, Germany. I followed the growth and evolution of LinuxTag from the very early days and I have fond memories of the event back when it still took place at the University of Kaiserslautern and our SuSE "booth" was just a regular table taken from the lecture rooms...

Things have evolved a lot since then. Today, LinuxTag is one of the largest Linux/Open Source Events in Europe and my new employer Sun is a major sponsor this year. In addition to several talks and keynotes, there will be a large Sun booth in the exhibition area (Booth #205) and we will have a dedicated MySQL demo pod! Some of the things we plan to demo there are the upcoming MySQL Server releases (5.1, …

On Monday this week I attended the first day of the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Prague.  The summit which just ended today, was intended to drive plans and decisions for the next Ubuntu release "Intrepid Ibex" which is due out on October 30th.  (Check out the reports from the summit here.)

Mark welcomes the masses while Jono scans the crowd for hecklers.

Sun had about 12 folks there representing GlassFish, Open JDK, NetBeans, Hudson, …

I just got around to reading Stephen O’Grady’s post on the relative openness of open source vendors and realized I had failed to be as clear as I could have been in my original post on the subject.

Responding to my note about Milking the GNU’s suggestion that a new independent organization could be formed to judge vendors on their level of openness, Stephen wrote:

“Those in the industry that might care have, I would argue, already formed their opinions on whether or not a project such as MySQL?s is or is not open source. And those outside the industry, well, I don?t expect they?d care. At all. Most of the enterprises I speak with are …

Properties:

Description:

This variable changes the way InnoDB open files and flush data to disk and is should be considered as very important for InnoDB performance. By default, InnoDB uses …